Navigating Depression & Anxiety Doesn't Have to Be So Depressing

💭 Go deeper: We talk more about this in episode #280 of the Joy Lab Podcast

There's a common assumption embedded in most mental health messaging: that navigating depression or anxiety has to feel just as hard as the depression or anxiety itself. You pick up the heavy breadcrumbs. You do the difficult inner work. You earn your way back to feeling okay.

But what if play could be part of the path?

Not instead of therapy, or medication, or the valuable inner work. But alongside it — as a legitimate, research-backed tool. That's what this episode makes the case for, with a combination of philosophy, neuroscience, and a 35-minute adventure in a life-size cardboard clubhouse.

Philosopher Karl Popper proposed that we can divide the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are tight, ordered, reducible systems (i.e., find the broken part, fix it, done). Clouds are irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable. Mental health, Aimee Prasek, PhD, argues, is a cloud. And yet, we keep trying to treat it like a clock: one diagnosis, one medication, one solution. The complexity that makes that so hard is also, she suggests, what puts the power back in our hands. There is no single fix waiting. There are many small paths. And that's actually good news.

The episode then gets practical about what blocks us from taking those paths... specifically the fun ones. Anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure) is one of the two core criteria Henry Emmons, MD, looks for when evaluating someone for depression. If you can still enjoy things, he starts looking for other explanations. When you can't, getting even small amounts of enjoyable activity back into life (even before you feel like it) can begin to move the needle. 

Then there's metacognition, put simply: thinking about thinking. It's a genuine skill for mental health and mindfulness. But when you're playing, or want to be playing, you don't want to be thinking about thinking. Athletes call it "getting in your head." Ted Lasso calls it the yips. The way back is to practice being there, playing, present in the moment.

And then there's Aimee's story. She was carrying a week of grief and overwhelm as she was navigating the new reality of her mom's Alzheimer's progressing, financial and planning details, too much parenting. Her four-year-old begged her to eat breakfast in the life-size cardboard clubhouse. Aimee really didn't want to, but said yes anyway.

Thirty-five minutes later, they were cracking up, drawing chalk monsters, pretending to be in the jungle of the wild things. And Aimee hadn't thought once about everything that had been so heavy.

As Maurice Sendak said in a documentary about his work: "It is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It's the best means they have for taming wild things."

Adults have wild things too. And we need catharsis too. Play is essential and you are wired for it. Tune into this Joy Lab episode to learn how you can start playing more.