What gets you through a tough shift? If the answer is more caffeine, fewer calls, a good partner, or leadership staying off your back, you may not be wrong, but you also may be missing something as fun as it is useful: playfulness.

When play disappears from a person’s life, what tends to move in is rigidity, cynicism, and burnout. Eventually, that absence can leave room for something even darker.

Psychiatrist Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, wasn’t studying kids on playgrounds when he discovered the power of play. He was studying a homicide investigation. As part of the commission that investigated the 1966 University of Texas Tower mass shooting, Brown found a pattern running through the childhoods of the convicted murderers he later studied: an absence of play.¹ That finding is the foundation upon which decades of play research has been built, and why it’s worth bringing to work, especially when that work is something as serious as law enforcement.

What is Playfulness?

Playfulness is a way of being; the ability to take a lighthearted, interactive, curious approach when the situation permits. Playfulness emphasizes curiosity, joy, adaptability, a relaxation of your importance, and, perhaps, a bit of appropriate, well-timed humor.²

You might be thinking playfulness belongs only in some work environments, like at LEGO or Google, where it’s literally built into the culture. Certainly not in law enforcement. But done well, intentionally, where you know your audience and the context, a bit of playfulness might be exactly what you (and those around you) need.

All mammals are playful. Brown’s own favorite piece of evidence is the story of a wild, hungry polar bear that approached a tethered sled dog with a predatory stare.¹ Instead of bracing, the husky dropped into a play bow. The bear play-bowed back. For several minutes, a 1,200-pound predator and its potential meal just played, proof, Brown argues, that the drive to play can override even a survival instinct. If you think about this in the context of policing and arriving at the scene of a tense-but-not-threatening situation, playfulness could be your next tool for getting folks to lighten up a bit.

If you’re thinking you’re just not built to be playful, you’re actually fighting nature. It’s only humans who tend to lose this as we age and trade it in for the armor of self-protection. You might just be out of practice.

 

What Playful Practice Looks Like

In 2019, in an observation conducted by Dr. Joy VerPlanck on a MILO simulator, an officer training to engage with a distressed citizen showed a creative way to shift his approach with a little levity. He was struggling to make a productive connection when he noticed the citizen about to throw their Detroit Pistons hat on the ground. Thinking quickly, the officer said, “Hey, friend, don’t throw that Pistons hat. They’re doing great this year. Playoff bound!” In a fast read of the moment, he decided a playful response was appropriate. The levity helped him reconnect with someone who needed support, and it gave the instructor a clear look at this officer’s ability to adapt and stay cognitively flexible under pressure.

Playfulness in adults can show up in many different ways. For some, it’s humor; for others, it’s organizing fun events or building adventure into daily life. Perhaps you and your partner got some bad news — what would turning on your favorite song do at that moment?

 

What You Need, When You Need It

In a profession sadly filled with heartbreaking calls, the loss of a fellow officer or beloved community member, or various moments of disappointment, play might just be the best evidence-based tool you’ve got. You might think of play as the opposite of seriousness, but it’s not. Play is the opposite of sadness.¹ You are allowed, even encouraged, to not be sad at work.

Here are some ways to safely bring play into training, the field, and the way we lead.

In training: Training environments are built for pressure, which of course has its purpose. But bringing playfulness into training allows the prefrontal cortex to explore different contingencies, making us better at learning new skills.³ When we keep training light, we keep it at the low-stakes setting it needs to be for optimal knowledge transfer and development.

➡ ️Example—spin the wheel of training. Create a reward wheel where officers get one spin. They can use it at the beginning, middle, or end of training, wherever a little play is most needed. Items on the wheel could include things like zombie apocalypse training, instructor push-ups, or a YouTube compilation of people falling.

Caution—Feel free to add items to the wheel such as a dance-off, but make sure participants have an option to spin again if they don’t feel comfortable. A key part of playfulness is that it supports and encourages social safety; if it feels forced or cringy, it can backfire.

In the Field: Play makes sustained vigilance possible. Officers who can access playfulness on shift recover faster between high-stress calls, because they haven’t spent every minute of downtime bracing for the next one.

➡ Example—Videos of officers shooting hoops with kids on a block or joining a TikTok dance during a slow afternoon tend to rack up millions of views. Those clips resonate because they show something people rarely get to see: an officer who is relaxed, present, and enjoying the people around them. Play is one of the few things that reads as authentic on camera, because it’s hard to fake.

Caution—Social media can be a great way of engaging with the community, but it can also draw fire with negative comments. If the post was genuinely harmless, you can just let those go.

In Leadership: Being the face for the annual pie-throwing contest, the clown for the kids, and the dunkee in the soaking booth is great, but that’s only once a year. Find ways to bring levity into every opportunity and interaction you can. You set the tone. And if you’re thinking being the leader means you can’t be playful, think again. A new study shows that being authentically playful doesn’t undermine your performance; it solidifies your credibility and leadership precisely because you choose to do it in a serious environment.⁴ “A true leader is someone who can maintain their playful nature even in a competitive climate.”

➡ Example—Lean into your mistake with levity. Perhaps you led your team in the complete wrong direction for a training mission. You missed your pick-up, and it was getting late. Your response: “Alright, I have officially been demoted from ‘navigator’ to ‘guy who owns a compass and doesn’t know how to use it.’ We took the scenic route tonight, folks—free bonus land-nav training, no extra charge. Whoever spots our actual turn first gets bragging rights and my coffee tomorrow. Let’s go.”

Caution— This only works because the joke lands on you, not on the map, the weather, or a teammate. Light self-deprecating humor (not focused on your core job credibility) defuses a mistake, but if pointed at someone else—a teammate’s screwup, their appearance, their background—it doesn’t defuse anything. It just adds a target.

 

But Seriously…

None of this asks officers to take the job less seriously, and that’s because seriousness and play aren’t in competition. In fact, it might be the very thing that keeps seriousness sustainable. Play is what turns frustration back into something closer to fun.

For a profession that runs on high alert, play is a nervous system reset. It signals safety to a brain that has spent the shift scanning for threat. It rebuilds the flexibility that stress wears down. And it does this without requiring a day off, a wellness retreat, or a budget item. It simply requires permission to be part of your day.

 

A version of this article was published in American Police Beat. 

VerPlanck, J., & Kates, K. (2026, October 12). Permission to play: A case for levity on the job. American Police Beat. https://apbweb.com/2026/10/permission-to-play/

References

1 Brown, S., & Vaughan, C. (2009). Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul. Penguin.

2 Kates, K. (2026). www.kelseykates.com

3 Huberman, A. (2026, January 29). Essentials: Using play to rewire & improve your brain [Podcast episode]. Huberman Lab.

4 Guo, Liu, Proyer, Jia & Wang, 2025, Scientific Reports

Dr. Joy VerPlanck is a learning and development consultant serving organizations of all sizes in the public and private sectors. She is a former military police officer and current chair of the cognitive advisory board at MILO. Joy holds a doctorate in educational technology, a master of science in organizational leadership and training, and a certificate in the foundations of neuroleadership.

Kelsey Kates is a speaker, facilitator, and learning designer who helps organizations rebuild trust, curiosity, and psychological safety into how people work. She spent over a decade in leadership and program roles at Google before shifting her focus to human-centered performance across government agencies, nonprofits, small businesses, and multinationals. Kelsey holds a B.S. from the University of Denver, a Master’s from Northwestern, an Executive Certificate in Neuroscience from MIT, and is a Certified Executive Coach and LEGO® Serious Play® Facilitator.