On Productivity Guilt, Play, and the Adults Who Never Learned to Rest – Nadja Rolli

Mar 29, 2026

Nadja Rolli, a child and adolescent psychotherapist and author focused on play in development, outlines a five-stage model of play. She explores why many adults feel guilty about rest, how play repairs attachment and trauma, the risks of early screen/competitive pressure, and simple sensory ways to reclaim unproductive time.

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INSIGHT

Play Is A Developmental Language

Play is a multilayered, developmental language that communicates the internal world and repairs missed development.
Nadja Rolli outlines five play stages: sensory, attachment, constructive, fantasy, and competitive, each with distinct functions.

ADVICE

Use Sensory Objects To Regulate Quickly

Do offer simple sensory items (putty, play-doh, gardening, baking by hand) to access soothing, regulating play without performance pressure.
Nadja shows clients relax and unconsciously self-soothe by stretching putty while talking.

INSIGHT

Culture Turned Play Into A Moral Threat

Historical and cultural forces split play into 'acceptable' and 'dangerous' forms, making unstructured play morally suspect.
Rolli links medieval suppression and social control to modern productivity myths that devalue play.

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Time Stamps and more: https://eggshelltherapy.com/podcast-blog/2026/03/29/nadja/

Many of the people I work with are highly intelligent, analytically sharp, and deeply uncomfortable with the idea of play. The word itself can feel faintly embarrassing, associated with self-indulgence. Doing something with no measurable output, no goal, no justification, tends to produce anxiety more than relief.
Nadja Rolli is a child psychotherapist and author who has spent her career working with play as a clinical and developmental tool. She walks through a five-stage model of play development, sensory, attachment, constructive, fantasy, and competitive, and what becomes clear is that many adults, particularly high-functioning ones, were pushed into achievement-oriented, competitive modes long before the earlier stages were properly lived through. The things that follow from that, needing to justify rest, struggling to lose without it feeling like something larger, being uncomfortable with open-ended unproductive time, are not personality quirks. They have a developmental logic.
We also get into how play connects to trauma repair, what attachment play looks like across a lifetime, why some people genuinely do not know what they enjoy anymore and what that points to, the historical reasons play came to be seen as dangerous or morally suspect, and what gets lost developmentally when children are moved too quickly into screens and competitive gaming before the earlier stages are inhabited.
The question underneath all of this is not really about whether you should play more. It is about whether you have ever genuinely felt entitled to exist outside of what you produce, and what it would mean to recover that.
Nadja Rolli is a child and adolescent psychotherapist based in London and the author of Can We Play Now?

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Trigger Warning: This episode may cover sensitive topics including but not limited to suicide, abuse, violence, severe mental illnesses, relationship challenges, sex, drugs, alcohol addiction, psychedelics, and the use of plant medicines. You are advised to refrain from watching or listening to the YouTube Channel or Podcast if you are likely to be offended or adversely impacted by any of these topics.

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