Do You Have Fun Often Enough? 4 Ways to Have More Fun!

Do you have fun every day?

Sometimes our lives are full of fun things. Big events, nice trips, and evenings with friends and family seem to come in waves. The summer can be full of days at the lake, camping trips, and BBQs.

But at other times it seems like we just don’t have that much fun. We work and do errands and clean the house and catch up on all the other commitments of life.

Have you noticed a difference between the times you are having fun often and the times when “fun” seems like a foreign part of your vocabulary?

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Do you have fun often enough? Are you looking for ways to create fun in your every day life? What are the benefits of fun?

Let’s talk about the wisdom I gleaned from a great book called The Fun Habit by Mike Rucky PhD and maybe you will decide to read it too!

Do You Have Fun or Does it Seem “Pointless”?

Remember when you were a kid? Fun was your main focus in life! You looked for ways to create fun in every part of your life even when you were supposed to be doing boring stuff like homework!

But as you grew up you probably let fun fall by the wayside a little bit or maybe a lot.

Why is that?

Well, you may view fun things as a waste of time. They aren’t productive and you have more important things to do.You may also have forgotten what you love to do, what is fun to you.

Or you may want to have fun but delegate it to the big trips and special events that only roll around once in a while.

How do you feel about making time for fun? Do you feel like fun is an important part of your life or something that is pointless and pushed to the edges of your busy schedule?

What are the Benefits of Fun?

If you have pushed fun out of your daily life you may be missing out. There are actually a lot of benefits of having fun and having a mind that looks for fun.

According to studies referenced by the book The Fun Habit oxytocin is an important feel-good hormone that may play are larger role in happiness than dopamine.

Where do we get oxytocin?

Our brain produces it the most when we are engaging in positive experiences that connect us with other people! Most of the positive experiences with other people I can think of are forms of fun!

Another study found that when people have a lot of oxytocin in their system they have better self control and make better choices instead of giving into instant gratification.

That means that when we refuse ourselves fun because we are “too resposible” we actually set up ourselves up to make less responsible decisions! Isn’t that crazy?

Also having all that oxytocin from having more fun has been proven to make us more empathetic and that makes us feel closer to our friends and family.

There are so many other benefits of having fun! Making fun a regular part of our life helps our brains be more creative. When we can see little pockets of fun in ordinary tasks it can also make us more resilient when bad things happen.

Overall, having fun is an important part of being human and we need to have fun just as much as we need to work, sleep, and eat. So stop feeling responsible for pushing it out of your life and start prioritizing fun!

What Is Fun?

So what exactly is fun? I mean, we know what kinds of things are fun but what is fun itself?

In his book The Fun Habit, Mike Rucker says this:

“Happiness is a state of mind, but fun is something you can do.”

Mike Rucker

That simple statement helps us see that fun is biased towards action and immediate. It is in the moment. Fun is an experience that is pleasurable and satisfying.

Fun is also something we do with other people. When you have fun with others it transports your thinking away from yourself and towards the people and the experience you are having.

“It’s almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you’re just howling with laughter.”

John Cleese

That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun alone. You can have fun any time you are doing something you really enjoy.

Just remember, it’s only fun if you think it is. No one can force you to think something is fun if you don’t like it. Fun is in the eye of the beholder! So think about what you find fun and write some of those things down.

How Can You Have Fun More Often?

If fun is that beneficial and you need to make a priority to DO something fun regularly how will you make the time for it? How do you have fun every day if you are super busy?

First of all, lower your expectations. Am I saying you have to live for the weekend, take big trips, and spend a lot of money on entertainment? Do you have fun only when you do these big things/

Not necessarily. Though all those things are nice if you are going to have fun more often you are going to have to look for little ways to have fun more regularly.

Do you have fun often enough? If you feel like the answer is no it might lie in what you view as fun and what you haven’t tried yet.

For example, if the things you view as fun always take a full day or weekend, are more than an hour away from where you live, or are expensive, you probably don’t have fun enough because life gets in the way.

One key to having fun is looking for the types of fun you can have closer to home. Maybe there are opportunities for fun in your back yard that you have overlooked. Think about it as a summer bucket list for adults to look for those things!

The Play Model

Another way to find more time for fun is to try the “Play Model” that is recommended in The Fun Habit. Look at how you spend your time and split up the activities into these 4 categories:

1: Pleasing activities are things you do that you enjoy and that are very easy to do such as meeting a friend for coffee, enjoying your favorite hobby, playing with your kids, and so forth. These little things add happiness to your everyday life.

2: Living activities are things that are fun but more challenging to do. These activities include mastering a new skill, taking on a challenge, or hiking and similar adventures. These things are very rewarding but they take a little more time and energy.

3: Agonizing activities are all the things we have to do even though they aren’t fun. That may include work, cleaning, errands, and taking care of other responsibilities. It’s true these aren’t all agonizing but they aren’t exactly fun and that’s the word that fits into the acronym for PLAY.

4: Yielding activities are things we do to pass time with little to no effort such as mindlessly scrolling social media and watching TV. These things are likely using up a lot of time you could be spending on truly fun activities.

Have Fun More Often By Hacking Your Schedule

Now look at your life and identify how much time you are spending on yielding activities.

Check your phone for your average daily and weekly screen time. Did you know that the average adult in America spends around 3 hours and 43 minutes on their phones every single day? That’s a lot of time!

Could you spend some of that time doing your favorite hobby or learning something new that you have always wanted to try? In other words could you transfer some of your yielding time to pleasurable and living activities?

Now look at that agonizing time? Is there any way you could work smarter not harder? Maybe you could hire someone to clean your house or ask for some family teamwork with the chores. Or perhaps you could do some meal planning to reduce trips to the store and cut down on cooking time. Are there systems you can create to make your chores less time consuming? Could you try a daily cleaning schedule instead of spending half your weekend cleaning?

When you really look at it you might be surprised how much time you can take away from “agonizing” activities just by thinking out a plan for them. Or at the very least you could find ways to make those agonizing activities more fun.

For example, I listen to books while I work cleaning houses and also while I fold my laundry. That turns “agonizing” activities into highly pleasurable “me time”.

According to some studies highlighted in The Fun Habit we should be shooting for at least 2 hours of leisure time fun a day. Considering we are wasting 4 hours on our phones that should be easier to find than we think!

How Can Fun Help You at Work?

Do you have fun often enough?

The first thing that may spring to mind when asked that question is this: “I work too much.”

Well, you are probably right. You may be spending a bit too much time at work and you should consider cutting back and setting boundaries. Or you may have a job that you don’t at all enjoy. But what if you could add a little more fun to your work? Is that even possible?

Absolutely! The key is to approach and execute your work tasks as if they were play. It’s called job hacking.

First of all you can enjoy your breaks more. Instead of simply pausing from your work look at breaks as a way to reclaim your autonomy or ability to do as you please. This may include taking a walk, talking to a friend on the phone, or reading a little bit. The main this is to do what you like on your break instead of falling into a rut. That will help you feel that work is actually a bit more fun.

Another way to make work a bit more fun is to make our work space our own. When we are in a space designed by others we feel controlled by them and that stresses us out. Instead you need to make your workspace a little more calming and comfortable. This will help your mind relax. You will then feel that you can be creative with the way you work and the solutions you come up with.

Lastly take the pressure off. Look at the different ideas you have as possibilities you can play around with until you see what works best instead of being too afraid to make mistakes.

There are many other ways to make work a bit for fun including matching your work methods to your personality, pairing easy tasks with hard tasks to keep the day fresh, creating a club among coworkers around a common interest, and focusing on the meaning your job has for society and why it matters to you.

Work is obviously not the most fun thing we do but it doesn’t have to be agonizing either. Think about your job and see how you can make it more pleasurable and fun with small adjustments and a change of viewpoint!

Do You Have Fun & Help Others?

Finally, should all your time be spent working and then playing with no concern for family, friends, or the world at large?

Of course not. Selfishness never leads to happiness and spending all your free time on your own interests will lack satisfaction after awhile.

While it is true that “there is more happiness in giving than in receiving” doing a bunch of work on the weekend often sounds like the absolute last thing we want to do.

So how can we make volunteering and helping others more fun?

Remember the key ingredients of having fun. It needs to be action oriented, involve positive interactions with people and give you some autonomy or freedom to decide HOW you will do it.

So any time you want to help someone or even do something bigger that benefits the world on a grander scale you need to first figure out what you are going to do, invite some friends, and give everyone the choice of how much they want to contribute to the cause in time, effort, or money.

When you focus on how you can help other people but you make it a fun experience you can accomplish a lot! People will be much more excited to help when the way they help is fun and more good will be accomplished than could ever be brought about by pressure.

Whether it is a fundraiser with a concert, a volunteer work with a snack break, or helping your buddy move with some pizza adding fun is the key to making serving others a success!

Learn How to Have Fun Every Day!

So here is the question again. Do you have enough fun?

Maybe not. Maybe you need to make fun a part of every day life like you did as a child.

Do you have fun at work or when helping others? Do you value the benefits of having fun enough to make time for it? How do you have fun even when you are stressed out? Do you see fun in the small moments like when you read a story to your child or tell a joke to your friend in the hospital?

Life is stressful enough! It might be time to learn how to have fun!

What are some ways you add fun to your happy simple life? Please let me know by commenting below!