Distributed Play

My daughter’s school has now closed for an indeterminate period from the afternoon of Friday 20th of March. Her circle of friends have been busy eversince reaffirming their connection via text groups and Whatsapp. They have even found ways of playing by each singing one line of I want it that way by the Backstreet Boys. I found that very amusing but also brilliant as they were busy building their network for the times ahead.

I have been looking into ways we can help distributed teams build that social capital, resilience and care for their mental and physical health by using play and laughter. The idea is to use a facilitated Zoom call to play some of the games we use in Comedy Improv. The advantages of this are numerous and we have talked about many of them before: How improv can improve your business.

Below the following video we will look at the benefits to your team and individuals from play and laughter that will help build resilience and mental strength over the immediate future.

Get in touch to book in a distributed gameplay session online for your team.

We often use our Applied Improv workshops to introduce:

• Diversity in thinking
• Creative collaboration
• Entering Flow states

But the advantages don’t just stop at the team level, they are also felt on the individual level. By using play and provoking laughter there are a number of benefits that are huge advantages to us during this pandemic.

Dr Lee S Berk has studied laughter and the effects it has on our physical and mental health for a long time and finds that laughter can help reduce the three detrimental stress hormones Cortisol, Epinephrine and Dopac that can be detrimental to the immune system. This helps relieve some of the anxiety that is likely to build when we are forced into change like being a distributed team.

Other effects are also present and include a boost to the immune system by the boosting of beta-endorphins which help elevate our moods and human growth hormone (HGH) which optimises the immune system.

Now you have the background on the benefits get in touch to book some time with us to help your team or teams during this period when we are all banished to our bedrooms, kitchen table or garden shed.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash