If you’re as old as I am, you’ll remember “Laughter is the Best Medicine” was the name of the humor column in Reader’s Digest.
It was good advice 50 years ago and it’s even better advice, backed by science, today.
In today’s world, it’s probably the redeeming value of Facebook, where I can count on at least one belly laugh there for every five minutes I miserly allot to it.
Yet, science is increasingly showing us that laughter has wide-ranging health benefits, including:
- It relaxes your entire body: A belly laugh relieves muscle tension and keeps your body relaxed for 45 minutes or more.
- It lowers stress hormone levels. Loma Linda University researchers found that subjects who were just told they were going to see a funny movie lowered levels of their stress hormones cortisol by 67%.
- It increases production of immune cells and infection-fighting antibodies, improving disease resistance.
- It relieves pain through the release of the brains’ natural painkillers called endorphins and it creates a distraction from pain.
- It reduces blood pressure. While laughing may momentarily cause blood pressure to rise, a good belly laugh will result in an hour or more of blood pressure that has dropped by 5 points or more and for those who laughed daily, the decrease was long-lasting.
- It tones your abs by expanding and contracting stomach muscles.
- It improves heart health. It gets your heart pumping and at least one study shows that a good prolonged laugh burns about the same number of calories per hour as walking at a slow to moderate pace.
And—I’m entitled to add this one based on personal experience: Regularly indulging in laughter simply makes you happier.
I’ve even seen one study that says the laughter doesn’t have to be genuine–fake laughter will actually lift your mood almost as well as the real thing.
And if you’ve ever engaged in laughter therapy, you’ll know that the initial fake laughter inevitably dissolves into real guffaws in short order.
Beyond its effects to improve health, laughter can have some mysterious healing effects that modern medicine has yet to explain.
Case in point: Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review magazine, diagnosed in the early ‘70s with ankylosing spondylitis, an enormously painful arthritis of the spine.
Unsatisfied with the medical profession‘s pronouncement that he would die in short order in huge pain, Cousins famously signed himself out of the hospital, checked himself into a hotel and laughed himself healthy with a library of old Marx Brother movies and mega doses of vitamin C. If you’d like to know more, he documented his recovery in the book and movie Anatomy of an Illness.
The bottom line: Cousins lived another 26 years, with no further signs of his illness, leaving his doctors baffled.
