Hi everyone, Kei Sunga here. I hope you're enjoying your fun to mention with author and

fun expert, Katherine Price. If you'd like to hear more about bringing joy and fun into

your life, particularly over the next few weeks, head to the Headspace app and check out

our Happier Holiday Collection. It features new meditations and videos to help bring joy

to your holiday season. Alrighty, enjoy the episode.

Hi, my name is Katherine Price and welcome to Radioheadspace and to Thursday morning. We

are in day 4 of what I've been referring to as a fun prevention, an exploration of

the many benefits of fun, and an introduction to some concrete strategies you can use to

build more fun into your life. I want to share with you something that I've found really

surprising and powerful, and that is the effects that fun can have on our physical health.

This might sound crazy, but I've come to believe that actually the pursuit of fun can help

us live longer. So let me tell you a bit about what I mean, because you might be thinking

I'm crazy. First things first year, there's actually not much research about fun. This

was something else that surprised me. Lots of research about happiness, about joy, about

all these other things, not much about fun. So with that said, as you know by now, we

have a definition that at least you and I are working with, and that is that fun or true

fun, as I call it, is a state of playful connected flow. Now that becomes very interesting

from a research standpoint, because whereas there is not research about fun per se, there

is a lot of research about playfulness and connection and flow, and there are effects

on our mental and our physical health. Today I want to just focus on two main things,

which is to say stress and human connection. I want to talk about how fun affects both

of those things. So stress. Stress is really complicated. We want to have a stress response

...