S7E19: The Power of Play in a Serious Job

Joshua: Egyptian Slap Rummy or something like that.

Laurel: Egyptian Rat Slap?

Joshua: Oh, yeah, that's it. Egyptian Rat Slap. I love me some Egyptian Rat Slap.

Baley: Can you play it with a group?

Joshua: Yes, but I think up to four people is kind of the least. If you have a round table, you can definitely play with more people, but you are all going to be slapping each other's hands. And so the more people, the more "eh."

Baley: Risk of . . .

Joshua: Four is pretty good, I think.

Baley: . . . injury.

Laurel: It reminds me of when I played Spoons with my in-laws. It became such a violent game that we stressed out Peter's mom and we had to stop playing. So I think that serious game is honestly the perfect segue to what I'm hoping to talk about with the two of you and with the world in general.

I have been thinking about this topic in my head, which I've summarized as staying silly in a serious job. It's this tension that I feel on a day-to-day basis that I imagine a lot of people feel too, which is that the work is heavy, life is heavy, and yet I remain silly.

I think that it is important to bring ourselves into our workplaces. I think it is important for the sake of self-care that we're not cutting off pieces of ourselves. But also, there's the balance there, I think, with respectability, politics, and also the importance of the work that we do to both give that its due credence and weight, but also not lose ourselves or get weighed down personally in the process.

And so when I decided that this was something that I wanted to think about and talk about and explore, I invited two of my best friends and also most, I think, appropriate silly-serious people to join me.

First Baley, if you want to introduce yourself a little bit, what you do these days.

Baley: I am a second-year psychiatry resident at the University of Utah. Laurel's been one of my closest friends and I feel very honored to be invited to be on this episode, especially because I feel like silliness is a core tenet of our relationship and something that . . . We have a similar sense of humor, I feel, and so I feel very honored to be asked to be a part of the silly-serious episode.

Laurel: Amazing. I think it's worth mentioning that the way that we formally became friends was through a "Bachelor" watch party. And so being med students who took a mental breather and watched reality TV together and got really involved in a very lighthearted pastime in which there have been brackets and there have been many years of following the completely unrelated-to-us narratives of these reality TV stars turned celebrities.

I think of it as popcorn television, right? You just get to sit back and enjoy it. And I think it was a really lovely way for us to get to know each other outside of the grind and maybe chronic despair that med school can be.

Baley: Yeah, it's interesting you say that because when I think about it, our relationship is one of the few in medical school or that I've met in medicine where the majority of it has not revolved around medicine or our work, which ends up happening a lot with people in medicine. It's kind of hard to separate even when you all get together because you have that in common. That becomes the focus. I feel like the majority of our time spent is truly not focused on work, which is worth mentioning.

Laurel: Yeah. And then speaking of not focusing on work, here's my little work pal, Joshua. If you'd like to say a little bit about yourself and what your shtick is.

Joshua: Hi, I'm Joshua. What am I? I'm a bioinformatics grad student. I'm not really medicine, I'm a grad student, so I don't know too much about the medical world, but I get enough through diffusion through you guys, so I think that's fine.

Laurel: To tie in your experience a little bit more, you work in bioinformatics in the context of disease and rare disease.

Joshua: Yeah. So I'm medical tangential. I hear enough about it. I work with the data on it. I'm just not right there.

But yeah, Laurel and I work in the same lab and it's kind of how we met. I feel like the majority of the first year that we knew each other was just sending memes back and forth on venting about stuff before we actually started talking. And still like 90% of the time that we do chat during the workday is just venting about what's going on, what's going wrong.

But I think that's a very important part about, like you were talking about, staying sane and kind of alleviating some pressure and all that.

Laurel: One of the things that you mentioned that I think a lot about is that the first year we didn't actually work functionally together at all. We were in the same workspace, but we didn't have to work together. And so we basically cultivated a friendship that was purely separate from a coworker perspective. And then have worked together intermittently since then, which is sort of funny.

Meanwhile, Baley, your job is entirely talking to people from what I understand as a psychiatrist. And I'm wondering if you can comment on that being sort of a different kind of work.

Baley: Yes. The job outside of notes . . . because I think for everyone it's like 50% notes at this point. But compared to other specialties, definitely, yeah, we do the most talking in psychiatry. That's the majority of my day.

And I feel like humor becomes especially important in that environment where you're dealing with really heavy stuff all day, and not to mention all the personalities that you deal with can be really emotionally and mentally taxing. Yeah, I think having a sense of humor, being able to incorporate some comedy in there, is really important.

And I also am very introverted, so I chose a job where I have to talk to people, which I love. It's a lot easier one-on-one and it doesn't feel as draining with patients. But it is something where I get a lot of my extroversion out during the work day, and then by the time I come home I'm like, "I don't want to talk to anyone. I want to stare at a wall."

Laurel: Wall-staring is an important part of wellbeing. And I do kind of want to probe your brain as a professional psychiatrist in a little bit about the tenets of silliness and self-care.

But I did want to mention this quote that I like, which is, "Play is not the activity but the attitude." A quote by Darryl Edwards. And so thinking about Josh and I, currently our work days look somewhat similar where we stare at a computer and get frustrated about code not working and data contorting to not do what we want it to do.

And then I guess you also stare at a computer a lot, Baley, and then spend the time not staring at a computer talking to people about personal and heavy aspects of their care.

And so my question is, if our activities are not necessarily playful, how do we keep a playful attitude in these more somber work activities?

Baley: I think part of that is naturally your personality, allowing that to come through in different environments and not . . . In medicine, it's particularly hard because it's very uniform, very professional, a lot of emphasis on maintaining a certain level of professionalism. I feel like a lot of times humor and jokes can be considered unprofessional.

This is one of the reasons why I actually went into psychiatry, was seeing people who could balance both the humor and finding ways to express the absurdity and just heaviness of what you see in a way that's healthy and light and brings you closer to the people around you.

It's a little bit harder within the confines of medical training, but I think once you get out and kind of find people who have a shared appreciation for finding humor in things, you can kind of use that together.

Obviously, I think humor has to involve other people. So it's really important to find the place where you feel comfortable kind of expressing yourself.

Laurel: I like that you point out that humor involves other people, because it's something that I've been thinking a lot about. I flinch at this tendency in medicine and working with disease to use gallows humor because it feels like humor that doesn't necessarily involve the people who are the most central in what's going on, and sometimes to me feels like it can happen at the expense of people who are meant to be at the center of our focus.

But at the same time, something that I've realized about myself when I'm in clinical settings is that I tend to be a pretty lighthearted, jokey person and walking into a room with a patient with my little strut and my little gesture-like approach to life is not at all an appropriate or productive fit for someone who is actively in pain and distress.

And so I think it's this interesting balance of finding support through humor with the people around us, and then maybe recognizing that there are situations and people in which that can be shared and situations in people where maybe it is not the right time or the right place.

Baley: Absolutely. Completely agree. That was something I thought about a lot when thinking about the topic of this episode and what makes it acceptable and a healthy, positive way of coping and seeing things.

I think the two biggest components of that are in assessing whether or not this is adding uplifting, positive humor versus darker, more malignant humor. What impact are you trying to have? What is the intent behind the joke that you're making? What is driving the joke and is the patient the butt of the joke? Or is it we're laughing at kind of a generalization or an observation of something that's happened versus in a way that is demeaning to the patient?

Yeah, I think being able to read the room first off with the patient is huge. I mean, if we're talking about going into a patient room, I don't lead with humor generally. I typically wait and kind of try to gauge this person's style and where they're at. And if they start dropping in some jokes, then I might lighten up a little bit or . . .

Laurel: Reciprocate.

Baley: Yeah, I go off of them. But then when it comes to humor among colleagues, asking yourself those two questions. Where is this coming from? What emotion is driving this? Is it coming from a place of anger, frustration, irritation, resentment towards the patient or your work? And what is the intended impact? Is it meant to be insulting? Is it meant to make someone feel bad? Or is this just simply to relieve some tension and lighten the mood?

Laurel: Yeah. And then I think about your work day, Josh, because again, it looks a lot like mine where you are not dealing with patients directly. You're dealing with patient data.

And so I wonder if that has an effect on how you don't get to, person-to-person, face-to-face, get the motivation of the specific rare disease cases that you're trying to work through, but also you get to exist on your own island without worrying about necessarily the other people and personalities involved.

I'm curious if you feel like that affects play as an attitude, but also how you take care of yourself in a situation that is you versus computer.

Joshua: I was thinking about that a lot too. On the research side of things, I work with the computer a lot, but I think folks in a wet lab setting, always at the bench can also kind of relate to this. It can be pretty isolating.

You and Baley were talking about this, but humor involves other people. I mean, you can tell jokes to yourself. I talk to myself sometimes when I'm working from home and make me laugh and it helps me lighten up. But otherwise, you typically do get humor and kind of lighten the mood through interacting with people.

Baley also talked about this. It's about knowing your audience, right? So I've been in different labs, whether it's rotation or working as a tech or something, but it was instances where the folks were a lot more serious and a lot more kind of . . . I don't know. Stoic isn't really the right word, but taking it a lot more seriously.

And that has its benefits for sure. But at the end of the day, for myself, it feels like when I take these things too seriously, it ends up kind of negatively mentally affecting me where I'm internalizing a lot of the worries and stressors that I have.

I'm working with rare disease data, so I'm not directly interacting with someone, but I still do get those kinds of worries of, "What if I put out bad research and this negatively harms that community?" Or I put out a bad tool and other researchers spend their time to use that tool, but it's bad and they're getting untrustworthy results and all that.

So there are a lot of things that you can kind of think about and internalize, and if you don't have a good support system to chat with about it, I feel like that can really take a toll on you.

I really burnt out around 2022 in my previous lab. But if you are kind of in a situation . . . I'm so lucky that you're in my lab and I have folks around that I can just vent to and make jokes about these things of how this one thing isn't working, or, "Why on earth did this one person do it this way?" and have a joke back and forth about it. That's super helpful.

But if you kind of don't have that in the immediate and the audience just isn't quite right, I think having people outside of that immediate circle that you can still joke around with and have fun with is super important.

Baley, what . . .

Baley: That made me think of something that I also was hoping to bring up, and you brought it up: how much of a difference it makes having people around you, a space that's separate from the professional space where you can talk freely, openly about things.

I thought multiple times during medical school about our class Slack, and one of the channels was specifically for memes. There were multiple times that I thought, "This has single handedly kept me going at times."

I have that now in my cohort, in my residency, and I am so blessed to be with 12 or 14 people that have wonderful senses of humor. And we have created a space where we can express ourselves.

The jokes that come, especially because of the nature of the work that we're doing and how absurd and disheartening it is at times. To have that group of people who, really, you have so much to relate on and then to be able to express your frustrations through humor and laugh at things together is so healing and just makes all of the difference, I think, all the time. If I didn't have this, I don't know how I would be coping because it feels so crucial.

Joshua: Yeah. And Baley, I want to know what you think about this, but one of the things that I feel like humor really helps out with is compartmentalization of these types of things.

For me, with research, I get feeling so bad about . . . Like, maybe I just had some big mess up with code or something and it wasted two or three days of work and I'm just feeling so bad about it. It's very easy to internalize that as, "Oh, I suck at this. I'm not doing very good," and all that. But once you start using humor and . . .

We also have our own memes channel in the lab Slack, and we kind of share that experience and other people are like, "I just dealt with the same thing. This sucks." It helps kind of sucking that idea out of your head and turning it into its own abstract concept. You are working with that, sometimes against it, but you are not that.

Laurel: I really love that, and I think that that's something . . . This idea of, again, humor is with other people, play is with other people, it's part of the reason why I think that I come full throttle into the workplace. It's important to me that no one ever feels alone and that you can be as silly in your workplace as you want. Odds are I'm going to be just as silly, whether or not you join me.

We were at a conference a couple weeks ago and one of the vendors was giving out these the mini Squishmallows, right? Josh and Baley both have Squishmallows from me and . . .

Baley: It's sat on my desk right now.

Joshua: Which one did you get?

Baley: It's a little octopus that's the multicolored octopus.

Joshua: That's like the best one. I love that.

Baley: It is the best one, I know. And I was like, "And it tells me something that so many people chose that one, my people."

Laurel: Yeah, it was a popular choice. But I loved it so much that I got one from the vendor and I asked if I could get a second one and they said no. So I ended up ordering a couple things of this Squishmallow mini. They're called Squishville, I guess.

And I basically said whoever wanted some at work could have some. It really delighted me how many people wanted one and how many professional folks who, when given the opportunity to say, "Yes, I want this tiny plush item," chose to get a tiny plush item.

I left a couple by the desks of grad students in a lab next to us because they weren't there when I was handing them out. And I came back later and asked them if it was okay that I left them, and they were like, "Yes, I love them." One of them in particular had been using it as a stress ball, dealing with some frustrations in her project.

And so it was just one of those things where I think we look out for each other in all kinds of ways. One of the ways that I try to look out for the people around me is knowing that there is support there. And that can be laughing about it, or it can be venting about it, or it can be screaming about it or crying about it, or all of the above at the same time as it often is.

I've been reading a lot of Brene Brown recently. She talks a lot about play and she talks about play in a very capitalist, work-focused world.

And I'll use this time to disclaim that we're speaking as individuals and not in the context of our employers.

I think that play itself is a form of rest. I think it is necessary and it is part of wellbeing. And it's something that, Baley, I was wondering as a psychiatrist who focuses a lot on both community wellness and individual wellness, if it's something that you've encountered in the psychiatry patient space.

Baley: I think thinking about play amongst coworkers and the importance of that, it makes me think about . . . We had a second-year retreat a few months ago. We really wanted to go to Moab and had to jump through a lot of hoops, talk to a lot of people to make that happen. And we did.

It's hard to get time with each other, an entire cohort of people, because we're all busy working obviously and have lives, as everyone does. And to have designated time just outside of work together, I feel like, adds so much to morale, to our connections with each other, to what we can give back to patients.

Being able to create spaces outside of work to bond with people, to play, to get to know people beyond their professional facade that we have to wear a lot of the time, I think, is really important. Because once you get to know them more in a setting that is less restrictive, then you know them better. You can start to text outside of work.

I know all of my coworkers very well now. And so it's community-building in a playful way outside of work that really can expedite your relationships with people that we don't get to interact with that often.

Obviously, that example is work sanctioned, but I think we try often to get together outside of work, and I think that is very needed and benefits us as physicians and humans and a better support for each other.

And then for patients, it's a tougher question because I spend a lot of my time inpatient in a psychiatric hospital setting. It's actually one of the things that I struggle with most, is just the general environment milieu that people are in and the lack of scheduled playtime or ability to engage in playfulness that's outside of a very structured group dynamic. And it oftentimes can be punished in an inpatient setting to be more playful.

It's one of the things that I think is very lacking in our framework and how we think about treating people and addressing mental health. Personally, I think it's essential to wellbeing and . . . Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts in an inpatient setting because it's not encouraged or cultivated/fostered there.

Laurel: I like, though, the sort of innate humor in the phrase "work-sanctioned fun." And I do think it's interesting and something to keep in mind as people who potentially can determine outcomes for patients that work-sanctioned fun can be recognized as really important for the psychiatrist, but are patients given the opportunity to also engage in fun and play?

I understand that there are obviously restrictions there, but I think that all people deserve the opportunity for self-expression and for exploration. And I think that that's something to maybe keep in mind. A holistic approach to health probably requires things that are outside of the prescriptive rigid environments that I think come really naturally to medicine as a whole.

Joshua: I know that this is very different to an inpatient psychiatric care and all that, but just speaking anecdotally, every time that I've had a doctor that can bring levity and make jokes about . . . Again, not about me myself, but if I'm coming in for a visit and just kind of making fun of the abstract concept or just speaking about it with . . .

I feel like professionalism means different things to different people, but if you can read the room. I like it when my doctors don't feel so rigid and too much like a doctor. And it makes it a lot easier to be open and honest with kind of awkward topics or difficult-to-talk-about topics if they either relate to it themselves or just understand the absurdity of medicine and the human body and health. I feel like that's been really helpful for me personally with doctors for sure.

Laurel: There's a level of openness and comfort that is so necessary to, I think, talking about the icky, sticky things that make us human and people and bodies, which is so necessary to understand for us to be healthy. And I think that making sure that we can approach those things is necessary to be good physicians, to be taken care of as patients, to be taken care of as friends and colleagues.

I know I love quotes, and so I restricted myself to three. But the last one that I really, really loved is Ludwig Wittgenstein says, "If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done."

Baley: Laurel, I saw this quote. I'm also a quote person, so I also brought my own quotes. But I saw that quote and it's funny because I thought of you.

Laurel: Oh, that's so nice.

Baley: Well, I love that you're hosting this episode because I feel like you're such a prime example of someone who can balance both the intelligence and humor. That's funny that you mentioned that quote.

Laurel: That's really nice.

Baley: I did want to comment on what Josh said, because I think it's a really important one, the breaking of the wall kind of between the physician and the patient. I just so often encounter people who are very intimidated by their doctors. And when they are in an environment where they feel intimidated, then they're less likely to ask questions. They're less able to absorb information when you talk.

I think being able to kind of break that barrier with people allows you to convey information and have it resonate with people in a different way that historically, I think, has been discouraged in medicine.

I think if you can deploy humor in a way that works with the patient where you feel closer to each other and build rapport, that's one of the best tools that we have in getting through to people in a situation that's typically very intimidating. Yeah, that's the end.

Joshua: If I can get my therapist to laugh, I am probably going to be sticking with them for a very long time. I've done the whole therapist speed dating game, and I've had a couple where you're trying to be lighthearted with what you're talking about, because humor can also be a mechanism to feel more comfortable, and if I'm trying to drop some jokes and my therapist is just sitting there stone-faced, it's like, "I kind of feel stupid now."

If we can just joke back and forth and have that open dialogue, like I said, I feel so much ease to be open and just kind of get more into the nitty-gritty.

Laurel: Yeah, I love that and I relate to that a lot. I think the quote that I mentioned, I wasn't necessarily even thinking of intelligent as intellectual. I was thinking of intelligent as intelligent design, like intentional and natural.

I, too, love making my therapist laugh and I really love that my therapist and I can laugh about something and then go, "Okay, but why are we thinking about this?" It allows you to attach the things that need to get done, like connecting to your patient or talking about necessary things in therapy, in a way that is approachable and even possible. Because I think that there are things that can feel too scary or too daunting without adding a little silly to it.

And going back to Baley's point also, I had this really long conversation the other day with folks in the medical school about this propensity, I think, of physicians and people in medicine to stop viewing patients as people and to view them as data or as medical problems or medical codes.

I think whether you see the play in someone else or you let yourself be silly with them . . . To me, at least, it's hard to be silly and not see the humanity in the person next to you. And so I think that's something that's really valuable for me and that I hope to bring forward.

Baley: I love that you said that, because as soon as you were saying it, I thought, "Yeah, it's a sign." If you can joke with someone, it's a sign that you're seeing them and that you're in the conversation with them.

So often, I see people talking at a patient and seeing them as a list of questions that they need to get answers to. And if you're joking with them, then yes, you're there with them, you're listening, you're bouncing off of each other, and that's a different approach. It's a different relationship then.

Joshua: I feel like it's so important to emphasize, too, the patient is not stupid. They can feel it and they can tell if your provider is actively engaged or is just a point in data and it's like, "Okay, we've got to get through this."

And circumstances considering. If you're in an ER, the context is going to be different than if it's a primary care physician, but your patients can pick up on these things. You can really feel it.

Laurel: Yeah. I really appreciate y'all sharing and talking and being silly with me, and also find it very, very funny that no one has commented on the party hat that I'm wearing.

Joshua: I was going to.

Laurel: Which I have been wearing the entire time.

Baley: That should say something about you. That should tell you something. I didn't even notice anything abnormal.

Joshua: I thought you were just wearing it. I thought you were coming from a party for the recording. I didn't even put it together.

Baley: That's what I mean. Neither Josh nor I even thought to ask about it because I'm like, "It's normal enough. I don't see anything weird here."

Laurel: Y'all know me too well. I, again, really appreciate y'all and I really appreciate that both of you are people who I get to joke around with, but also have meaningful conversations and talk about the big and the small, the tough and the gentle, if you will.

And so I thought that maybe a nice parting moment we could have is if each of us thinks about something silly that we like to do that we can recommend to each other and to people listening to the episode. Something silly.

Joshua: I love talking to my animals. I'll talk to them like they're people. I talk to my dog the entire time I'm walking her, and my cats like they're just other roommates. I don't know. It's nice. It feels like someone's there, because they are there.

Baley: I do the same thing. Yes, I talk to myself. I talk to my dog. I'm telling her jokes. It's a whole bit going. The first thing that came to mind . . . and I don't know why. I think it's because I already wanted to mention this when we were talking about professionalism in medicine and humor. Laurel knows this, but I love hippos, and specifically Fiona the Hippo is my favorite. And I actually included it on my application to residency . . .

Joshua: Oh my god.

Baley: . . . as one of my interests. And I had two or three programs ask me about it, which I was like, "That's a great sign that we're probably going to be a good fit."

But I highly recommend watching any Fiona the Hippo videos. There's a Facebook page that has hundreds of thousands of people on it that are also just obsessed with specifically Fiona, but just the silliest content that you can imagine about hippos. And that alone can just take me out of anything. They in themselves are very silly to me. They're nature.

Laurel: That's wonderful. A very animal-centric couple of suggestions.

Joshua: Oh, wait, I just remembered another thing. I realized thinking about it you can't really bring talking to your animals into the workplace, so I have another suggestion. Just fill your space with things that bring you joy.

I love birds and I have a growing collection of birds that are on my desk just kind of making their own flock, making their own nest. I've been slowly growing it. I just like looking at them.

One of them is an owl that I got from a thrift shop, and it's kind of made out of wood and its eyes are looking in different directions. Every time I look at it, it just makes me chuck a little bit and I just get back to what I was doing. I love it.

Laurel: I super love that and I think that it gives me something as a person who likes to collect trinkets and give them to people. I've given Josh some nonsense as well that's now at his desk, and other people in our lab. I think one of our coworkers described it as a Laurel shrine, which is just little things that I've given her.

But I think it's so important to make a space. If you have to be in a space, you might as well make it a space that you enjoy and that feels good. I think it's just a really nice, lovely, simple thing to do.

Baley: You can be a professional, you can be a doctor or whatever, and still incorporate your personality and the things that are lighthearted. We think of them as opposed to each other, but if I walked in and my doctor had a stuffed animal dinosaur and little toys on his desk, I'd be like, "Nice."

Joshua: Yeah. It's a great icebreaker too.

Baley: Yes.

Laurel: I agree. One of the things about me that is . . . I didn't do it for this reason, but it's worked out really well, is having pink hair means that everyone always has something to say to me. And I think that a plush dinosaur, a fun shirt, it's just a nice point of human connection, which is always a great place to start.

I've gotten really into choosing photos that I have of people for the contacts on my phone. So that way, every time they text me, I see a little photo that makes me happy. It's such a small thing, but it's just been really delightful, and even just the practice of going through all these photos of my friends and picking out one that I think is emblematic.

Yeah, I'm really grateful for y'all taking the time out of your busy lives to talk to me about something as important as being silly.

And I want to close after saying that you can listen to "Bundle of Hers" wherever, podcast or streaming. And thank you to people for listening to this episode.

Also, I wanted to close by reading actually the tweet, I think it is, that you sent me earlier, Baley, because I love it so much, which is, "I was put on this earth to be silly and then die. What is all this brutal reality and grief doing here interrupting my silly?"

I really love this "Everything Everywhere All At Once" symbolism of silliness is the water we swim in, and it's the serious stuff that interrupts it that we're able to deal with because we have the reservoir of silly, as opposed to blips of silly in a grim landscape. I really love making it part of the fabric in which we get to drape ourselves. I think it's a nice and joyful way to live, and I'm grateful to live in it with y'all.

Baley: Happy to be draped in the fabric with you all.

Joshua: Back at you, bud.