Gary Ware handed me a fidget toy on the first day of a conference, before he had even spoken to me. I still have it. That small thing turned out to be his entire argument, and the thing it points at has a name: play deprivation.
This conversation went somewhere I did not expect. I thought we were going to talk about fun. We ended up talking about why so many of us feel like we have to earn the right to enjoy our own lives.
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Why this one landed on me
I talk about rest a lot. I am not always good at taking my own advice.
Gary gave me one small thing near the end of our chat. It was so simple that I could not find a single reason to say no to it. I told him right there on the recording that I was stealing it, and I have already started doing it.
Here is the honest part. It worked on me because it did not ask me to earn anything first. If that sentence hit you somewhere, you are in the right place.
You might also want to read why resting feels like failing. It is the same wound from a different angle.
Meet Gary Ware
Gary Ware is the founder of Breakthrough Play. He is a facilitator, a keynote speaker, a coach, and an author. He is not a clinician and he does not present himself as one.
He was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia at twenty six, after six straight hours of testing. What he says about that day is not what most people expect.
I tell people getting diagnosed was the worst day of my life, because essentially in order to diagnose me, they have to put you through these experiences to make sure that it is true that you have ADHD. Afterwards I was exhausted and I felt hopeless.
He wrote a book about what he found on the other side of that.
Playful Rebellion: Maximize Workplace Success Through The Power of Play by Gary Ware. Also available as an audiobook.
Find Gary at:
- Website: breakthroughplay.com
One note on credit. The play history exercise Gary teaches comes from Dr. Stuart Brown and the National Institute for Play.
The line about the opposite of play is older still. It is usually traced back to the play researcher Brian Sutton-Smith.
What play deprivation actually looks like
Most of us picture play as a break. A game, a hobby, something you do after the real work is finished.
Gary defines it differently, and the difference is the whole point.
Play is doing something where you’re immersed in the experience and it doesn’t matter about the outcome. You would do it regardless of the outcome.
Read that again and notice what it rules out. Anything you are doing to get somewhere is not play, no matter how fun it looks from outside.
That is why a ping pong table in an office usually does not work. Nobody is immersed. Everybody is still being watched.
The proving ground
Gary has a name for what a life looks like once play has drained out of it. He calls it seeing the world as a proving ground.
When you see the world as a proving ground, you see the people around you not as playmates, you see them as competitors, people that are trying to take what is yours.
That one stopped me. Not because it sounded dramatic, but because it sounded normal.
Some of us have lived that way so long that we stopped noticing it was a way of living. It just felt like being an adult.
Gary also told me about a company that quietly took the word fun out of its stated values and replaced it with excellence. Nobody announced what was being given up. People just stopped going to lunch together.
Why rest alone did not fix it
Gary kept resting and kept burning out anyway. One night he nearly fell asleep driving home from an agency job and had to pull the car over.
I want to be careful here, because this is the part where a podcast can overpromise. Play is not a treatment and neither Gary nor I are clinicians.
What research does exist is worth knowing about, with its limits stated plainly. A 2026 study in Healthcare by Sendatzki, Brauer and Proyer looked at playfulness, stress and satisfaction in employees and students and found playfulness associated with lower perceived stress.
That study measures playfulness as a personality trait, not play as something you go and do, so it supports the idea without proving the fix. It is also correlational, which means it cannot tell us which way the arrow points.
There is also good research on why adults avoid play at all. Sebastian Deterding’s 2017 paper Alibis for Adult Play argues that adults dodge play largely because being caught playing feels embarrassing. That is adjacent rather than direct evidence for anything Gary claims, but it explains a lot about why this is hard.
If burnout is the part of this you recognise most, what burnout did to Patrick Casale is a good companion listen.
Finding your way back from play deprivation
Gary walks through an exercise called a play history. You think back to what brought you joy as a kid, then you dig for the element underneath it.
The example he gave has stayed with me. A client remembered playing with Barbies and being the mom. The word underneath it was nurturing.
So they started with one succulent. Last time Gary checked in, that person had over two hundred and fifty of them.
Then he gave the small move I mentioned earlier, and it takes about five minutes.
Replace the location of your social media app of choice with your notes app. And when your brain goes to push that button unconsciously, it’s gonna open the notes app. And when you were going to scroll on social media, I challenge you to do one of the things that’s on that list for five minutes.
Make the list first, while you are in a decent headspace. That part matters, because nobody can generate a list of joyful things on a bad day.
Key takeaways
- You can stop waiting for permission. Play is not a reward for finishing the list, and the list is never finished anyway.
- You get a name for the feeling. If people have started looking like competition, that is worth noticing rather than judging yourself for.
- You get a starting point that costs nothing. One list, one app moved, five minutes.
- You get to skip the guilt. Gary’s whole case is that this is recoverable, not a character flaw you have to apologise for.
Episode timestamps
- 00:00 The proving ground
- 02:01 The 3D printed gift at NeuroDiversion 2026
- 04:36 What play actually means for an adult
- 06:24 The opposite of play is not work
- 08:05 Play deprivation, and how to spot it
- 11:40 The drive home that changed everything
- 17:20 Why Gary calls his diagnosis the worst day of his life
- 20:05 Disengaged at work, and what it costs
- 23:42 When a company deleted the word fun
- 25:39 The improv class
- 27:16 The compass of joy
- 28:32 Barbies, nurturing, and 250 succulents
- 32:52 The five minute notes app swap
- 35:13 Joy versus happiness
- 39:10 The one thing to take away
People also ask
What is play deprivation?
Play deprivation is what happens when play drains out of a person’s life over time. Gary describes the result as seeing the world as a proving ground, where other people start to look like competition and work becomes something you have to earn by proving you are worthy. It is not a formal diagnosis. It is a way of describing a pattern that a lot of adults recognise once somebody names it.
How do adults play?
According to Gary’s definition, adults play when they are immersed in something and the outcome does not matter to them. That can be gardening, improv, building something, music, or a game, and it looks different for everybody. The test is not the activity. The test is whether you would still do it if nobody scored it.
Why do I feel guilty for resting?
For a lot of us, rest got tied to whether we had earned it. If your sense of worth runs on output, stopping can feel like falling behind rather than recovering. Naming that link is usually more useful than trying to force yourself to relax.
How does play affect the brain in adults?
Research on adults is still thinner than research on children, so it is worth being careful with big claims. What existing studies suggest is that adults who score higher on playfulness tend to report lower perceived stress and use healthier coping strategies. Those findings are correlational, which means they show a relationship rather than proving that play causes the improvement.
Before you go
The line I keep coming back to is the one Gary ended on.
You are wired for play. Play is in all of us, regardless of how old that we are. And if you have been void of play, don’t worry. It’s in there. It’s just atrophied.
Atrophied is not gone. Atrophied comes back.
Go find Gary at breakthroughplay.com and pick up Playful Rebellion. If you are new around here and want somewhere to land next, start here.
If the show has helped you at all, leaving a review genuinely helps other people find it. And if you are not following yet, come find me wherever you already spend your time.
One last thing, and I say it every time because I mean it. I am a mental health advocate speaking from lived experience. I am not a clinician, nothing here is medical advice, and none of it replaces working with someone qualified.
Much love. Good vibes. – Ky
Full transcript
Here is the full conversation in text, corrected and labelled by speaker. Open it if you would rather read than listen.
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