Mia Sundstrom is a third-generation leader at the National Institute for Play (NIFPlay) and the granddaughter of its founder, Dr. Stuart Brown. She has been immersed in play-based learning and the research that underpins the field from an early age, and in 2026 was appointed NIFPlay’s Chief Executive Officer.
Before becoming CEO, Mia served as NIFPlay’s Director of Play Transformation, working with organizations and communities worldwide to translate play science into practical tools for leadership and well-being. She also works with the University of Denver Chancellor on the Character Dimension Project, helping to develop and deliver programs that explore how play and character support resilient, values-driven lives.
Most recently, Mia and the NIFPlay team launched the Live Playfully Journal, a 90-day guided reflection practice designed to help anyone who wants to reconnect with their own playful nature and build play back into their daily lives.
1) Your grandfather inspired a lot of people to give themselves permission to take play seriously. As the next-generation leader of NIFPlay, what permission do you think adults need now that may be different from what they needed ten or twenty years ago?
Thank you for acknowledging my Grandpa’s legacy. One of the greatest gifts he gave people was permission to take play seriously, and see it as something essential to who we are as human beings.
That permission still matters, but the barriers to play have certainly gotten more complicated over the last ten or twenty years.
We are living in a world that fragments attention and connection. Smartphones are a huge part of that. We are constantly reachable, constantly stimulated, and often only half-present. COVID also changed how a lot of people engage socially. Even as things reopened, many people’s habits around gathering, connecting, and initiating social plans had shifted. Also, people are more transient now compared to recent previous generations. We move more, change jobs more, and may not have the same built-in neighborhood, family, or community structures that used to create more spontaneous opportunities for play. And, unfortunately, we’re facing polarization and division, here at home and abroad. In a challenging social climate, divisiveness tends to get in the way of playfulness.
This all points to what I call the paradox of play. As Brian Sutton-Smith has said, “The opposite of play is not work, it’s depression.” Building on this, play is essential to well-being, but we must be well—have our basic needs met, including safety—to play. It’s quite the catch-22 of modern mental health: we can be too depleted, stressed, or burnt out to initiate play, even though play is the exact neurological reset button we need to recover.
So, the work we are doing now is not just about helping people remember that play matters. It’s helping people reclaim their attention, space, and social connection, which is what allows play (and being playful) to emerge in the first place.
2) NIFPlay describes play less as a specific activity and more as a state we enter, where we are freely engaged, curious, and absorbed for its own sake. Where do you see people most often misdiagnosing their own need for play? In other words, when do people think they need a new hobby, when what they really need is a different relationship to attention, choice, or permission?
I think the biggest misdiagnosis is that people often look at play only as an activity you engage in.
They think, “I need to find a hobby,” or “I need to go do something playful.” And sometimes that is true. Finding the activities that naturally engage you matters. At NIFPlay, we care a lot about helping people understand their own play nature because play is deeply personal. How I enter a play state may be very different from how you enter a play state.
But play is not only a noun. It is not just the activity. That makes play a bit hard to define, and therefore, there isn’t actually a concrete consensus. That said, the way we think about it at NIFPlay is that play is a biological state. It’s what happens when we are absorbed in something for its own sake. Freely engaged, open, free from time, intrinsically motivated, and curious about what you are doing. The experience itself becomes the reward. Your attention deepens. Effort can feel enlivening. Time can start to recede. In that sense, there is a strong relationship between play and flow, but they are not the same thing. I like the way Lucas Freire puts it: “Flow is the wave. Play is the ocean.” Play empowers us to create the right conditions for that magical flow.
So when someone says, “I need more play,” the answer may not only be, “Go find a new activity.” It may be, “What helps you access that state?” Do you have enough freedom? Do you have enough space? Are you doing this because you want to, or because you feel like you should? Are you able to engage without judgment, pressure, or an external outcome taking over?
Then there is the second part of the play definition, which is playfulness.
Being playful is a cognitive disposition of moving through the world. It is a disposition. It is curiosity, humor, openness, optimism, flexibility, resilience, creativity, and adaptability. It is not about being silly all the time or pretending that everything is easy. It is a way of engaging with life that can help us meet challenges, relationships, work, and learning with more creativity and resilience through the lens of play.
That is where adults often underestimate what play can be. They think play has to be separate from the rest of life. But playfulness can be practiced in the middle of life with the right framing, cleaning, walking from one place to another, or working on a project can even be play. In how we approach a conversation. In how we solve a problem. In how we relate to ourselves. In how we notice what feels alive.
So yes, sometimes people need a new hobby. But often, they just need to reconnect with the conditions that let them become playful again. They need to remember that play is not just something we do. It is also a state we enter and a way we engage. And, more tactically, as busy adults, sometimes it’s something we need to schedule time for so it doesn’t get crowded out (which can feel in opposition of play for some people, even though it’s not).
3) You grew up around play-based learning, then spent years in high-performance athletics, where pressure and measurement are always present. What did gymnastics teach you about when achievement supports play, and when achievement starts to strip play out of the activity?
This is such an important question, and honestly, one I am really interested in right now, especially when you look at how intense competitive youth sports have become.
I grew up in play-based learning environments and also in the achievement-focused world of gymnastics. Gymnastics is incredibly measured. There are expectations, scores, rankings, and constant feedback. So I’ve lived on both sides of this. I know what it feels like when movement is pure play, and I also know what it feels like when something you love becomes tied to performance, pressure, and identity.
What gymnastics taught me is that achievement does not automatically kill play. In fact, achievement can support play when it gives you a container for playfully approaching mastery. There can be deep joy in working toward something hard, in refining a skill, in being fully absorbed, and in doing something with a team where everyone is committed to growing. Challenge can be very playful when it’s chosen, when it feels meaningful, and when the person still feels connected to their own agency.
Where play gets stripped out is when engaging in an activity becomes only about the outcome. When your worth is attached to the score, the ranking, the scholarship, the college placement, or the approval of someone else, the internal experience changes. The same activity that once felt alive turns into a source of burnout. It’s happening more and more as youth sports have evolved to be more competitive, which is sad. It has become less about play (intrinsic) and more about achievement (extrinsic).
For me, play is a very big part of what got me through collegiate gymnastics. I had a meet where I fell three times—something you rarely see at the collegiate level. Luckily, I had Grandpa to help me navigate through that period. He always encouraged me to “follow my bliss.” This is something he believes in so deeply that Bliss is actually my middle name. What I understood about play, as well as his encouragement, gave me a way to stay connected to the part of gymnastics that was still mine: The joy of movement. The relationships with my teammates. The creativity and expression, and the feeling of being fully in my body.
That does not mean every practice felt playful or every season was easy. High-performance environments are demanding, but recentering on play and reconnecting to my “why” kept gymnastics enjoyable and sustainable, making it easy to rebound.
That’s the tension I think we need to pay attention to with young athletes today. Achievement can be healthy when it grows out of intrinsic motivation, a healthy attitude toward mastery, connection, joy, and play. But when the desire for achievement completely replaces those things, we have a problem. So, the question is not whether kids should compete or pursue excellence. The question is whether play is being protected within the container of pursuing mastery.
4) A lot of organizations say they want creativity, adaptability, and psychological safety, but they still design work around urgency and control. What’s a practical change workplaces can make that creates more play without making the work feel unserious?
The first thing I would say is that play at work cannot be forced. Science is clear that “forced fun” doesn’t work. If play becomes another mandatory team-building activity, people feel that immediately. It starts to feel performative, and then it loses the very qualities that make it play.
Additionally, some work cultures have a hard time reconciling that for the benefits of play to emerge, you need to undo some of the environmental scaffolding that “hustle” culture instills. It is hard to operate in a creative way when your day is inherently overscheduled.
So, a helpful way to think about this is through the conditions that allow play to happen. Through the foundational workplace research Dara Simkin has led, we often talk about play needing permission, space, and spark.
Permission means people know it is safe to experiment. They know they are not going to be judged for trying something, asking a different kind of question, or showing up with a little more humor or imagination.
Space means there is actually room for play to occur. You cannot tell people to be creative and adaptive while every minute of the day is overfilled, and every conversation is driven by urgency. Play needs some breathing room, even if it is small. For instance, when someone tells me they don’t have 30 minutes in their day to be playful, I tell them to start with 5 minutes. Something is better than nothing, right?
Then there is spark, which is the activation. Sometimes people simply do not know how to begin. A prompt, a ritual, a question, or a playful structure can help people step out of their normal pattern.
When you can get those three things present, you start to see the outcomes organizations say they want: more connection, more well-being, and more new thinking.
So, one practical change is to start with a small ritual. Not a big offsite. Not forced fun. Something repeatable that changes the energy of the room. It could be how a meeting opens, how a team celebrates learning, or how people are invited to generate ideas before judging them. It could be as simple as finding a way to gamify cleaning your inbox that creates a joyful experience.
The last thing that comes to mind is inversion, which is to say, sometimes we need to flip the adult workplace script. Instead of starting with control, polish, and certainty, you might ask, “How would a child approach this problem?” Not in a childish way, but in a childlike way. With curiosity, experimentation, and less fear of being wrong.
With practice, it becomes clear that none of this makes work any less serious. It actually gives people access to the human capacities that serious work depends on: creativity, trust, adaptability, and the willingness to keep trying when the answer is not obvious.
5) NIFPlay has an ambitious goal to reach 10 million people with play by 2030. Scale often creates a tension between fidelity and accessibility. What parts of play science can be simplified without being diluted, and what parts must never be reduced to a slogan?
Yeah, absolutely. I think we have to hold both. If people cannot understand the science, then it does not move culture. It does not help a parent, or a teacher, or a leader, or someone who feels like they have lost touch with play in their own life. So part of our work is to make the science feel accessible and usable. At the same time, we have to be really careful not to flatten it.
My grandpa was foundational in creating the field of play science as we understand it, and that comes with a responsibility. We are carrying forward decades of clinical observation, research, and lived experience. So yes, we want to make sure the concepts are digestible for anyone; And, we want to make sure the science of play is rigorous, meaningful, and well understood academically.
A good example is our Play Styles quiz. Like any framework, it has limitations. Personality is a really complex blend of nature and environment, and any framework that tries to simplify it is, by nature, oversimplified. We know that. The point of the quiz is not to profile people or put them into rigid boxes. The point is to help people get back in touch with their inherent intrinsic motivators. What are the activities that you have natural predilections for? What helps you enter a play state? What does play actually look like for you?
That is where a tool like the Play Style quiz can be really helpful. It gives people a starting place. It gives them language. It helps them remember something that might still be lying dormant inside them. As we get older, a lot of us lose touch with that, so sometimes we need something simple to reactivate it.
But what cannot be reduced is the deeper truth that play is not just an activity or a personality type. Play is a public health necessity across our lifespan. It supports cognitive, emotional, social, and physical health. It is learning. It is productive. It is biological. And it is deeply personal.
I also think the next phase of play science is not just about saying something brand new. We’re living in a new era of AI and information overload. For instance, more and more kids are trading conversations with family and friends for conversations with ChatGPT. Tying this back to your first question, what may matter most over the next 20 years is our ability to connect what we’ve already discovered about play and apply this wisdom and science to modern-day problems.
So part of NIFPlay’s work is connecting play to psychology, neuroscience, ethology, positive psychology, well-being, flow, and clinical mental health in meaningful ways against current societal challenges and opportunities. Through our work, even if you’re not interested in the science, you are still going to be confident that the science has your back. For anyone, this is going to make giving yourself permission to play easier. And, when you do, you will be better off for it. Not just in your well-being, but in your productivity, in your relationships, and in every part of your life, because that is how valuable human play is and why our goal of reaching as many people as possible is so important.
