Medicine's Secret Weapon: Laughter

The old adage Laughter is the best Medicine is truer than true. Who doesn't love a good laugh??!!

I love listening to the children laugh together at the kitchen table when they're playing a board game. I love hearing the great belly laughs coming from my aunts and uncles at a family reunion over shared old stories or new. And I love listening to my mother laugh, especially when she has to walk away from the phone to catch her breath. My children love watching Poppa turn three shades of red or even purple when something has just hit his funny bone so it is beyond tears!!! It's like they are amazed they said something so profound to have actually left their father in stitches!

Evidence shows that, aside from making you feel good at the moment, laughter also has surprising long-term health benefits. Who doesn't like being supported by science with something you were doing anyway!

Health Benefits of Laughing

In the book Anatomy of an Illness, author Norman Cousins discusses his diagnosis of a crippling and irreversible spine disease. With the help of his physician, however, Cousins beat the odds by using his own healing powers, which included laughter. He watched Marx Brothers comedies and enjoyed entire pain-free intervals that came as a result of indulging in sheer amusement. In this way, he mobilized his body’s natural resources to prove what an effective healing tool the mind can be.
Laughing has the ability to simply help you feel good. A good roar relieves physical tension and relaxes muscles for up to 45 minutes. It triggers a rush of those all-important endorphins that follow a good workout. This explain why people love to attend parties. Such occasions are especially enjoyable once someone starts telling jokes.
Here are few more benefits of laughing:

• Lowers blood pressure, thereby protecting the heart.
• Increases vascular blood flow and oxygenation of the blood.
• Gives a workout to the diaphragm and to the abdominal, respiratory, facial, leg and back muscles. It contracts the abs and even works out the shoulders, leaving muscles more relaxed afterward. It even provides a good workout for the heart.
• Reduces certain stress hormones, including cortisol, epinephrine (adrenaline), dopamine and growth hormone. It also increases the level of health-enhancing hormones like endorphins and neurotransmitters.
• Increases the response and effectiveness of anti-body producing cells and such tumor- and disease-killing cells such as Gamma-interferon and T-cells, thus keeping the immune system humming.
• Defends against respiratory infections-even reducing the frequency of colds by increasing immunoglobulin in saliva.
• Increases memory and learning, as demonstrated by a study from Johns Hopkins University Medical School; humor during instruction was shown to increase test scores.
• Improves alertness, memory and creativity.
• Laughter brings the focus away from anger, guilt, stress and negative emotions in a more beneficial way than other mere distractions.
• Humor can give us a more lighthearted perspective and help us view events as 'challenges', thereby making them less threatening and more positive. 
• Laughter provides a physical and emotional release.

Studying Laughter

According to William Fry, M.D., of Stanford University, humor and creativity work in similar ways by creating relationships between two disconnected items. The whole brain is thus engaged, which is a process that occurs quickly. Less than a half-second after exposure to something funny, electrical waves move through the higher brain functions of the cerebral cortex. The left hemisphere analyzes the words and structures of the joke, while the right hemisphere “gets” the joke. Similarly, the visual sensory area of the occipital lobe creates images; the limbic (emotional) system makes you happier; and the motor sections make you smile or laugh.

A Little Advice

If care is pressing you down a bit, and you’ve found yourself struggling to find humor in everyday life, the first place to start is with smiling. Pioneers in “laugh therapy” even find it’s possible to laugh without experiencing a funny event, and the same is true of smiling. When you see someone or something even mildly pleasing, practice smiling.

Or try counting your blessings. Considering the good things in your life will distance you from negative thoughts that are barriers to humor and laughter. When you hear laughter, move toward it. Sometimes humor is a private thing, but more often people are happy to share something funny because it gives them the opportunity to laugh again and feed off the humor you find in it.

Spend time with fun. Hang around playful people who laugh easily at both themselves and life’s absurdities. Their playful points of view and laughter will be contagious. Watch a truly funny movie! There's no shortage of laughter opportunities from entertainment.

Laughter connects us with others. Just as with smiling and kindness, most people find that laughter is contagious, so if you bring more laughter into your life, you can most likely help others around you to laugh more, and realize these benefits as well. By elevating the mood of those around you, you can reduce their stress levels, and perhaps improve the quality of social interaction you experience with them, reducing your stress level even more! 

For me, I'll just go visit with my kids....