How play boosts your creativity and resilience | Katina Bajaj

0:00This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack.

0:27TED Health: That's technology at Capital One. Today's episode is sponsored by Kashi. Say hi to new Kashi Gut Health Granola, a straightforward, delicious way to fuel your gut made with prebiotics, fiber, and cultures. My favorite flavor, blueberry almond, has perfectly crispy clusters, delicious almonds, and bursts of whole blueberries. It's an easy fit for a daily routine, whether that's for breakfast or a snack. In a world of overwhelm, it's a straightforward, delicious choice. Try new Kashi Gut Health Granola. This episode is brought to you by Planet Visionaries, a podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative.

1:09TED Health: Planet Visionaries is the podcast celebrating the people creating practical, hopeful solutions for our planet's urgent conservation challenges. Season 6 launches this fall with bold, real solutions. Hear from Anna Rathman of the Jane Goodall Institute on protecting wildlife, Tom Pesach on his 396-day journey documenting the entire Amazon, and Lydia Oshie, a Guatemalan leader opening doors for Indigenous girls to access global education. Hosted by legendary climber and advocate Alex Honnold, each episode goes beyond the headlines to show what's actually working and who's making it happen. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries.

1:52TED Health: Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

1:58TED Health: This is TED Health, a podcast from TED. I'm Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter. I'm a board-certified practicing internal medicine physician, and I'm your host for today's show. Earlier this week, I was putting away my takeout leftovers, and I caught myself looking at the container in my hand. It was plastic, and I had a thought that I've had before. Should I be using glass instead? It was a very small issue in that moment, but it opened up a much bigger question that I'm hearing a lot more often now. How worried should we be about microplastics? This is what led me to this latest installment of What Caught My Attention, my recurring segment all about the latest news from the world of health that stops me in my tracks.

2:42TED Health: With each eye-catching story, I'm doing a deep dive into the evidence, how it's reported, and most importantly, what this means for real people trying to live healthier lives. You probably already guessed today's big topic, microplastics. Then after the segment, stay tuned for a fascinating TED Talk about the power of play. That's your TED Health lineup for this week.

3:07TED Health: Microplastics. They've become almost impossible to avoid, and so has the conversation surrounding them. We hear that microplastics are in our drinking water, food, air, oceans, our blood, lungs, and even the plaques in our arteries. There was also that unforgettable viral claim that each of us eats about a credit card's worth of plastic every week. And just to clear this up, that last one is not supported and came from calculations that relied on some shaky assumptions about the size and mass of particles. More careful analyses suggest typical ingestion is far, far lower. But that's what led me to this week's What Caught My Attention segment.

3:49TED Health: I was struck by how widely that original claim traveled, and how quietly the correction seemed to follow. And I get why. The line, you're eating a credit card every week, is vivid. And the concept that scientists are still trying to measure a very complicated exposure accurately is less memorable. Still, the broader concern is real. Microplastics are, in fact, widespread. Researchers are finding them in places inside the body where we would not expect or likely want foreign particles to be. The difficult part is figuring out what their presence actually means for our health. A 2024 study in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at people undergoing surgery for significant carotid artery disease, which is a buildup of plaque that narrows the arteries carrying blood to the brain.

4:42TED Health: Researchers analyzed plaque removed from their arteries and detected microplastics or nanoplastics in many of the samples. Over roughly three years of follow-up, the people whose plaques contained these particles had a higher rate of heart attack, stroke, or death. That's the kind of result that deserves attention. But it also needs context. This study was observational, the kind where researchers observe what happens without assigning people to an exposure or treatment. So if researchers find that people with microplastics in an arterial plaque have more heart attacks, they can say the two are associated.

5:20TED Health: But they cannot prove that microplastics cause the heart attacks because other factors may be involved. An unhealthy plaque might be more likely to collect particles. Other exposures could travel alongside plastic exposure. There have also been questions about how easily samples can become contaminated and how reliably some lab techniques distinguish plastic from biological material. So when someone asks me, are microplastics causing heart disease? The most accurate answer right now is, we really don't know. Other research gives us reasons to keep looking. A systematic review published in 2024 concluded that microplastic exposure is suspected to harm aspects of reproductive, digestive, and respiratory health.

6:07TED Health: Some of the stronger signals involved sperm quality and immune system effects. But much of the evidence still comes from animal studies. And animal experiments often use doses or particle types that don't match everyday human exposure. The World Health Organization has made a similar point. Even though we're talking about microplastics, size still matters. Dose matters. The route into the body matters. A particle that passes through the gut is different from a much smaller particle that may be able to enter our tissues or bloodstream. We're still learning how often that happens and what happens next when it does.

6:46TED Health: This is one of those areas where medicine asks us to hold two thoughts at once. There's enough evidence to take the question seriously. There's not enough evidence to translate it into a precise personal risk. For me, that means choosing a few low-effort precautions without turning daily life into a contamination exercise. I don't heat food in plastic when I can avoid it. For me, using glass or ceramic is easy enough. Filtering drinking water may reduce some exposure. eating more fresh or minimally processed foods, has plenty of benefits beyond anything involving plastic. And then I return to the health risks we understand much better.

7:27TED Health: Smoking, blood pressure, cholesterol, exercise, sleep. Those deserve far more of our attention than trying to eliminate every microscopic particle from our environment, which is probably impossible anyway. This microplastics conversation really illuminates how uncomfortable uncertainty can make us. We tend to want the clean answer. Safe or dangerous? Worry or don't worry? Change everything or change nothing? Science usually gives us something messier. We collect clues, we improve the measurements, we revise what we thought we knew. Sometimes a frightening headline becomes less frightening. Sometimes an early concern grows more important as better evidence becomes available.

8:12TED Health: For now, microplastics seem to sit somewhere in that unresolved middle. So I'd suggest we treat microplastics like one of the many long-term exposures worth some reasonable precautions. It's less useful to worry about the theoretical credit cards in our bloodstreams than the ones paying for things that we know move the needle on our health.

8:38TED Health: to wrap up today's episode we're sharing a talk about something many of us may not spend enough time thinking about play katina bajaj has spent years studying creativity and she became interested in how many adults gradually remove the practice of play from their lives and she's not talking about play as another hobby to master, to schedule, or perform well. She describes it as doing something because you want to, without knowing exactly where it will lead. I love that definition because it's actually much harder than it sounds, just to go with the flow without any tangible outcome besides the reward of the journey itself.

9:19TED Health: Katina argues that when adults lose opportunities for that kind of open-ended experience, we may also lose some of our flexibility, imagination, and capacity to adapt. Her work asks us to notice how often we've replaced curiosity with efficiency, even in the parts of life that are supposed to feel free. Katina's talk made me think differently about daydreaming, doodling, wandering attention, and all the little moments we tend to label unproductive. Maybe some of them are doing far more for us than we realize.

9:56TED Health: And now, Katina Bajaj at Play at TED in 2026.

10:23I'd wait. And I'd wait. And I'd wait until something felt worthy enough, perfect enough to make. That moment barely ever came. Ever since I was a kid, play felt like something that I had to earn. And when I finally did do it, I took it seriously. My favorite game growing up was emergency room doctor. I'd forced my younger brother to scrub in, robes on, beanie babies fully prepped, and I was head surgeon, of course, so there was no room for mistakes in my OR. Most people don't become play skeptics until they're adults, but for me, even at eight, I was questioning the point of it. So I ended up doing what any reasonable skeptic would do, and I became a scientist.

11:16I got my master's in clinical psychology and spent almost the last decade studying the science of creativity. And what I discovered surprised me because creativity isn't just a talent. It is a core part of all of our well-being, a pillar that I came to establish and become a fierce advocate for called creative health. And one of the best strategies that we have to strengthen our creative health is exactly what I dismissed as a kid. Play. That's because when we play, especially as adults, we unlock this unique type of flourishing. We have deeper fulfillment and stronger resilience and even more original ideas.

11:57But the type of play that I'm talking about is probably not what we're all imagining. It's not just being silly or childlike, or even starting up a brand new hobby. We've reduced play to be this cherry on top of an already good life, but from a scientific perspective, it is much more fundamental than that. Play is what happens anytime we choose to do something without knowing exactly where it's going to end up. There are no instructions we need to follow or outcomes we need to achieve, just two elements, intrinsic motivation and the freedom not to know the answer in advance. The problem is we've come to treat that type of play as worse than optional.

12:40It's something that we avoid and even punish, so much so that upwards of 70 % of adults around the world today have stopped doing it. I first noticed this pattern as I was interviewing thousands of people about their current relationship with play, and I kept hearing the same thing over and over. They told me they didn't have the time or the talent or the right tools to do it anymore. And when they finally did, it wasn't play. It looked a lot like my emergency room, something that was scheduled and optimized with nothing left to chance. I know this might not seem like a big deal, like we're just having less fun, but it's deeper than that.

13:21We are living through a play deprivation crisis. We've systematically removed everything that makes play what it is, the spontaneity, the freedom, the wonder, from all parts of adult life and replaced it with efficiency and achievement. And in doing so, we're losing the very survival skills that we need the most right now, things like our capacity to adapt and imagine and even feel alive. Play deprivation is tricky, though, because at first we barely notice it's happening. We just feel endlessly busy. But over time, without play, stress can compound and then burnout can become chronic. And then we walk around as playlist adults, which ultimately creates a playlist society, one where our institutions can grow rigid and lonely and polarized.

14:11But we can change this, though. Not even just for ourselves, but for future generations, too. Because play isn't something we age out of. It is a lifelong trait, which means no matter how invisible it might feel, we can always restore it. And how we go about doing that is much simpler and more expansive than you'd think. At my company, Daydreamers, one of the things we got extremely curious to figure out was finding the optimal way to play. Are you noticing a trend about me yet? We studied all kinds of people, executives, postal workers, stay-at-home parents from 18 to 85. And we looked at how they played, not in a lab, but in the texture of their daily lives.

14:55And as we analyzed the millions of minutes of creative behaviors that we collected through pictures and psychologically validated assessments, we found the opposite of my hypothesis. Play wasn't some list of actions we could add to our calendar. It was an approach. The people who became creatively healthy were doing something differently. They were playing all the time in all these parts of life, thinking playfully, expressing themselves playfully, even noticing when it happened around them. And as they began to embody it, their lives transformed. So while I wish I could stand here and give us one play prescription to follow, that would be the antithesis of what it is.

15:37What I can do, though, is paint a picture of what a playful life could look like, because we don't need more stuff. We just need to start injecting it back into how we already live. And the three places to start are during work, before sleep, and in public. Let's start at work because most of us get stuck in this linear task-oriented thinking, churning through to-dos and in back-to-back meetings. But neuroscientists have found that the spontaneous imaginative thinking that's underneath creative play lives in a different part of our brain called the default mode network. And that gets activated when we do things we don't normally consider productive.

16:19Playful people mind wander. They daydream. We often call that laziness, but underneath the surface, our creative brain is actually hard at work, connecting all these disparate ideas that don't make sense yet. Even Einstein swore by this. He credited his most innovative ideas not to doing math behind a desk, but to thought experiments. And right now, protecting our nonlinear thinking matters more than ever. And that doesn't happen through doing cringy icebreakers. So next time you see Mark staring off into the distance during a meeting, or even you want to look away from your inbox, celebrate it because your thinking is starting to play.

17:00Okay, that sounds doable, right? But what happens when we get home from work? Well, most of us feel exhausted, so we reach for ease. We scroll, order food at the click of a button. We want our lives to be frictionless. But our play and our lives need friction. There's actually a type of positive stress called eustress that comes about when we we do things that require effort from us. That's why physically playing or making things with our bodies actually expands our energy and even our perception of time. But we've come to engineer the friction out of that too, though. We think playing at home is perfectly completing a page of that adult coloring book or following a YouTube tutorial to a tee.

17:44Real play, though, is freer than that, which can feel uncomfortable at first. It's experimenting with a bunch of different ingredients without a recipe or doodling in the margins of your notebook. It can be that simple. That's actually exactly what I was doing when I had my own creative breakthrough. Normally, I'd get home from work and try to relax, or if I was feeling extra adventurous, I'd take out my notebook and try to write something profound, neither of which are very playful. But one night while I was writing, my pen moved to the left. And then it made a circle. And then a bunch of random shapes and patterns started to flow.

18:23And while I did feel uncomfortable, I was also incredibly liberated. And when I came back to reality and tried to make sense of it, I thought of my eight-year-old self sitting on the floor of her room, waiting for something worthy to make. And I realized in that moment that she, like so many of us, got it backwards because we don't need to wait for play to feel good to do it. Doing it in the face of resistance and discomfort is how we begin. But we can't just play alone at our desks or in our rooms. We need to play in public, too. The last and most insidious sign of play deprivation is cultural.

19:05It's when we don't just deprioritize it ourselves, but we actively punish it in the world, silencing music in our parks or calling leisure time lazy. Almost 100 years ago, philosopher Johann Huizinga warned us about this, suggesting that when a culture loses play, it can become brittle and polarized, unable to cope with change. I know that might seem familiar and maybe even scary, but know that play is inherently contagious. Research actually shows that just being in proximity to people doing it can motivate us to do it too. So we don't always need to be the main character. We can just amplify it when we see it.

19:46I'm sure you've noticed this happen before when a crowd begins to form around a musician, but most of us end up racing past. So next time, I want you to take out your headphones and listen for a moment. Maybe be the first to laugh or clap or join in because when we make play visible, it allows our communities to come alive too. I know that even these small moments of play can feel like an act of rebellion in a world that's convinced us doing it as adults is unnecessary. And oftentimes they are. But it wasn't always this way. Since the beginning of our species, we have been making these beautiful, weird, funny, interesting things for no bigger purpose at all.

20:33Anthropologist Ellen Disanayake actually has a name for this capacity. She calls it making special. In her work studying early human societies, she also kept noticing an interesting pattern. Every culture, without having spoken to one another first, kept adding these playful touches to the most ordinary aspects of their lives. They decorated their tools with intricacy. They made clothes and filled them with beads and shells. They danced and told stories and appreciated beauty for no functional or productive reason. Just because. So this exact capacity to play, to make special, isn't just inside of you.

21:17It's wired into our entire species. It's always how we've stayed human, how we've bonded and adapted and even made meaning in life's most difficult moments. And I see that as our responsibility to keep that part of ourselves alive. So we need to play again in any form, in every part of life. Not necessarily because it will lead us somewhere better, but because we are human and humans play. Thank you.

21:58TED Health: That was Katina Bajaj at Play at TED in 2026. And that's it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. TED Health is a podcast from TED, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about this episode. Send me a message on Instagram, at ShoshanaMD. This episode was produced by me, Shoshana Ungerleiter, and Jess Shane. Edited by Alejandra Salazar and fact-checked by Vanessa Garcia-Woodworth. Special thanks to Maria Lages, Farrah DeGrange, Daniela Balarezo, Constanza Gallardo, Tansika Sangmarniwang, and Roxanne Heilash.

22:39TED Health: Today's episode is sponsored by Kashi. Say hi to new Kashi Gut Health Granola, a straightforward, delicious way to fuel your gut, made with prebiotics, fiber, and cultures. My favorite flavor, blueberry almond, has perfectly crispy clusters, delicious almonds, and bursts of whole blueberries. It's an easy fit for a daily routine, whether that's for breakfast or a snack. In a world of overwhelm, it's a straightforward, delicious choice. Try new Kashi Gut Health Granola.

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