My husband and I like to play games. Board games in particular, but most any game will do. One day we walked around downtown Portland, on a hunt for objects that started with each letter of the alphabet. (The letter X made this a particularly long walk).

This ability to play serves us well, especially when life gets stressful. It reminds us that even in serious times there’s still some room for levity. I also believe that the ability to play helps us overcome adversity in ways that few other things can.

During childhood, most of us are experts at play. It’s hardwired in us to use our imagination as we figure out the world around us and come up with strategies for dealing with it. But somewhere during adolescence, we give up “childish” ways in favor of independence and maturity. Our strategies solidify, and our (apparent) need to experiment decreases. This is all well and good except for the fact that, once established as adults, we tend to forget all the other benefits that play affords us:

• A way to release tension, stress, and anxiety
• An avenue for social connection
• Access to the healthful perks of smiles and laughter
• Ways to look at our problems in a new light
• Opportunities for creative, innovative solutions.

Fortunately, lots of grown-ups still know how to play. Competitive sports, poker night, video games, even stock day-trading can all be forms of play. These activities certainly can help us relieve stress, improve our social life, and provide us with humor (all but the day-trading, I expect).

However, the kind of play I’m advocating taps into our childlike sense of creativity and wonder. It fuels our imagination and stretches our mind to see our world in a fresh way. It’s this kind of play that helps us approach problems differently and come up with creative solutions.

If you have kids, you’re probably a lot closer to this kind of play, especially when you get down on your hands and knees and become a dragon, or get fingerpaint under your nails.

But even if you don’t have kids (or your kids have reached that “I’m too old to play” age themselves), there’s immense benefit in reawakening the kid in you. Regardless of your current challenge, taking time to play can make a world of difference.

Here are some ideas for play you might not have considered lately, if ever:

• Organize a scavenger hunt with neighborhood kids (or adults!).
• Play Frisbee in a nearby field, or find a Frisbee golf course if you’re goal-oriented.
• Dust off your Rubik’s cube. Work it awhile then remember why it collected dust in the first place.
• Go to a thrift or vintage store and rescue one of the games or toys you played with as a child. Play with it again.
• Play badminton or croquet (badly) with friends.
• Browse online for a weird toy or gizmo. Some favorite sites include www.ehobbies.com, www.thinkertoys.com, and www.scientificsonline.com.
• Write a limerick or haiku about a current challenge you’re having.
• Even better, take a favorite song and personalize the lyrics. Sing it to yourself or to very trusted friends.
• Buy jacks. Play with them.
• If you’re a crossword puzzle addict, buy a word puzzle book and try something completely different.
• Get a paint-by-number set. Ignore all the color codes.
• If you built model trains/planes/cars as a kid, go get one. Re-experience paint and glue and racing stripe decals.
• Ask your kid to make up a game, then play it with them. Then it’s your turn to make one up.

Play is personal and highly subjective, but the value and rewards are universal. By tapping into the very best part of who we were as children, we can reclaim the very best part of who we are now.

So, how will you go out and play today?

If you ask the average person today if they have balance in their life you’re likely to get a snort, a laugh, or a blank stare. Balance? Ha! That’s because few of us ever experience what balance feels like, or recognize the profound effect balance (or lack of it) has on our health, productivity, and overall happiness.

Balance means different things to different people, but lack of it has some universal effects. Think about when your car tires get out of alignment: certain areas wear faster than others, and the tires become weak, threadbare, and sometimes blow out. When our lives get out of alignment, we get stressed, angry, sick, and despondent. Like your tires, extreme lack of balance also ends in blowout: job burnout, soured relationships, estranged children, health crises.

So how do you fit one more task (finding balance) into an already bloated schedule? Well, regaining balance is both very easy and very hard. Easy in that it requires nothing more than asking yourself where things are out of alignment, and listening to the answer. Deep inside, you already know where things are out of balance. The hard part is accepting the answer and taking action on it. We can get addicted to the high-speed wobble, or feel like we’ll somehow let the world down if we don’t keep up the frantic pace. The reality is, regaining balance leads to more time, energy, vitality, and enthusiasm. With all that, you won’t let anyone down!

Here are a few ways to inch your way back into balance:

Know your priorities. And honor them. List your values in order of highest priority, then live your life accordingly. If you say your top values are family, health, and community, staying late at the office every night, eating fast food, and driving like a maniac will quickly put you out of balance with your values.

Be state aware. Check in with your physical, mental, and emotional state regularly. Pain or discomfort in any area indicates that something is out of balance.

“Yes” also means “No.” When you say “yes” to one thing, recognize what you’re also saying “no” to. Volunteering on yet another committee means less time to work on your house, play with your children, or read a novel in your hammock. Go back to your priorities to confirm where your “yes-es” should cluster.

Schedule downtime, every day. I know this sounds like asking the impossible. However, scheduling just 30-45 minutes of quiet, nourishing, YOU time daily will more than make up for itself in renewed energy for tackling everyone else’s needs the rest of the day.

Ask for help. It’s all the rage to be superhuman these days, juggling career, family, hobbies, and social networks single-handedly. It’s also unrealistic and unnecessary. Not only does asking for help move you back into balance, you’ll forge stronger bonds with loved ones as you allow them to see your human side!

Ride the wave. Sometimes life just hits you sideways, despite every effort to maintain balance. When that happens, think of yourself riding a wave. Relax, take a few deep breaths, and imagine floating on top of the wave as it passes, instead of getting sucked under it. Because it will pass. It always does.

Staying in alignment requires both awareness and practice. But if you pay attention to balance, you’ll find that:

1. You have a clearer sense of the real priorities in your life.
2. You give yourself permission to let go of the things that don’t serve you.
3. You have more time and energy to do the things you want to do.
4. You’re more available for everyone and everything around you.
5. You have more fun!

So, what’s your first step for getting back into balance?

As we move my elderly father 1,000 miles closer to us, the concept of “worry” has been on my mind a lot lately. The dictionary defines worry as “feeling uneasy or concerned about something; to be troubled.” Worry can also be “to pull or tear at something with or as if with the teeth” (like a dog worrying a bone). That’s a fitting analogy for the scenarios we repeatedlygnaw on with our minds.

So, why do we worry? I believe there are several reasons:

1. We simulate negative situations to “practice” how we will handle them in real life.
2. We imagine worst-case scenarios as a kind of talisman, protecting us from their actually happening.
3. Since our brain chemistry doesn’t differentiate between real and imagined scenarios, we get addicted to the “fight or flight” chemicals released when we imagine the worst.

In truth, worrying rarely helps us. How many times has the situation you worried about actually turned out that way? What worry does do is put us in a constant state of anxiety, weakening our immune system, suppressing our creativity, and in fact making us less able to handle difficult life situations when they do arise.

Believe it or not, we choose to worry. After many years of practice that choice becomes a habit, but one that can be broken with conscious effort. Without becoming an insufferable optimist or dismissing reality, you can still choose to focus on the best-case scenario. By doing so, you send your mind and body a signal that this is the outcome you’re aiming for.

Here are a few creative ways to help break the worrying habit:

CIA. Consider the situation you’re worried about, and make a three-column list: things you can Control, things you can Influence, and things you can Accept about the situation. Take action on the first two columns, and let go of the third.

Freebird. If you’re a visual person, sometimes it helps to imagine your thoughts as something tangible. I often picture worrisome thoughts as trapped birds, frantically flapping around in my head. Then I imagine opening a window and letting them fly out. While you can use any image that works for you, I recommend finding something that signifies “letting go” or “releasing.”

Get in gear. Worrying is a lot like having your foot on the gas pedal without the car being in gear. You waste a lot of gas but don’t go anywhere. Change that potential energy into kinetic energy! Go for a walk, run up a flight of stairs, turn on some music and dance. Move your body and change your chemistry.Now’s OK. Bring yourself back to the present. Where are you and what are you doing right now? Eating breakfast, driving your car, sitting in your office, brushing your teeth, walking the dog? Chances are you’re in familiar territory. Is there anything in this moment that’s truly unmanageable? Do this each time you feel overwhelmed. By returning to the present, you reclaim your power over the situation and your life. Even when you’re faced with something new, assess the present and know that you’re handling it, right now.

Improvise on these to suit your personality. For more ideas, read 25 Ways to Break the Worrying Habit.

Quick! What was the best thing that happened to you yesterday? What made that day worthwhile?

Uh…

If you’re like me (and probably most people) you might have trouble coming up with anything off the top of your head. That’s because, unless you’re already leading a rare and extraordinary life, one day tends to run into the other. Your days then turn into weeks turn into months into years until you find yourself saying, “Is it April already? Can you believe Y2K was five years ago??”

So how do we slow this whole time thing down and live each day to the fullest? One popular method is to “be here now.” Savor the moment, be conscious, that sort of thing.

Personally, I find it hard to remain present just for the sake of it. It takes discipline and, like all things requiring discipline, has the potential to become yet another source of anxiety.

Instead, why not make it fun?

Try this: when you wake up in the morning (or the night before if you’re a planner) create a “theme” for the day. Look for opportunities throughout the day to manifest that theme. It becomes both a game and a source of inspiration as you begin to realize that you are creating your own daily experience, without changing anything about your environment or activities. What changes is how you observe and influence your actions and responses.

A daily theme should be something that is enjoyable yet personally meaningful. Here are some examples:

• Today is about… humor. I will deliberately look for things I see/hear/read throughout the day that make me smile or laugh.
• Today is about…patience. I will experiment with responding rationally to irrational requests by my supervisor or spouse, or find interesting things to look at or think about while waiting in line.
• Today is about…connecting. I will give 100 percent of my attention and energy to each encounter – with clients, co-workers, family, friends, strangers – and notice how they respond.

The trick is to make this fun. Consider it a treasure hunt. Now that you’re looking for them, opportunities to find or create elements in your theme will show up again and again. You’ll get hooked and want to look for more.

Then before you go to sleep, think back over the day. It will be a lot easier to catalog what happened, what you did, how you felt. You’ll find that you’ve lived a much slower, richer day, just by framing how to think and act within it.

What is tomorrow’s theme going to be?

Before getting out of bed, you stretch. Before exercising, you stretch. Stretching warms up your muscles, gets your blood flowing, and prepares your body for whatever you’re asking it to do. Plus, stretching feels really good.

In the same way, it’s a good idea to regularly stretch your habits. Our everyday routines — what we eat, what we wear, where we go, whom we socialize with — are familiar, comfortable, and safe. However, these routines don’t really prepare us for facing change, whether well-planned or hitting us when we least expect it. What we need is a way to push our limits and make ourselves more flexible.

Habit stretching sends a signal to our brains (and bodies) that something new is coming up, telling us to rev up the engines and get the juices flowing. It improves our resiliency, and helps us meet new challenges with greater confidence and less stress.

So, how do you consciously stretch your habits? If you’re the adventurous type, you probably do this already. I have a good friend whose annual New Year’s resolution is to try something new that really scares him. I think this is a great idea, but you don’t have to be that bold to properly stretch yourself.

Start small.

• Eat something different for breakfast.
• Drive a new route to work.
• Read a section of the newspaper that you normally ignore.
• Talk to a person at the office who has nothing to do with your job.
• Go to an interesting local meeting or event that you’ve always found excuses not to attend.

Then work yourself up to bigger things.

• Take a lesson in something you’ve always wanted to try.
• Ask your boss to help strategize ways to balance your workload.
• Tell your spouse/child/best friend something you really love about them.

Feeling good? Piece of cake? Try:

• Outlining 10 important things you’d like to accomplish this year, or within 5 years.
• Devising a plan to get those things done.
• Asking yourself if you’d still be doing your same job if you had $10 million or only one year to live.

By the way, the whole purpose of stretching yourself in this way isn’t necessarily to feel wonderful afterwards. You might, of course, but the real reason is to get to know yourself better. Where are your limits? What are your hidden strengths? What’s most important to you? What’s not? Discovering these answers arms you with knowledge and abilities that guide you through the really big changes you want to make, and help you weather the ones you don’t.

So stretch yourself. Try something different before the day is through, and you might be surprised at just how good it feels.