570 - Play as Resistance: featuring Gary Ware from Breakthrough Play and Normalizing Non-Monogamy

The importance of play

We’re showcasing an episode from Normalizing Non-Monogamy that had Jase and Gary Ware as guests to talk about play as a form of resistance with hosts Emma and Fin. The conversation ranges from how important play is to some tools and strategies that can help you incorporate more play into your life.

Gary Ware is a creative yet strategic Play Consultant that was brought here to make your life even better than it already is. By day, Gary helps companies and professionals level up their skills, and by night he is an improv comedian. In between all of Gary’s passions, his most desirous one is helping people become the best versions of themselves through fun and entertainment.

Some of the key points Gary, Jase, Emma, and Fin go over in this episode are:

• How to play in a time where we’re buried in our phones and there’s constant pressure to do more. Many of us feel guilty for slowing down at all.

• What does play as resistance look like to you?

• Play often feels irresponsible, but resistance doesn’t always look like pushing back. Sometimes it looks like refusing to become numb, cynical, or mechanic.

• Why is play an effective way to rebel and push against the systems we’re talking about?

• Why is play so effective at disrupting rigid systems?

• Why do we think play makes us feel more like ourselves again?

  • Isolation increases stress and compliance.

  • Play builds trust and shared meaning.

  • Connected groups are more difficult to fracture and easier to sustain.

• Chronic stress narrows thinking, while play widens perception and choice. Regulated people make better decisions and hold better boundaries.

• How do we balance play and reality?

• What if we don’t know how to slow down and embrace play? Where would someone start?

If you’re interested in a weekend away to rediscover play and connect with yourself and your partner better, check out the upcoming event Relationship Recess that’s coming up in the beginning of May!

Transcript

If you find any transcription errors, please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.

Jase: Welcome to the Multiamory Podcast. I'm Jase.

Emily: I'm Emily.

Dedeker: And I'm Dedeker.

Emily: We believe in looking to the future of relationships, not maintaining the status quo of the past.

Dedeker: Whether you're monogamous, polyamorous, swinging, casually dating, or if you just do relationships differently, we see you and we're here for you.

Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're very excited to share with you a special episode that I did along with the folks at Normalizing Non-Monogamy and Gary Ware talking about play as resistance. Now, I was invited to be part of this conversation and I was excited about it just because I love anything that gets us out of our normal routines or just being addicted to scrolling on our phones or looking for validation online and gets us in touch with the here and now, with the people that are actually around us, engaging with them in a real and authentic way. And I was already excited about it, but while recording this, I was continually amazed by how much Gary has researched this and how much he actually looks at this not just as we should be encouraging more authenticity through play just because that's good, or we can all relate to the world being stressful, but that he actually has data to back this up and actually has research that shows more effective ways to engage in play and why these things matter to us. So I just found this to be such an interesting conversation with him that I wanted to be sure we shared that with all of you. So we hope that you enjoy this episode of Normalizing Non-Monogamy with me and Gary Ware as guests. And of course, if you're interested in learning about Multiamory and our tools, you can go check out our book, Multiamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships. It's available at multiamory.com/book or wherever fine books are sold. And we include many communication tools in there that apply in all your relationships, not just your romantic ones. And with that, let's get into the episode.

Fin: All right.

Fin: Well, welcome to the podcast, everybody. So to talk a little bit about play today, we've got our friend Gary Ware here, and Jase, also a friend of ours from Multiamory podcast, joining us to talk about the importance of play in our lives and as a means of resistance against the growing pressures and demands that I think a lot of us are feeling these days with so many aspects of life right now just feel overwhelming. And so we're excited to talk today, not just about why this is important, but also some tools and strategies we can use to start bringing play into our lives, into our relationships, to help sort of come back to ourselves as the craziness of life and the world sort of swirls around us.

Emma: Yeah. Yeah, before we jump into more, we'd love to start by having you, Gary and Jase, introduce yourselves.

Gary: Yeah, I'll go first. Thank you. My name is Gary Ware. I run a small program called Breakthrough Play, where I do just that. I use play-based methods as a way to help individuals and groups connect and just be the best versions of themselves. So happy to be here.

Fin: Yeah, excited to have you, Gary.

Jase: Awesome. And I'm Jase. I'm one of the co-hosts of the Multiamory podcast, which is a long-running show about relationships, especially non-traditional ones, but we try to cover everything and we love focusing on kind of what can existing research, as well as new research, tell us about how we can apply these things in more than just the one cookie-cutter style of default monogamy relationships.

Emma: Yeah.

Fin: Love it.

Emma: Awesome. Thank you both for being here today and for having this conversation with us. We're super excited to dive in. But before we do, we wanted to talk a little bit about the inspiration for this conversation. And part of that is that for Finn and I, the last few years have been full of really big changes for us. And pretty much everything in our lives has been in a state of flux. And we've been working really hard to find ways to strengthen our connection with each other and with ourselves through this. And one of the ways that we have been doing that is through play. And that's whether through a board game, a puzzle, mini golfing is one of our classic ones that we go to. We try to find play to bring back to ourselves and our relationship.

Fin: Yeah, for sure. And so about a year ago, we were struggling particularly hard and happened to have a call with Emma, Dedeker and Jase. We were all sort of just talking through things that have been hard in life and how it's been beating on us and also sort of around on the people around us, our communities we talked to a lot of people in our communities. We talk to people from our shows, listeners reach out, and just everyone seems like they've been drowning. And we kind of wondered what would happen if we took this idea of play and designed an entire weekend dedicated to using the power of games and play to strengthen our relationships with ourselves, with our friends, with our partners, with our families. And so we reached out to Gary to see if he'd be interested in helping us create this weekend. And he said yes. Emily, Dedeker, and Jase all said yes. And so Long story short, here we are.

Emma: Yes, we have an event coming up this spring, May 1st through the 3rd, just outside Orlando, Florida, called Relationship Recess. And it's at a crazy 10 acre Lakeside estate with a massive 13 bedroom home that's basically a giant playground. We're going to have a weekend full of structured games and non-structured games, just a lot of play and beautiful experience for all of us.

Fin: Yeah, yeah. And we don't have the whole team here today. We're missing Dedeker and Emily, but we're excited to have Gary and Jase here. And I'm just curious, before we dive in any further, For each of you, is there anything that you're both really excited about for this weekend in particular, or something that just inspired both of you to say yes when we asked you about this crazy thing that we came up with?

Jase: I just wanted to say that, yeah, the whole idea that it's so easy to get burned out or to suffer from compassion fatigue or whatever you want to call it of there's a lot of stuff to care a lot about, and that takes a lot of our energy. We can sometimes feel like we've just got to keep fighting. We've got to keep struggling against that. But when we're doing that at the expense of our mental health and our capacity, it actually just kind of makes us lash out at the people who should be on our same team rather than actually putting our energy where it belongs. And then when we're not repairing and making that space for ourselves to also enjoy this life that we're fighting for and that we're fighting for acceptance of that, then we're not even living the thing that we're trying to get. So I think that just as the general message of the retreat was what inspired the Multiamory team from the start to get involved and to do this with the three of you. And then I think the other thing that we've been realizing more recently as we're planning out some program ideas and workshop ideas and things for it is how, when you're in a space of fun and play, how you can still do some workshops and kind of deep exploration where you're coming in with a little bit more of this like, freedom to explore those parts of yourself. And so we can actually also have a lot of opportunities for doing some really deep work on how you show up in your relationships and what you want from those within this context of it being more lighthearted and not just, I'm going from work to another work.

Fin: Yeah. Yeah. And so you and Dedeker and Emily are running some, I think, relationship huddles, some activities around the RADAR conversation and a few other like microscripts and tools as well. Yeah.

Jase: Yeah. Yeah. We're still we've got like a huge list of all the possible things we could talk about. We're just working on narrowing it down to like what are the most exciting ones and also seeing how much people sign up for the different ones and we can adjust from there.

Emma: Yeah. Yeah.

Fin: Totally. Super excited. Well, thanks, Jase. Yeah. And how about you, Gary?

Gary: I really want to echo what Jase mentioned in that oftentimes we just because of society and whatnot, we have this thing where we look at play and playfulness as a juvenile thing and something that we get to do after all of our work is done. And I know we're going to dive into this, but the research suggests that that's when we're at our best. And work and play aren't two things that should be at odds of each other. They should be something that can coexist. And by bringing playfulness into the sort of workshop space, It gives you the ability to take it in more and be able to retain it afterwards. So that's why I'm excited that we are blending all of those because again, they could coexist and you leave feeling rejuvenated and whole as a human.

Fin: Yeah, I love it. Well, we won't rave too much more about relationship resets here because we're going to dive into this conversation, but we just, we really wanted to sort of stress that the foundation of the conversation today is also the foundation of what we, what we created for relationship recess. And so if you would like to learn more, you can see all of the pictures and videos of the house, a tentative schedule of what's coming up and sign up, grab your tickets over on our website, normalizingnonmonogamy.com There's a banner at the top to get to relationship recess, or you can click on the events tab. Again, you can find all the information there. You can grab your tickets and learn more. So thank you. Thank you both for being here. We're excited to dig in and maybe just to kind of start it off, and we talked a little bit about just the amount. A pressure we're all feeling. And I think you mentioned it, like Gary, like how can we think about play at a time like this when there's so much work to be done, whether it's like work, work or work, just trying to like support our community, support the people around us who are also struggling in the insanity that is today. Maybe just to kind of start with digging in a little bit more about this, like what maybe what's been your experience and how do you sort of approach play for yourself and the people around you when life is kind of crushing in on us like this.

Gary: Yeah. So I want to first talk about what's happening on a physiological level. When we are in that state, the stress response of all the cortisol and adrenaline, it is very challenging for us to want to play because our body is in this sort of danger response. But here's the big thing in the wild when that would happen, it will be a momentary thing. Something is rushing at you or you need to save someone. But after it's done, you go from that stress response to the rest and relax response, and it's this circle. Well, when it comes to all the things that are happening in the economy and the things at work, that cycle is never complete, so we're always on. And we, you know, and if you get that feeling of, like, oh, I feel guilty of doing these things, just know that you're not alone. You know, your body is feeling like it needs to protect itself. But here's the anecdote. Making intentional space to do those things will allow you to complete that stress response and in turn give you the ability to be more resilient. Now, I can say all of these things, but you can still feel that dissonance is like, yeah, I hear you, Gary, but I still feel guilty and not want to do these things because of a number of things. So, I just want to let people know that, Hey, I see you, I feel you, and it's challenging. And I know from my own experience, the things that help me is having people in my corner that can recognize when I'm in that and can give me that little nudge of like, Hey, Gary, why don't you take a break?

Emma: Yeah, the invitation.

Gary: Yes.

Jase: It's funny, it reminds me of a couple of things. One is this quote that's often attributed to the Dalai Lama, even though there's actual evidence that this is many hundreds of years older than that. But it's this, I meditate for an hour every day except when I'm really busy and then it's two hours. And I also heard a similar piece of advice actually from a voice teacher I had when I was in high school. That guy was stressed out about schoolwork and things like that. He's like, you,'re reading any books right now? I'm like, I like reading, but I've just been too busy. He's like, that's why you especially need to read. And I feel like it fits into this similar thing of like, you've got to engage in another way. You've got to, you can't just stay in that one mode all the time because that's, literally killing you.

Emma: Right. Well, and it's having to break, like we live in a world that everything is urgent right now. Everything feels urgent.

Jase: Yeah, I know. I'm like, I need to take notes for myself.

Gary: Yes, exactly.

Fin: Note to self, note to self.

Emma: And so you have to intentionally break that. And even though you don't have the time because you're too busy to read or to do something like that, to figure out ways to intentionally break it and choose to do something different, even if it's reading for 20 minutes. How can I find even small moments when life feels so busy and everything feels urgent to bring this in? It's not easy.

Fin: Yeah. Well, and I will say too, this idea that we're not only does it feel like this, but I feel like in many ways it is this. We're always available. We always have our phones. Work is never that far away. And it's just all consuming a lot of the time. And like you talked about, we don't ever hit pause. We don't ever just take a few minutes where we're not looking at our phones. Looking at something, consuming something. And if it's not the actual, like, your day-to-day, like, work job, it's the work of trying to maintain our sanity as other stuff is happening. You know, the news is 24 hours a day. Everywhere you look, we're just inundated.

Jase: I'm actually curious, and, Gary, you might have some input about this, but something I've noticed for myself is that, you know, if I'm working, I'm, like, jumping from task to task. I'm feeling kind of exhausted that I'll have, you know, these brief moments, like, I'm eating lunch or I take a moment to wash dishes or something. And often I'll pull up YouTube or something to put on something to watch. And I personally love and get a lot of fulfillment from watching math videos on YouTube, like explaining mathematical proofs and things like that, or like physics videos. I love that kind of stuff. But often when I'm in that state of being really stressed, I actually find myself more likely to instead click on a video that's like the latest about the Epstein files or like this terrible thing that Trump just did. And like I find myself drawn to the stuff that I know isn't, like intellectually, I know isn't going to help me unwind from this like bound up, stressful place that I'm in, but those almost seem more attractive when I'm already in that mode, even though they're the opposite of what I need.

Gary: Yeah, that's a very good point. And it goes back to when we're in the stress response, we it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You know, our bodies are looking to fight off dangers, and we think that we need to give ourselves more info because it's going to help that anxiety of like not knowing what's going on when in reality you're absolutely right. It actually is worse. You know, the more that we inundate ourselves with these things, the more that it keeps us in that cycle and it doesn't help.

Fin: Yeah. Yeah. Which I feel like is a bit of this, what we're kind of like getting at here around resistance. Like how do we how do we start to resist that? And I mean, I think we can look at resistance in a lot of different ways, but I feel like this is one of those, like how do we resist? Getting pulled into that cycle, how do we resist pulling up a video that we know is actually going to like ruin our evening verse, make our evening a fun evening.

Emma: The first step of that is just what we're talking about right now is being aware of it. And, and noticing the patterns in ourselves and what we're drawn to and when, and then, and then being like, wait, I could make a conscious choice to do something different, but you know what? I'm going to make a conscious choice to do, to do this instead right now too. That's it. Both are valid.

Gary: And one thing to add is that you're absolutely right. We need to be more intentional because we live in a very complex world where even 10, 15 years ago, it wasn't as complex as it is now. And the things that we take for granted is the fact that we didn't always used to be on. And that is what the tools that were supposed to help us are actually hurting us. And I use this joke all the time. Is back like maybe 20 years ago, the only people that were able to be reached at a moment's notice were doctors and drug dealers. Everyone else, it can wait to the next business day. And I think about my grandpa, who was one of the hardest working people I know. He had a lot of leisure time and it was because it was sort of baked in. When the workday was over, you went home and there wasn't anything that was you know, vying your attention until you came back to work. But now, because we can be, you know, we're ever so connected with supercomputers in our pocket and our sort of curiosity as human beings of wanting to know, it's actually hurting us. And now we have to be intentional to break away from that.

Fin: Yeah. Yes. It was interesting this morning. I was out for a walk thinking about this, and, and I came out of college. I mean, I both came out of college around 2010 and started our first engineering career jobs. And that was, there was about a two year window where I had a blackberry that like could probably get emails, but didn't really get emails. And like after that two year window, it's just been nonstop. And it was like this really interesting moment that I remembering like, I worked for a short amount of time where I wasn't on 24/7 and then it shifted and damn it has been exhausting since then. So I just, it was just a moment of realizing like there was a very little little window where I was not on all the time.

Emma: And so many people now don't know what that feels like. Yeah, they don't have that experience if they're younger, yeah.

Jase: So I think something that's challenging about this, to bring it back to the whole resistance or resilience being related to play, is that I think part of that also is that a lot of people, when they think of play now, think of games on their mobile phone. And I think often the ones that tend to get us the most are the ones that play on these same addictive properties that reading bad news and upsetting headlines and your friends' social media posts about all the terrible things in the world, they play on that same thing, that same drive. And I think that's part of maybe why play gets a bad rap, because if we're just associating it with that, yeah, I would probably agree that is a little irresponsible, but Maybe not in the way you think.

Gary: No, and so to that point, I love that you mentioned that there's a few things. One, the person to blame, his name is BJ Fogg. He created the Fogg Behavior Model, which was adapted by application designers to get us addicted to stuff. So I'm not going to get too much into that, but basically that model is how to get someone to take action to do stuff. And it's all about like our sort of biology and stuff like that. That aside, a researcher, her name is Jane McGonigal, she studied games and to find out, like, can it help us thrive? And believe it or not, there's just as much research that shows that games and video games specifically can be detrimental to our lives as it is, it can help us and can help us connect. And there is one subtle difference, and it goes back to what we said in the beginning, the difference between the people that used it for growth and so growth happened and the people that used it and got sucked in and really harmed things was their intention. So if your intention and again, this requires conscious thought behind this and a lot of times we use it as an escape and that's why we get sucked in. But the interesting thing is that can happen to anything. It just so happens that video games is the thing that is sort of out there in the open because it's seen as a juvenile thing. But if you go into the thing of like, hey, I want to take 10 minutes and play Candy Crush because I had a rough day and I just need to disconnect so that I can connect with my kids later. Boom, you will use it for its benefits. However, if you went in, it's like, I don't want to deal with the world and I'm using this as an escape, then yes, that will become the pattern. And I know a lot of us, myself included sometimes, get sucked into that more escapism with it and it doesn't give us those benefits.

Fin: Yeah, and I'm curious, I'm building on this a bit. What for each of you or for all of us here, what has play as resistance looked like for you, right? I know we just kind of talked about this, how we can maybe use video games or coming in with a certain intention. But if we're looking around going, okay, well, because I know there are people out there who like, I truly don't have more time. You know, maybe they're working multiple jobs, they've got their single parents, whatever. It is that like, I don't have more time to do more. Are there ways to sort of use this idea of play as resistance or just resist by doing less? Like, is that also a pathway into it?

Gary: You're absolutely right. We don't have a lot of time. And the first thing that I allow, not allow, but I instruct people to do is rest. Rest is important. And it doesn't mean that you Of course they're like, oh, eight hours of sleep, this, that, and the other. But are you getting quality rest? You know, this is where we start to like optimize our overall behavior. Cause a lot of times we treat ourselves like we treat our phones. We run ourselves until it is 0% and then we crash out and then we get up the next day and we do it again and we wondered why, like we're never fully charged. So my question is, what is your rest ritual routine so that you can get quality rest? Because you shouldn't be passing out with your phone right next to you and expecting to get quality sleep. I have two kids, an eight-year-old and a three-year-old, and they have a bedtime routine. About an hour before bedtime, we start all the things to wind them down so we can get their bodies in a place where they can get quality rest. We need to take a page out of that book. So that's the first thing is getting quality rest, but rest isn't just sleep. And this is where play can come in because there are three types of rest. So there's the macro rest. So that is sleep and making sure that we optimize that the best that we can. And it doesn't necessarily mean eight hours of sleep, but it just means get quality sleep. And the other thing is micro rest. And again, we all like, oh, I'm so busy. I'm so busy. But guess what? If you really look at your day and you're truly honest with yourself, I bet you there are times where you don't realize it, but, you know, those are times that you can have these micro rests. And, and the things that you can do in that varies. But these are the things throughout your day of just moments of disconnection from stimulus like technology and stuff like that. And this is where you could take five to 10 minutes and maybe doodle or five to 10 minutes and, and walk or stretch or, or something that brings you joy. And here's the thing, and this is like a subtle nod to what we're throwing out, but there is a thing called Mesol rest. And these are things that used to be seen just for prestigious individuals. These are sabbaticals and stuff like that, where you step away from the work for extended periods of time and as a way to rejuvenate yourself. Well, not everyone can afford to do something like that. However, taking a weekend to be intentional will do wonders, where you disconnect and connect with others and stuff like that. Now, yes, that is a plug. I'm just going to be, that's a plug for what we got going on. But also, this could be something that you put into your life more often than not. As a parent, I am fortunate that some of these things are baked in. I have very active kids, and that comes with doing Taekwondo practices and recitals and school stuff, which forces me to step away from work and disconnect from stuff like that. And not everyone has children that they have to take care of to do stuff like that. But that doesn't mean that you can't give yourself an excuse to step away from the work. We just have to realize that by doing so, the world is not going to end. So I'll step off my soapbox for a moment and let Jase chime in if you want.

Jase: No, I love that. And it kind of reminds me of something that I feel like for the past couple years, Dedeker and I have been talking a lot about, which is this thing of realizing and kind of being honest with ourselves that a lot of our feelings of self-worth come from how productive we perceive ourselves to be. And that that's 100% this like, yes, yes, capitalism won.

Emma: Yes.

Jase: You've been reduced to what you produce and that's it. And we do that to ourselves, right? That we've kind of bought into that narrative. I think we're still on the awareness step even a couple of years in because it's hard to break those patterns. It's hard to change how you think about it, but it's, that idea of, oh, I don't know, today, I felt like I was busy, but I didn't get anything done today, and I feel bad about that. I feel like I need to start early tomorrow to see if I can get a little more done. And just kind of realizing how much of that narrative is tied up in my worth as an individual in society is tied to producing enough. And whatever that enough is, is a big open question too, right? And I think that that's not tied to a job necessarily, right? Like maybe you have a boss who expects a lot, but so many people I know doing the kind of hustle culture working for themselves thing are even worse bosses than normal bosses are in terms of how much they expect and how little breaks they want to give. I can fall into that trap on both sides. I'm feeling like I want to do really well in my day job and also feeling like I need to do exceedingly well for my own things like the podcast and stuff like that. It's easy to fall into that trap.

Fin: Yeah, I feel that in a huge way. I make the joke often that when we walked away from our jobs, our careers, and started sort of working for ourselves, I started working for my biggest asshole boss ever, which is myself. Who is harder than anyone who's ever-- I'm harder than any of my previous bosses have ever been on myself. And so, I think one of the things we talked a little bit about before we hit record was just sometimes the idea that this resistance isn't about doing more, but it's also about, like, refusing to, to get cynical, refusing to cave to these pressures. And I think I've, I've seen that is something that I've been trying to do for myself. Like, when, when I send an email because I'm all up in my head at, you know, 11 o'clock at night, not expecting that somebody sends one back, right? I'm often like, if they respond, I'm like, no, don't respond. Like, I don't want you responding. Right. So I think there's ways we can do this for each other because it can become a really vicious cycle where you see somebody else working crazy and you're like, well, I have to keep up with them. But I just wanted to throw like a little shout out. Last week I sent an email to somebody. We were sort of off the grid on vacation, sent an email. I was like, Hey, we're kind of off the grid, but I can work on this. And they sent back, they're like, Don't even worry about it. So glad you're taking care of yourself and you're not like, so can we celebrate each other when we see each other playing and resting and being like, oh, great. You're not pointing out how bad I'm doing. You're giving me permission to play. Yeah. Like, when, when you take care of yourself, I look at it and go, wow, I can, I can do that for me. So I don't know, just a plug for Humanity and all of this, that we can take care of each other a little better.

Emma: Well, and celebrating the power of choice. Like, like, that's when, when we feel like we do have choice in it, that's what can open up so much. Because oftentimes we don't feel like we have choice, especially in the in this world right now.

Jase: Before we go on to the next section, we want to take a quick break to talk about the sponsors of Multiamory that help us keep this content going every week and making it available to everyone out there for free. Thank you to our sponsors for helping us do that. Please do take a moment to give them a listen. If any are interesting to you, go check them out, use the links in our show description, and use the promo codes that we say, because that's how they know that it's worth advertising on our show. And of course, if you'd rather support more directly and get access to our community and the ability to discuss these things in real time with us once a month as well, go to multiamory.com/join. We have a sliding scale there, so it should be accessible for everyone, and we would love to have you as part of that community.

Jase: So I have a question for Gary, actually, and this is about this kind of idea of supporting each other taking rest and maybe enabling each other to take rest like that of, I could send a message now or I could schedule it so it doesn't send till the morning. So I'm kind of putting less temptation in front of other people to respond at odd hours of the night or things like that. But I think that sometimes what I see in our online communities, like in the multiamory community sometimes or other spaces where there's also this sense of right now, like we're under threat, right? This is kind of a dangerous time and there's a lot that feels like we need to do or a lot of dangers to be aware of that I think sometimes our own internalized guilt of, well, I'm not doing enough, can translate into beating up on other people anytime they don't seem like they're doing enough. I'm curious if you've found anything in research or in the workshops or things you've done that could help with that. It just seems like such an endemic problem to social groups and communities that do feel like they're under threat.

Gary: You're absolutely right that again, it goes back to the different sort of states. Like when we're in that stress response, we don't see the world as a playground. We see the world more as a battlefield where we need to protect ourselves and we need to protect the people we love. And again, the thing that we least want to do is often the antidote. So again, it goes back to like what you mentioned at the top of, Hey, we need to do more of that because it's going to help us. Because going back to play and playfulness, there was research, I believe it was out of Thailand, and they had the elders that were lonely, and then they had the younger generation that was needing mentorship. And so they did this program where they brought these younger people and they paired them up with an elder. And basically they had to spend an hour a week together. And for the control group, they can do anything. They can talk, they can, read together, like, you choose, you know, whatever you want. But then the experiment group, they had them play Nintendo Wii. And if you're not familiar with Nintendo Wii, that is the game system where, you know, the controllers are like, you know, you move around with them. Motion sensing. Tennis. Yeah, it's motion sensing controllers. And so they had them do that with their time together. And so after 30 days, they surveyed the group. And as you would suggest, when you intentionally spend time with someone, you have a stronger affinity because again, you see their humanity and you see who they truly are. But the surprise was the group that did the Nintendo Wii, not only did they have a stronger affinity towards the person they were with, they had a stronger affinity to that whole group, which means that the younger people had a stronger affinity to elders of all ages, just all elders in general, and all elders had a stronger affinity to younger people just because when you're in a play like state, your brain is taking all of your belief systems and setting it aside for the rules of the game. And you're having what is called a peak emotional experience. So you're having all of those positive, you know, neurochemicals flowing through your body. And it gives your brain a moment to say, oh, I'm enjoying this, which means that, you know what? I like this person, and I like people like this person. And that is, again, the magic of play. It can sort of change the way that we think as a whole because of that, because we are separating our belief system for the rules of the game. And it's like something that is really, truly magical. And I've seen in inner cities where there's a distrust of authority and whatnot, they would have sort of community gatherings where they would play games and they would do stuff like that, where they would have those people out there in the community playing games alongside where you get rid of all power dynamics. And in that moment, we start to have a stronger trust. So again, it's something that we don't think that we should do, but when you start to do that, you start to see the humanity and so on. And then in those moments when we are online and we are missing those social contexts of like, these are human, you'll start to have a little sort of you pump the brakes a little bit more. I don't know if that answered your question. I feel like there is, again, hope for humanity if we can bring each other together to have these moments.

Jase: Yeah, it's just hard to... I feel like so often we find there's some inherent challenge with how we relate to each other in these asynchronous online ways. And it's just hard to find solutions to that. Because your thing about play reminded me of a study that I learned about, and I actually just Googled it real quick, and there have been several since then. But back in college when I was doing some music education training, that there was this study showing that if groups of people did something rhythmic together, or they were all keeping the same beat as each other, that then in later events, they were more likely to trust each other. They exhibited more pro-social behavior. They were less likely to feel, you know, negative toward each other or hate each other, things like that. There have been lots of variations on this since then. But there's kind of something about play that is also in real time versus playing a game via letters or something, right? There's this big delay.

Gary: In that book that I mentioned, Jane Mcgonigal and SuperBetter, and some of the research she found was there were some asynchronous games that people played that brought them together. So there was this unlikely marriage that happened between people of two different sort of nationalities. And there was a clash between the in-laws because of the differences in their cultures. And so like it was seen as like, no, you shouldn't marry this person, blah, blah, blah, all this other stuff. Nonetheless, love is love. And they got together. But this was around the time of, do you remember Farmville back in the day?

Jase: Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gary: And in Farmville, you get points by helping watering people's lawns and stuff like that. And so since they were all connected, via Facebook, the, each of their, like the in-laws and stuff like that were sort of connected in Farmville. And they, because of the, the game mechanics, they ended up like, oh, all right, I'm watering this person's grass and stuff like that because of the game. Again, they're not thinking like of anything else. They're just doing it through the game mechanics. And then they found themselves having a stronger affinity towards each other because of the game of, of helping each other. So they helped each other in this imaginary world. And then they started to like trust each other in the real world. And so again, that happened in an asynchronous thing.

Jase: I love that. That's great.

Gary: And it was like again by accident that that happened. But again, it shows that your unconscious brain is like, well, I, why should I hate this person? I did them a solid in this game.

Jase: They watered my crops and I watered theirs. Yeah.

Fin: Right.

Emma: Well, it kind of brings us all back to the like the basis of humanity and caring for one another.

Gary: Yes.

Emma: That's so easy to get out of and bringing us back to that can really help foster the connection and repair.

Jase: And like, it's a way that it makes those people into part of your in-group of people that I help rather than being this outside threat.

Fin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they become three-dimensional again.

Jase: I love that.

Fin: Yeah.

Jase: So you're saying we should all reboot Farmville?

Gary: Someone needs to reboot Farmville.

Jase: Like that, right?

Gary: And then subtly get the people that are like, are having these fights, like just get them in there and then

Jase: get them in there.

Gary: Yeah.

Fin: Okay. Easy peasy, no problem. I know, right?

Gary: Done.

Fin: Yeah. One thing I just wanted to touch on in here too, Gary, I'm just kind of curious is we've used play and rest almost interchangeably through the conversation today. And I'm just kind of curious, I know they're not one in the same, but I will say for myself, I've noticed rest becomes easier when I play because when I'm in something that's taking my brain and saying, okay, focus on this game. It helps me forget all the other stuff so I actually rest, or at least that's what I experience. And I'm just curious, in your work, what have you seen as the actual link between rest and play? I thought it'd be helpful to kind of tie the two together a little bit because we've used them fairly interchangeably.

Gary: Yeah, I don't have the exact research on this, but I can tell you from personal experience is that when you are playing, you are getting into that rest and digest state of your, of your body, which allows things to be easier because you're not, your body's not flooded with cortisol and adrenaline, the things that keep you on edge on, on alert. And I also like to note that play is different for everyone, you know, and this is the problem is that a lot of times people put play in this box. Then there's a doctor, his name is Dr. Stuart Brown, and he wrote this book on play, and he talks about different play personalities. And the thing that we need to realize is that there are different ways that you can engage in play, and it varies per person and based on need. And so some of those play personalities is the one that we all sort of think of when we think of plays, the competitor. This is where a lot of sports come from. Then we have the Joker. Again, a lot of playfulness is like, oh, pranks and stuff like that. These are play personalities, but did you know play personality is someone that is a storyteller and storytelling can be consuming stories like going to the movies, it could be reading a good book that is seen as play because essentially my definition of play is doing something that brings you joy that you could do regardless of the outcome. And you're right, when you when you engage in that, it does make rest easier. And when you rest, It makes play easier. But the main thing is being intentional. And this is why I say play is resistance because a lot of our social norms are telling us to do otherwise, and it's to our own detriment. So we need to resist that urge to feel like we need to connect all the time. And this is a good alternative.

Emma: Yeah. I just started reading this book, Rest is Resistance by Trisha Hersey. Have either of you read it yet?

Fin: No.

Gary: I haven't read it, though.

Emma: Yeah, I just have to do a quick plug for it. I just started it, so I can't talk about it yet. But it feels very relevant to the conversation we're having of how rest is resistance, too, and to build on that with rest and play and bringing both in as resistance.

Fin: Yeah, one of the stories from my past that kind of came to mind here was in college, I took a social dance class, and I remember one day, we were doing some square dancing or something like that. And we got done and everyone was just sort of like laughing. It was ridiculous. And she's like, who here was thinking about their math test? Who here was thinking about this exam? And, you know, it was like right before finals week and everyone was like, nope. And it was like, that was the moment we were like, oh, we've literally forgot about everything for that song, right? And if you can kind of string series of those together, you get hours perhaps of rest. Then you can come back. To that exam, refreshed, actually be present for it or whatever the work that you're trying to rest from is.

Emma: Yeah, I love that example.

Jase: It also relates to some other research that I remember learning about in terms of learning. And so with this is that when it comes to learning something new, and so for me, this is all about language, right? Because I've been studying Japanese for freaking 10 years now, and I'm trying to pass this kind of high-level proficiency test. And it's all been self-study, but there's always this struggle, right? Of like, how do you learn most effectively? And one of the things that comes up in the research is after you study something, taking some time to just space out and not think about it has actually been shown to increase your retention and your learning of those things. But it's so counterintuitive because you think, oh, no, I should take some time and think through it, keep drilling it in my head, and it's no, this The research shows intentionally not thinking about it, like trying to not really think about anything, just daydream, think about whatever, but not trying to make your thoughts productive. Let's your brain do this background processing that's actually more effective than if you were just on, on, on the whole time.

Gary: Yes, I totally agree. I read something, and again, this goes back to productivity. So I was going through a early in my career, I was going through a moment of, you know, trying to be as productive as possible. And one of the things that they said, and it seems counterintuitive, is to take breaks at the moment when you're in this peak of doing your work. And you're like, why would you do that? Because the brain will continue to work on it. It's almost like an ellipse. If you think about watching back when we didn't binge everything and we watched TV shows and they would have a cliffhanger, we thought about it all week. Because again, our brain can't help but to sort of fill in the gaps and solve problems and things like that. And that's the same with our work. So if you design your workday in such a way where you take the break at the exact time, your brain is going to continue to work on that in the background. And then you do something that is stepping away from what you're doing and it just allows your brain to work on it. And as Jase mentioned, process it and you're going to be able to better suit yourself when you come back from it. So I love that there's research that shows that it's great for learning as well.

Emma: Yeah, I mean, I just, as you're both talking, I'm like, when I'm able to do that, I've found that I am better off in the long run. Because it is, your brain keeps working in the background the whole time. It's hard to let go and trust that sometimes.

Jase: Yeah, that's the part. And even knowing this, I still really struggle with doing it.

Emma: Exactly.

Jase: Instead, I want to jump from learning one thing to jump into the next productivity task or the other thing I have to learn, even though that's counterproductive.

Gary: And I have a story on this, if you don't mind. Back when I started doing what I was calling recess, and you both participated in one of my recesses, I was testing it out, and a really good friend of mine, she sent me a text before my very first one. She wanted to be there to support, but she said, Man, I have a busy work day. I'm probably going to be here very late. I'm sorry, I'm not going to be able to make. And I knew she was on the edge of burnout. And I said, Hey, do you trust me? And she's like, yeah, of course I trust you. I said, Look, is right around the corner from your office. You probably need a break. You probably have not hydrated or anything. Just come down for 15 minutes, 15-20 minutes, and then you can leave. 15-20 minutes, the first couple activities, I think you'll benefit from it, and then you can go back to work. She's like, All right, all right, cool. So she came and she stayed for the whole time. She stayed for all two hours, and then she didn't go back to work. She went home. She got a good night's sleep. And then she went back and she sent me a text the next day saying that she had a great time and she went home, got some rest again, going back to that whole thing about rest, and went back to work early. And she knocked it out in probably a fraction of the time she thought had she not taken that break and did that all night.

Jase: Yeah. 100, I believe.

Fin: I love that, Gary. Yeah, it's. Picked up something that I had been thinking about. I was thinking about this morning on my walk as well is like the, the systems we live in are constantly saying like, okay, you finished that, now you have this, now you have this, now you have this. And then I'm also creating my own list like, oh, and I have this and I have this. But when there are times when I can stop and I pull myself out and I go and do something else, my list gets shorter. There's something about that stepping out that I'm like, how many of those things on my list did I actually have to do versus how many was I telling myself? And so there's, It just, it feels like we get into this autopilot where we're just like, just do it, do it, do it. And if somebody hands us a thing, we're just going to do it. But when you can step out, you're like, I didn't need to do half of those things. And, and my-

Emma: Because the rest and break helps to be more creative with it all.

Fin: Yeah. Or, or get some perspective to be like, what was I thinking? I didn't need any of that.

Jase: Right. It's like breaking out of this model of just being a cog in the machine whose only value is turning the other cogs, right? That, you're actually thinking and being creative and understanding and making decisions and priorities.

Fin: Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I appreciate that, that story, Gary. It's powerful to know that like, yeah, the 15 minute break, reset the whole evening and the next day and probably set her up for a better week for 15 minutes.

Emma: Yeah.

Gary: And she stayed, she stayed longer than 15, but I, it was again, going back to Fogg's behavior model, I guess this is a good point to talk about it. In his thing, he says, you need a prompt, and then you need to make sure that the ability to do it is at the right level. And then you have the action, and then you have a reward. And most of the time, when we think about doing these things, it is just so daunting. Like, oh my gosh. Like the thought, again, to her thought of doing a two-hour thing when she's already stressed about all the stuff that she has to do. And then that's why he, BJ Fog wrote a book called Tiny Habits, and he talked about if you're trying to do something, just make it slightly easier. And you have to, like, again, reduce that action time. And so I just said 15 minutes. Again, I wasn't trying to, like, get her to stay the whole time. I just knew as a good friend that she needed a break. And it was right by her office. So again, all these things are easy. Like her brain's like, oh, yeah, it's right by the office. I say 15 minutes. And then the cool thing about play and whatnot, and again, this is why it can be a slippery slope and it can go either way, good or bad. Is that she was there and she was having a good time, but she was able to have a conscious choice and realize in that moment, like, do I really need to go back to work or should I be responsible and actually go home and get some rest? So that is, again, one of the benefits of taking a step out and actually being conscious about the things that we're doing. And ask yourself, am I making this choice or someone else, you know, or some other system making this on my behalf?

Fin: I love that. It reminds me a couple weeks ago, we had, I had Crystal on the podcast. It was episode 430. It was just last week. And she was talking about, it was a lot about pleasure. Her work is all around pleasure. And she's like, you know, when I go to a restaurant and I'm eating my food, like, I make a big deal about it. I make, like, I let people know how enjoyable it is. And she's like, when I do that, it shows the people around me that they also have a choice, that they can be like, oh, I don't have to just play by the same rules. And so I love that idea sort of rolled in here, right? When we see other people or we show other people that we have choice, that we don't have to keep staying in the cycle. So I don't know, I just, I love that community aspect of play as well, that it's contagious.

Gary: Do you, and this question for both of you, have you heard of the acronym GRAPES as a way of self-care?

Emma: No.

Gary: And so pleasure is in there. Pleasure is to pee and grapes. So it's G-R-A-P-E-S and G is gentle to yourself. The R is relaxation. The A is accomplishments. P is pleasure, E is exercise, and S is social. And these are things that again, if you incorporate them in your sort of life, it helps reduce the inflammations and the anxieties and things like that because these are the things that we need. But the interesting thing is these are the things that we often do the least of.

Fin: Yeah.

Jase: Yeah.

Emma: Yeah. Or until almost until we're forced to because our bodies might shut down.

Gary: Agreed. Yep.

Emma: And then, and then we have to take a break because our bodies are telling us you cannot continue. But what would happen if we tried to listen to our, if we ate our grapes earlier? Yeah. If we tried to listen to our bodies sooner and listen to our nervous system sooner and what feels how to break that cycle, as you were talking about in the stress cycle, right? You have to choose to get out of that because you can't be innovative or resist or do a lot of the work when you're in survival mode as much as we want to be.

Jase: Oh, that's such a good point. I love this. I just looked up, you know, Grapes Self-Care and found various resources online of kind of things to do in each of those categories. So this is stuff I need very badly right now because I've been in a pretty bad cycle of being really stressed and anxious and all that. So this is This is good for me. I'm getting a lot out of this.

Gary: My therapist, every time we have a session, it's like, Gary, have you been eating your grapes? It's an ongoing thing.

Jase: Nice, nice.

Emma: Yeah. It's about resourcing ourselves in so many ways, in all of those ways, the grapes, so that we can show up in the world. Otherwise, our bodies often will tell us that in a different way.

Gary: Agreed.

Jase: Yeah.

Fin: I'm curious for everybody here, and Gary, maybe to lead us off ways. That you. I know we've talked about, like, all these great ideals of what we, what we're striving for, but what are some ways that you. I know you talked about you have kids, so that sort of injects some forced play into your life. But what are some ways that you found to, like, break some of these Cycles, balance play with the reality of, yeah, we, we still live in a capitalistic Society. We can't go to our landlords and be like, I had a lot of fun last week. Would you take that as a partial payment for my rent? Like, that's not. Typically how it goes. So how do we balance the play with reality? And how do you break the cycle yourself?

Gary: For me, what I've been doing lately is having a hobby. And it's interesting because in, I believe it's Europe, in some cases, instead of prescribing medication for some, like sort of mental health challenges, they prescribe a hobby. Because think about it, when you have a hobby and it's something that you're doing, one, you're learning. Because you're getting better. There's a level of mastery that you're trying to gain. And then two, there's a completion. My sister, for example, she got into crochet and she was, prior to that, she was having some normal anxieties of just being an adult. And then she started crocheting and really got into it and loved it and started making everyone in the family little plush dolls and scarves and all these things. But again, One, it allowed her to not to doom scroll it. Again, it was a very intentional act. Two, she's using her hands. Three, there's a completion aspect of it. It's like, wow, I finished this thing. And then she gave it away. So there's this gratitude and expression of like, hey, look, I appreciate you. She inspired me and I took up 3D printing because I got a 3D printer for Christmas. And so I've been making people things just just because. And it's just really cool just wanting to see people's faces like when I give them this gift and then they look at it and like, I, you know, granted, like, no, I'm not, don't come at me of the whole thing about plastics and stuff like that. I get it and it's not woodworking and I didn't make it myself and design it myself. However, there is some level of technical skills that is needed. And then at the end of the day, I would rather spend my time doing that than spending it on social media trying to find out, you know, what is going on with this, that and the other. But it is cool to give someone a gift.

Jase: I just love all of this information that Gary has to share and all of the conversations and thoughts that this has inspired in me. But we're going to take another quick break to talk about our sponsors for this show. Again, please take a moment, listen to them. If any are interesting, go check them out. Or you can just go down to the links in our show notes. Use those links, use our promo codes. That does really help our show. Or of course you can support us directly@multiamory.com/join and get things like ad free episodes and access to our amazing private community.

Fin: Yeah. I love it. I also just want to say to Gary, that you touched on something that I think is important here, which is something I struggle with too, which is the idea of is the thing I'm choosing to do the right thing? Is it socially responsible? Is it sustainable? Is it organic and fair trade and all of the Right. And there's this point sometimes where it's like, probably it's not the best that it could be, but if we're trying to break a cycle, I think taking bite sized pieces, like what can I do right now? And then that gives me more space to do, quote unquote, better next time. And then that gives me more space to do better. And so I just want to give,

Emma: because others, you can get in a loop of being, you'll never start.

Fin: And I think that's the thing.

Gary: And grapes, gentle to yourself.

Fin: Be gentle. Yeah, I just wanted to highlight that because that is a trap I fall into, which is if I can't do it the right way, the best way, the whatever way, then I might as well not even do it. And then I just keep working and I keep working in probably a less efficient way. You just have to sometimes just start somewhere, break the cycle, and then maybe improve and iterate.

Jase: Yeah, for sure. I feel like the trap I fall into with that is I'll spend a lot of time working out the perfect schedule of how I can relax, but without actually doing the relaxing. I've just done the work of like making the perfect relaxation program or something.

Gary: Yeah, right.

Jase: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Emma: I had to do that last year around working out. Cause I, I used to exercise quite a bit. And then I started grad school and I completely fell off my, all of my habits. And I was like, I can't do this at all. Like, and I was like, how it felt so overwhelming to even think about, I, like, I felt like I needed to plan my workouts, like plan the whole thing. And what was I going to do? And to your point, Jase, like, I'm going to spend all this time creating a schedule for myself and what I need to do. And I was so overwhelming that I just couldn't do it. I just didn't do it at all until I finally was like, what is the simplest thing I could do? And I created myself two basic workouts. And I've just like, I was like, I'm just going to do these two every week, even if I like just those two. And I don't care if it's the same thing. I can go up and down in weights and different things, but I'm not going to complicate it. And I've still been doing those workouts since the last year. And sure, I've taken weeks off and things like that, but it I had to simplify it to the point where it was attainable, like I could do something. Because when I was getting caught in that, trying to make it perfect and all of the planning that I needed to do, and I was like, well, what if I don't get these muscles and these or do this in this way? And it's like, something is better than nothing.

Gary: That was me when my son was born, because I had this sort of way that I exercised and meditated and all these other things. And it's so I remember it like it was yesterday. Because a wiser person than me, my good friend April, she had mentioned she has kids older than mine. And she's like, you know, when you have kids, your routines are gonna have to change. Like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I was so naive. This again, nine years ago. And she's like, okay, you'll see. And that was exactly what happened in that the complexity of being around like newborns and it throws your life in flux. And it was one of those things where everything fell off because I wanted it to be perfect. I wanted to like have this perfect time when I was meditating and working out. And I had to like sort of go back to like square one of like, just like what you did. I was like, all right, look, these are the things I can do. And, and, you know, because again, being intentional, like, I know that this is important and I have to be okay with it being messy.

Fin: Yeah, I love it.

Emma: The messiness and figuring out ways to embrace the messiness. Oh, that's hard. But, but it is part of life and it is like, bringing in the humanity again for all of us.

Fin: Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious for you, Jason, that sort of same thread, like things that you've been doing. I know you said this has been, sounds like big work for you is trying to figure out this burnout and bringing this rest in. What are some tips, tricks, tools you've been using for yourself?

Jase: Yeah. I mean, I think something that I've been struggling with, and actually was just talking to Dedeker about this last night, where I was kind of like, okay. I need to find a way to gauge for myself when I've done what I think of as enough to then give myself permission to play a game or read a book or, you know, watch a movie or, like, engage with something that I enjoy without feeling that back of my mind sense of guilt about it of this, like, oh, but I really should, I really should be doing something else. And that meter is just hard. And I think that on the one hand, there's realizing that when it comes to work, often I'm holding myself to a 10 times higher standard than anyone else actually is, because I just want my work to be good. And that's just part of my personality is kind of recognizing like what of this is self-inflicted versus we can kind of feel like, oh, there's all these demands on me and realizing like actually a lot of this is coming from me. I do have more agency than I realize in certain areas. But then I think when it comes to also getting things done is more looking at rather than just an endless to-do list of all the things I need to do of splitting it up by day. Like I use bullet journaling as the technique where you basically break up your to-do list, but assign them to specific days. And the idea being that you keep the number of things on each day, ideally quite small. Like I try to keep mine to like two or three things, like very small because I know I'm going to do a bunch of other stuff. Stuff too, right? Someone's going to message me, they need help. This thing's going to happen in the server. I need to go update that. There's going to be stuff that happens. But trying to focus on just, if I can get work done on these things, I can feel good enough to then let myself actually enjoy my time with my friends or to go do something social afterward or go to a community event or things like that that otherwise I just won't ever let myself do because I'll just work and work and work and work instead. And then just feel so exhausted. I'm like, no, I can't do anything. I just got to zone out and go to sleep.

Fin: Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that. That very relatable too. And that's a, I've had a similar strategy at times over the last year of like, if I can do these three things, I'll call today good enough and I'll let myself turn my computer off at five or six instead of nine or 10. Right. It is not easy to do. I will throw a couple of maybe quick things from my side as well that, you know, one thing that Emma and I have been doing that we found really great, I think both individually and for our relationship was doing puzzles together.

Emma: We just started this, this like last month.

Fin: Yes, nice. Last month we got out a 3,000 piece puzzle that we got at a thrift shop. So we have no idea if all 3,000 pieces are there.

Emma: Oh no, that's part of the game.

Fin: That is great for somebody with OCD, but we're not thinking about that at the moment. At this point. But anyway, just what we found is like we can sit in quiet or we can chat about our relationship, we can chat about our individual stuff, and it gives us- Or listen to music. Or listen to music. Like it's just time where we're in our relationship together with a little bit of a distraction. So it's not this like focus, like, okay, we're going to sit and have a deep dive into our relationship and talk about hard stuff. But like we can chit chat about it and it comes up and then it fades away. And so it's just a less intense way of approaching it. So that's been really a great thing for us the last couple of weeks. And I think this one is a little more personal for me is tying it into a strategy I've been using is sort of dealing with obsessive compulsive disorder. So I was diagnosed with that last year and sort of the gold standard for that is something called exposure with response prevention. Which is essentially you expose yourself to one of your triggers. So if it's locked doors or turning lights on and off, whatever the thing is. And it's almost sort of brute force. You expose yourself to it and then you just do not do the thing that you would normally do to make that feeling go away. So I'm not going to go look at the door again. I'm not going to get out of bed and go check the locks again. And so there are times where I find myself I've intentionally said, I'm going to turn work off and I'm sitting there and things are just coming at me left and right, like, oh, do this, oh, do that, oh, do this. And I'm sort of just brute force, like, no, I'm just not going to. And I'm going to see what happens if I say no this time. And it's really uncomfortable. And similar to what we talked about earlier is we learn that sometimes the things that we thought we had to do, we didn't. And I know so much of that is I've trained myself to think that everything that comes into my brain that I think I should do, I have to do. And by just sometimes being like, no, I'm just not doing that one. I'm breaking that pattern. And it is hard. It is hard, but it's working slowly.

Gary: I love that.

Jase: No, that's awesome. It actually reminds me of something that is another really good thing to do. And this is not specific to OCD at all, but is when you find these little kind of dead time moments in your day. And this is, examples of this would be, I go to the cafe and there's two or three people ahead of me at the counter. I'm standing in line for a few minutes, right? Not a huge long wait, but a little bit. Or you're having dinner with somebody and they get up to go to the bathroom and you're just sitting there by yourself for a little bit. Or something like that, something where you're waiting for a thing. It could be you're a graphic artist waiting for something to render, whatever it is, these kind of like little things that for most of us, we're so afraid of boredom that we just go to our phone right away or we're worried we're missing something, maybe that kind of thing, but is to try to get in the habit the same way of feeling like I have this like itch in my brain to check my phone and to engage with something. What if I did didn't, though. Like, what if I actually just stood here and kind of looked around the cafe? Or what if I just stood here and kind of looked out the window while I'm waiting for my computer to do something or. Right. Whatever it is, just sitting there and looking, it's. It can be kind of this crazy, profound experience when you do it. You're sort of like, wow, I'm just, like, here. I'm, like, existing and taking this world in. It's because we're so not used to it now that we're so. Tuned into our phones.

Emma: Yeah. Yeah. When you notice things, I love that example, and I've tried to do that too. You notice things you would never have noticed before, especially if you're out in a public place or even in your own place, like own home or own place, you notice things or ways you're feeling or what, or maybe an impulse of something you need. I actually need to go get a glass of water. I didn't realize I was thirsty until I slowed down enough to... That's such a good one. To realize that I need to drink some water.

Jase: Absolutely. Yeah.

Emma: Yeah, I love that example. And I'll throw in one other quick one on my end. I've noticed that these micro moments, not too different from you, Jase, but like just if when I have a break between meetings or client sessions or something like that, and I have 10 minutes, sometimes five minutes, to put on a song and to just stretch or move my body to that song, like I'll pick a song for three or four minutes long, and listen to it and just be in the music for that short time, and then you're right back at it. But just that little bit of break and moving my body, or even just standing up and stretching, helps so much to help keep going into the next thing and be like, wait, that was a moment of rest.

Gary: I love that. And one thing to help people actually put this into action, because oftentimes, and I know this from personal experience, We hear something inspiring like, you know, this podcast and we're like, oh wow, I really want to try that. And you really want to, you honestly really want to, but the reality is we've created these neural pathways that do the opposite. So we can't rely on ourselves to do these things without intervention. And that's why I love Finn that you have, like you have a process of going through that. And BJ Fogg talks about creating recipes. And it's just like if you read the book Power of Habit, they talk about this too, in that you have to be intentional and so you have to think of what is the trigger. I'm in line and what's the habit that I normally do that I don't want to do? All right, I do this. All right, instead, what do I do? So you have to be intentional to set up these things and you have to make it easy for yourselves. For example, after meetings, after meetings, so that's the trigger. Will doodle for five minutes. But you need to make it so easy that your doodle pad is right there. You have everything within an arm's reach because if you have to think about it or rely on your own self to think about it, it's not going to happen because the way that our brains work, the moment something becomes a habit and we do it without thinking, your body, believe it or not, before you're conscious, you are already making that move towards that thing. There's been a lot of research that showed that they train a mice to go through mazes and they had like the little EKG caps on their mice. These have to be tiny. I'm quick aside, like to be able to monitor mice brain waves. But nonetheless, and they monitor their brain waves and they notice that once they mastered the maze, they can go through the maze, but the brains, the brain waves aren't as active, which means that again, they're in an unconscious state. And so that's why you have to be gentle on yourself, because a lot of times the things that you do, you're like, oh, crap, I did it again. And you did it in an unconscious state, like your body was already going to do it. And then it just justified the thing. So we have to be intentional.

Emma: Yeah. And on that note, one more thought is something I've worked with clients on often is creating a resource list, kind of like you said, a recipe or a menu, and literally putting it on your wall, encouraging people to take a pen and a pencil or a paper and write it out, make it pretty if you want, but it doesn't have to be even it can be a sticky note, but something that's hang it around your wherever you live, put it in your bathroom, in the kitchen, I don't care, but places to help remind your brain so you don't have to scan and try to think about, okay, I need to make a different choice here. I want to make a different choice here. What are my options? Or even writing out your nighttime ritual, right? Like if you're creating a bedtime ritual for yourself, but then writing yourself what you do while you're trying to learn it so that it's there, you don't have to think, wait, what was next? What did I want to do next? No, I'm going to just I'm just going to look and see here, this is what I've created for myself and I want to try it. And that doesn't mean it can't change. You can change it at any time, but it just helping yourself get through that step of having to think through it.

Jase: If I could pile on just one more here, and that's taking advantage of a response that you already have. So your phone's kind of the easy one there is change your background, change your wallpaper to just maybe like, black with white text on it that says, don't look at your phone, or, you know, space out for a second, something like that. Or some things that I've seen some people do, you know, you have that muscle memory of every time I open my phone, I open Instagram, or every time I open, I open TikTok or email or Slack, whatever.

Emma: And it's open before you even realize it.

Jase: Right. So on your phone, put something else in that spot. So when you go by muscle memory, you click in and you get like a quote from tinybuddha.com or, you know, like some other inspirational quote, or it just opens an image that says, Don't look at your phone. Whatever it is, use the responses you already have to your advantage to insert a different trigger, like a diversion out of that rut.

Emma: I love that, too.

Gary: Yes, I replaced the Instagram app with Kindle.

Fin: Nice.

Jase: The placement where it was.

Fin: Yeah, that's just so much on this. When I deleted social media off my phone, my first step was to delete it just off my home screens, so I had to go look for it in my list. But then it went into my recently used, so it was just as fast to like go as there as it was to go. I was like, it's not working. It's got to be off here completely. So, yeah, I don't know. I, I, maybe just to pull back in the, the G from Grapes to Gentle, I think we've all kind of said here that these aren't perfect processes. They're, you're gonna still, you're still gonna find the social media, you're still gonna find the stuff, but to, to have some grace for ourselves as we do it.

Emma: Yeah.

Fin: And, I don't know, just maybe Moving towards wrapping up here to get maybe a couple of final thoughts from everybody on this. But I think one thing around this having grace for ourselves, being gentle for ourselves, is that there isn't a right way to do any of this, that it's imperfect. And I'm hopeful that in this conversation today, if nothing else, maybe you got a little bit of a permission slip that it's okay to do this. Gary's given us permission many times. There's many times we reach out and we're like, Gary, and it's like, no, it's okay. Go play, you know, 15 minutes or whatever. And so just if you're out there struggling in this, you're definitely not alone. If you're trying to bring play in and it's hard as hell, like you're not alone there. But there's, there are a lot of us out here trying to find ways to break up the insanity. And just if, again, if nothing else, wanted you to come away with a feeling of not being alone, some tools, and yeah, maybe come join us in Florida. At relationship recess, if you really want to, like, atomic bomb your way out of it, that'd be a good jump start. But can you tell I didn't have that analogy teed up? It was developing on the fly.

Gary: I love that for you.

Jase: I was just watching a clip from the Sandra Bullock movie the Net from back in the 90s, where they talk about a cyber nuke, as if that's, like, a thing that, you know, would erase all of the computers in the world or something like that. I don't even know what it's supposed to do. But a cyber nuke. There's a theme here of weird analogies.

Fin: I love that. So maybe final thoughts from each of us to take out into our lives over the weekend and in the coming weeks. So yeah, I don't know. Gary, you want to kick us off?

Gary: Yeah, I think my main thing is if you heard one thing that's like, yes, I need to do that, Do it right now. Go do it and take a page out of all of our books that we mentioned. How can you make it easy for yourself? Whether you write it down on a Post-it, you put it on your app, but just do it right now.

Jase: I would say that my thoughtful piece of advice should be about being gentle with yourself. I know that's probably the one I struggle with the most out of all the grapes. And that the one I've always tried to come back to is to imagine what you would say to yourself if you were treating someone else like you treat yourself. You'd be like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, back off of my friend. You're being a jerk right now. Right? So like have that voice there. But then I would say as far as like practical getting stuff done is like, yeah, find a way to insert the habit you want into your life as it is instead of imagining, oh, I'm just suddenly going to change and do all this stuff differently. But like, Find a way to insert it into a pattern you already do, or something you already confront every day, so that it is easier to do. Just make it easy.

Emma: Yeah. And it takes time. It takes time to change habits, form habits, change things. And my thought here too is, I encourage everyone listening, whether this whole conversation resonated with you, or just parts of it, and parts of it did not resonate, I encourage you to continue the conversation. Talk with your friends and family and people in your life about this topic of play as resistance, or just what it means to you, we do those types of things because I think that it's important to keep spreading the word and keep these conversations going because it's so important for all of our, I would say like just health and well-being and being human and being human in the fullest form that we can.

Fin: Yeah, I love that too. And I think in talking about it with other people, it's that I think for myself, again, I know we often hear like, oh, you should find the motivation from inside and you shouldn't need other people for validation. Fuck that. I still need it. And so like for me, there's a lot of like talking to a friend and they're like, oh, I just took off a Wednesday and went and did a thing and it was totally fun. And I'm like, oh, shit, I can do that. You did that. Why couldn't I do that? Right? So I think the more we talk about this with each other, the more we start to break down the systems that tell us we can't, that we can't break these, these cycles. So yeah, I, I love that. Talk about it with people, go play with each other, find ways to make games at the grocery store with the other shoppers. Why not? You can make a game pretty much anywhere if you're open to it. And I love that. And also trying to do all of these that we talked about would definitely, to me, be overwhelming. So yeah, like I think you said, pick one, try that one today, pick a different one tomorrow, right? There's no right way to play. I think.

Emma: Yeah. And if you have a really good one or other ways that this has impacted you, reach out to any of us. We'd love to hear. We'd love to hear contact information will be in the podcast show notes, of course. But thank you both, Gary and Jase, for this lovely conversation and for all of the inspiration that you've provided me and for everyone else.

Fin: And thank you for helping us create Relationship Recess. We're super excited about it. Again, it's coming up May 1st to the 3rd. So if you want to come and get more of this, talk about it in person, see the magic and like be in the magic, come join us. We'll be outside Orlando, Florida, May 1st to the 3rd. We'd love to have you come. Links to find all the information are in the show notes. So yeah, thank you both for being here.

Jase: Yeah, thank you for having me and I look forward to seeing everybody at the event.

Gary: Agreed. It's going to be so much fun. I'm so excited. Agreed.

Fin: We will see you both there. Have a wonderful weekend.

Jase: We hope that you enjoyed this special episode from Normalizing Non-Monogamy. I would love to hear from all of you. We're going to be posting our question of the week in our Instagram stories at multiamorypodcast. And our question of the week this week is, when was the last time you gave yourself permission to play instead of just being on? I'm just really curious to hear what people have to say about that, especially if they've listened to this episode and they they know that play doesn't mean mindless play, but active, engaging play. Very curious to hear what you all think. And of course, if you want to discuss this episode with other listeners, the best place to do that is in our episode discussion channel in our Discord server, where we have a thread for each episode that comes out. So you can discuss it right there, or you can post about it in our private Facebook group. You can get access to these groups and join our community by going to multiamory.com/community And of course, you can post publicly on Instagram @multiamorypodcast.

Jase: Multiamory is created and produced by Emily Matlack, Dedeker Winston, and me, Jase Lindgren. Our production assistants are Rachel Schenewerk and Carson Collins. Our theme song is Forms I Know I Did by Josh and Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page on multiamory.com