 “Let the surgeon take care to regulate the whole regime of the patient’s life for joy and happiness, allowing his relatives and special friends to cheer him, and by having someone tell him jokes. The surgeon must rebel against anger, hatred, and sadness in the patient and remind him that the body grows fat from joy and thin from sadness.” - Henri de Mondeville It is true that laughter is the best medicine. Many studies prove it conclusively. It actually helps boost the immune system, lowers blood pressure, helps muscles to relax, and can drastically reduce stress. Doctors say that laughter increases our tolerance for pain and helps speed the healing process. According to psychologists, having a sense of humor aids your mental health, as well. Having a well-honed sense of humor enables you to see the funny side of problems, which in turn causes you to see the more positive side of life and health. Being optimistic and happy and having a sense of fun brings out the more courageous aspects of a person. When it comes to battling illness, having a sense of humor makes it easier to bear. Seeing the lighter side of life gives you a completely different outlook and improves your attitude in life. A sense of humor makes adversities easier to bear. It aids us by making it easier to move forward even in the face of difficulties. Think of a bamboo tree in the middle of the storm. Having a sense of humor makes you more likely to bend than to break when confronted by life’s storms. Laughter releases energy that makes you feel good. Besides making you feel good physically, it also blows the cobwebs away and helps you to think more clearly. Laughing every day can help rid of depression and sadness. The person with good mental health has better self-esteem and is more sociable and comfortable around others. A happy person is usually instrumental in creating warm and compassionate families. A good mental health allows a person to bounce back from traumatic events more easily and quickly. A good sense of humor can bring this all about. The ability to laugh easily is a wonderful gift that you must nurture. So, what can laughter do for you physically?
Because of laughter, you feel more cheerful and happy. This is a side effect of endorphins produced in your body. Laughter releases endorphins in the pleasure centers of your brain, which give you a feeling of natural high. When you encounter a problem or an illness, you tend to focus on that issue to the detriment of your mind and body. Whenever you have a problem, it is uppermost in your mind and takes over your thoughts and energy. It can make you sad, lethargic, and depressed. Laughter enables you to push aside the problems you might be facing, whether it is emotional or physical. It redirects your focus away from the problem and lifts your spirits. Laughter leads you to a higher plane where you can experience hopefulness, pleasant thoughts, and happiness. While you are laughing, you banish those problems albeit temporarily. It provides respite from negative emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, or depression. When you laugh, you raise yourself above all that and breathe in air, which results to a clear mind. Suddenly, the sun is shining and hopefulness returns. It is a wonderful feeling that you can reproduce any time you want, just by simply laughing. Laughter can actually improve your quality of life. If you are feeling blue, put on a movie. Stay away from drama and pop in a great comedy. Have fun, laugh with abandon, and enjoy the moment. Forget about everything else and just concentrate on the movie and the fun you are having. The well-known publisher and editor, Norman Cousins, had a personal experience with the healing power of humor. His doctors diagnosed him with a degenerative spinal condition brought about by a type of endocrine imbalance caused by tension and frustration. The prognosis was that he only had five hundred to one chance of survival. He decided that since negative emotions had damaged his endocrine system, maybe positive emotions could help repair it. He left the hospital and checked in to a hotel. He literally barricaded himself and watched all the humorous movies that he could get his hands on. He watched reruns of the Candid Camera, Marx Brothers movies, and everything else he could find that would make him laugh. While watching, he discovered that laughter helped ease the pain caused by his illness. He discovered that ten minutes of good belly laugh would give him two hours of pain-free sleep. He proved that laughter really is the best medicine, for within a few years, the doctors pronounced him completely cured! How does laughter reduce the pain you feel? Laughter provides momentary distraction from the pain and this makes you feel better. The endorphins entering your blood stream give relief from the pain. It is also because your muscles relax when you are laughing. Laughter also helps you with your breathing. Normal breathing leaves stale air in your lungs. When you are feeling stressed, your breathing pattern is shallow. This prevents oxygen from coming into your lungs and causing more stale air to build up along with water vapor and carbon dioxide. This can lead to upper respiratory infections and serious breathing problems. Nurses discovered this problem in hospitals, while trying to encourage patients to breathe more deeply. To address this, they let patients watch comedy videos. The resulting belly laughs clear the lungs of stale air, carbon dioxide, and water vapor; allowing oxygen-rich and life-giving air in. Your sense of humor provides the ability to see changes in your life as merely challenges rather than traumatic events. People with a well-developed sense of humor are more successful in coping up with adversities. More often than not, they feel more in control. Humor can help you rise above anger, fear, or loneliness. Laughter makes you feel that you can handle anything and are in control. Humor makes you feel hopeful again. The more you laugh and smile, the more you experience that energy you need to make your life better and happier. You acquire the will to live stronger. The best part is that it is never too late to develop that all-important sense of humor. It is all in the attitude. For the sake of your health, both physical and mental, it is essential that you develop your own unique sense of humor. Practice it every day. It is not enough just to spend time with humorous friends and family. It is not enough to read humorous literature and collect funny stories and jokes. In order to benefit from the healing effects of humor and laughter, you must be a practitioner, as well. You should develop that sense of humor and practice it every day. Change your attitude about life and see the funny side. Conscientiously do these and you will immediately notice the big difference. Events and traumas in life will not break you; you will be more flexible when a crisis occurs. You will bend and bounce back faster rather than break. Pat yourself on the back when you have good days, where you just laugh away your troubles, smile through the day, and even help others laugh and smile, too. The real trick is to still see the funny side, continue to smile and laugh, be playful and happy even if you have a bad day. Everyone has occasional bad days. Sometimes you may not feel like smiling when life is busy throwing more than you can handle. How do you handle stressful times? Do you yell and scream? Do you cry? Do you moan and groan, and talk about how unfair life is? How is that working for you? For starters, walk away from the source of the stress. Leave the room. Read something humorous, have a friend tell you a joke, or go online and find the joke of the day. Try Google.com for some sources. You can even have jokes sent to your email inbox every day. You need to find something funny just to get you started. I know it sounds crazy, but that one laugh could make all the difference in your day. Using humor to get through the bad days can save your life. Laughing will lower your blood pressure right away. You will feel calm and see things more clearly. Whatever the source of stress is, it is not important enough to endanger your health. Sometimes, simple things in your job cause stress. Others feel down if they have problems involving their spouse and children. Some worry over financial problems. For the sake of your health, it is important that you focus on the positive emotions. In this case, you need to feel the effects of laughter. In 1980, Dr. Franz Ingelfinger, the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, stated that 85% of all human illnesses are curable by the body’s own healing system. You have complex molecules in your body and these are called neuropeptides. This is how your brain cells and body cells communicate with one another. All your body cells have receptors that receive these messages all the time. The neuropeptides change every day depending upon your emotional health. Therefore, your emotional health can work for you or against you. Studies repeatedly show that positive emotional health has an enormous bearing on your physical health, so it is important that you maintain a positive focus as much as possible. This is where laughter and humor come in. Laughter reduces the stress hormones. These are the ‘fight or flight’ hormones and adrenaline is one of these. These hormones can be useful. By allowing the buildup of hormones without release, you are creating havoc to your health. Anything that can reduce these hormones on a regular basis is good for you. If you go on with life building up these stress hormones, you are severely damaging your immune system. Your body also has immunoglobulins, which protect your body against upper respiratory infections like colds and flu. Research has shown that laughter can increase these infection fighters. To put it simply, laughter can flip the switch that turns on these immunoglobulins to make them work more efficiently to heal your body and prevent the occurrence of infections. The study goes on to show that just watching an hour or so of comedy on television can flip the switch for the system. However, the same study shows that if you experience stress after watching comedy, you counteract all the good effects of the fun that you had while watching. People with better-developed sense of humor bring in more laughter in their lives and have a better-developed immune system, too. “The simple truth is that happy people generally don’t get sick,” this is according to Dr. Bernie Siegel, M.D. The study also shows that the group of people, who have well-developed sense of humor and used humor every day to battle stress, did not encounter problems with their immune systems. Candace Pert, American neuroscientist and pharmacologist tells us, “The chemicals that are running through our body and our brain are the same chemicals that are involved in emotion. And that says to me that…we’d better pay more attention to emotions with respect to health.” Laughter may be the answer to high blood pressure, arthritis, strokes, and ulcers. It may even be instrumental in reducing the risk of heart disease. Research has linked heart disease to emotions such as depression, stress, anxiety, and anger. One significant research from the University of Maryland Medical Center shows that having a good sense of humor and being able to laugh even in the midst of stressful events can help reduce the effects of those damaging emotions. In the study mentioned above, they also discovered that people diagnosed with heart disease are forty percent less likely to laugh compared with people without heart disease. Perhaps we should take to heart the advice of Voltaire who said, “The art of medicine consists of keeping the patient amused while nature heals the disease.” “Humor is just another defense against the universe.” - Mel Brooks |
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