Keep Laughing — It’s Powerful Stuff

By Suzanne Phillips, Psy.D., ABPP

As humans we are one of a few species that laughs and we laugh from the time we are babies. Our laughter spans age, gender, language and culture. As humans we make each other laugh and we emotionally respond to laughter in others. It goes without saying that our laughing is contagious.  People are 30 times more likely to laugh in social situations than alone.

We have not only been laughing since biblical times – we have been reporting benefits to mind and body:

“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.” Proverbs 17:22

“You don’t stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop laughing.” Michael Pritchard

“Laughter is a necessity in life that does not cost much, and the Old Ones say that one of the greatest healing powers in our life is the ability to laugh.” Larry P. Aitken, Native American Chippewa Tribe

We now have scientific evidence that what we suspected is true – laughter is physically, psychologically, and interpersonally powerful stuff.

The Study of Laughter

Gelotology is the study of laughter and its effects on the body, from a psychological and physiological perspective.  Scientifically, laughter is defined as the physiological respo­nse to humor which consists of gestures and the production of a sound which our brain directs us to conduct simultaneously. When we laugh, changes occur in our brains and our bodies.

Physiological Benefits

Researchers have found that laughter relaxes skeletal and cardiovascular muscles. The rapid breathing associated with laughter increases oxygen level and improves respiratory function. Laughter has been described as “internal jogging for all the major organs.”

• Studies have found that laughter can improve clinical outcomes in disorders like asthma, cancer and heart disease by reducing the physiological stress response which exacerbates these conditions.
• A study that compared 10 men assigned to either one hour of laughter or quiet time where blood samples were taken pre-trail, during and afterward, reported that the “quiet time” group showed no change, whereas “the laughter group” demonstrated a decrease in stress hormones.
• A study that randomly assigned 40 participants to a humorous audiotape, a relaxation audiotape and a narrative audiotape found that laughter most significantly increased tolerance for pain.

Psychological Benefits

Laughter has been associated with reduction of stress, anxiety and improvement to mood, self-esteem and coping skills.

“If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.” Jimmy Buffet

Most folks can more than relate to these sentiments. All of us have our own version of America’s Funniest Home Videos for which laughter was the only thing left to do – the necessary stress release valve.

• When the kids all are hit with the stomach virus, the guests are arriving and the dog feels the need to run through the house to leave evidence of the crisis in every room, laughter becomes a way for horror, panic and helplessness to be released – harmlessly!
• Given the body-mind connection, the very act of laughter changes body chemistry to our advantage. When we laugh, our brain releases endorphins – the feel good hormones of serotonin and dopamine that foster a sense of well being.
• It’s not that we are suddenly thrilled – we are just able to get enough distance with a “You can’t make this up laugh,” to breathe and find a way to figure out the next step. Laughter is a resiliency tool for stress.

Interpersonal Connections

You may have had the experience of entering a room where people are laughing and before long you are laughing without even knowing why. It is connection without words.   Many researchers believe that the purpose of laughter is related to making and strengthening human connections.  The more laughter, the more bonding and the more laughter – this may account for the contagion in laughing. It gives us pause to wonder what is or isn’t happening in a family, an office – even a church where there is no laughter.

“As a general rule, the freedom of any people can be judged by the volume of their laughter.”
- Anonymous

Why We Laugh?

We know that although we all laugh, what we find funny can differ. It is often a function of age, gender, culture, experience and circumstance. Those studying laughter propose three theories for what we find humorous:

• Incongruity theory – we laugh when there are two thoughts or emotions put together that we don’t expect( the comedian who is trying to lose weight quickly by only eating fast food).
• Superiority theory – we laugh at what makes us feel superior  ( the dating debacles on our favorite sitcom).
• Relief Theory – we laugh at something that creates tension or stress that we spontaneously release in laughter (watching the bride and groom in a wedding video trip and fall off the altar into the fountain).

Cruelty Disguised as Laughter – when laughter is a cover for hostility, envy or disdain it is not funny. Laughing at the expense of someone else, at someone who doesn’t find it funny is assaultive– it creates stress and benefits no one.

“Laughter is the Shortest Distance between Two People” Victor Borge

Recently a woman, who together with her partner of many years has been trying to salvage a very devastated marriage, reported that  “Something different is happening – We are laughing. We never laughed.”

• Laughter is integral to intimacy because laughing means risking being emotionally touched by another.
• Laughter is intimate because it is transformative in physical and emotional ways.
• Laughter is a mutually shared moment in time.
• Laughter enhances connection -the insider joke, the hysterics shared in a place where no one else is laughing, embodies the feeling “We get each other and we are moved to laugh in a similar way.”
• Laughter is restorative. In the aftermath of trauma, anger or pain, the spontaneous mutual laugh at the baby covered with food or the pet redesigning the plants is physical connection. It is often the first step back.

“We cannot really love anybody with whom we never laugh.” Agnes Repplier

The value of laughter has become so recognized that it has been formerly offered as Laughter Therapy, Laughter Meditation, Humor Therapy and the World Laughter Tour. All promote the recognition and use of laughter as a personal coping skill, a resiliency factor and a therapeutic agent for physical, psychological and social well being.

Are You Making Use of The Benefits of Laughter?

Who makes you laugh? Who do you make laugh? It’s like sharing vitamins

Can you laugh at yourself? It actually equates to self-acceptance and forgiveness. If you can laugh when you find the cream cheese in the sock drawer – you know it’s going to be a good day.

Do you have a favorite and predictable source of laughter be it a sitcom, cartoon, radio show or website that gives you a daily dose of “aerobic humor?”

Can you find the humor in absurd situations? According to Erma Bombeck – If you can’t make it better, you can laugh at it.

Do you have reminders around you (calendars, screen savers, quotes etc.) that actually shift your mood and trigger laughter. Given the different arguments about what was edible in the refrigerator of one family, the mother posted a magnetized sign on the refrigerator door “If it walks out- Let it go.”

Do you look for opportunities to share something funny? Re-visiting and sharing situations or material that is funny to you generally invites sharing by others – it turns a group into a party. It turns an email into a back and forth chuckle.

Can you look toward your children as sources of genuine delight and laughter? A good laugh is sunshine in a house.

Do you appreciate the daily dose of laughter most pets provide? Dogs laugh back with their tails! Cats don’t let us know they are laughing.

Do you carry laughter everywhere you go? Try it.

Laughter Is An Inexhaustible Resource That We All Share.

Keep Laughing – It’s Powerful Stuff.

Aggressive Parenting May Harm Child’s Emotional Health

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on September 23, 2010

 

A new study underway hopes to determine whether or not grabbing a child firmly by the arm, yelling and repeatedly punishing him or her may lead to long-term mental health issues.

Researchers are studying how harsh parenting can impact the emotional development of a child. It is believed that harsh parenting methods may lead to anxiety disorders such as social phobia, separation anxiety and panic attacks.

“Several studies have shown that coercive parenting practices are linked to anxiety,” says Françoise Maheu, a professor at the Université de Montréal’s department of psychiatry and lead investigator of the study.

“We know that common practices such as spanking or excessive punishment do not instill a strong discipline. Quite the opposite, they have a lasting psychological impact on children.”

Maheu and her team are investigating specifically how the anatomy or physiology of the brain is affected by this parenting. They are in the process of recruiting 120 youths ages 12 to 17 years. These youths will be split into four groups according to two variables: their current anxiety symptoms and their parents’ current harsh parenting practices.

While doing behavioral tests, the children will be subjected to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), where their brain activity (cerebral activity) will be measured. Maheu will then be able to correlate brain activity with fear and anxiety.

“My hypothesis is that two specialized structures, the amygdala and the anterior congulate cortex, which form the neural fear circuit, play a role in mediating the anxiety associated with harsh parenting. We are investigating these structures because they are strongly associated with the processing of threat cues,” says Maheu.

“Investigating the links among harsh parenting, fear circuitry and anxiety in youths will provide key insights on the developmental neurobiology of harsh parenting and anxiety,” adds Maheu.

“Understanding this while individuals are young is crucial as it could lead to early interventions that would effectively interrupt a development trajectory early in its course, before anxiety becomes chronic.”

This article was edited to clarify the nature of the research to be undertaken.

Helping Students Understand Addition and Multiplication

By Leigh Pretnar Cousins, MS

Addition, multiplication and exponentiation (raising to powers) are related operations. 

Multiplication is repeated addition.

Exponentiation is repeated multiplication. 

Look at the photo to see what I mean.

Math is hierarchical. Skills build on top of other skills. In this way, math is similar to learning a foreign language. That basic vocabulary and simple rules and verb tenses you learn at the beginning are essential for your future fluency.

Matt and I see many students who are quite good at “the hard stuff,” the algebra and geometry that they are learning now in high school, but they can’t truly excel because they’re still struggling with earlier skills such as multiplication and fractions.

More often than not, kids wind up with weak math foundations because their elementary-school and middle-school learning didn’t progress at the same pace as did the school curriculum.

For example, many kids memorize their times tables without understanding what they are doing. Most kids can tell you that three times five equals fifteen. But do they know what that means?

Here’s a quick assessment to help you see what your student really knows about multiplication:

• Write a multiplication problem, say 5 x 3 = ?, on a piece of paper
• Your student should tell you the answer is 15
• Now ask the student to write a word problem to fit the equation.
• Kids with multiplicative thinking can write an appropriate story. There were five cats and each one caught three mice, how many mice is that?
• Kids who are still thinking additively write addition stories. There were five cats and three more cats arrived, how many cats are there now?

And here’s something students of any age (including adults) can practice, to increase math fluency, exercise your brain, and feel better about math!

• Take a multiplication fact. Let’s use 8 x 7 = 56
• Find as many different ways as you can to get that answer:
• 8 x 5 = 40 and 8 x 2 = 16, 40 + 16 = 56
• 10 x 7 = 70 and 2 x 7 = 14, 70 – 14 = 56
• 4 x 7 = 28, 8 x 7 is twice as much, so 28 x 2 = 56

Can you find some more?

Lessons from Life’s Final Moments

By Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D.

The message has been given over and over again by those who know that the final days or hours are near. Randy Pausch learned he had terminal cancer and stood up to give The Last Lecture at Carnegie Melon. In this lecture he told his class and eventually the world that “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” He spoke of recognizing being in the moment and taking advantage of it, because after all, at some point or another we may realize that we don’t have as much time as we think.

Morrie Schwartz was living his final days as a result of Lou Gehrig’s Disease. When Mitch Albom found out about this he spent every Tuesday with him learning the lesson that in this life you must learn to love yourself and those around you. He went on to write Tuesdays with Morrie.

It’s really interesting how western culture often doesn’t value our elderly – oftentimes where life’s lessons are held. We seem to get caught in a trance of automaticity and routine and life passes by without recognizing what’s most important.

One reason for this may be because of our denial of death. If you are a person who has someone close to you who has been dying or if it is yourself, you may notice many people not wanting to talk about it. Death makes people uncomfortable; it’s a reminder that we are all impermanent here.

This denial of death is one of the main culprits for not recognizing how precious life really is. When we avoid what we’re uncomfortable with, we close ourselves off to something very important.

I’ve quoted this before, but it’s a good reminder. Rumi says,

“Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.”

We can take a lesson from those who are dealing with the passing of life; things seem to become a lot clearer. All the erroneous baggage we carry seems to slide off as life’s essence emerges. Of course this doesn’t always happen, but enough of these stories have emerged that makes it worth paying attention to.

Randy’s and Morrie’s messages are not unique, it’s just that our minds make the snap judgment that it’s bad to have that reality in our awareness and so auto-pilot takes over and we avoid it. At the same time, we avoid seeing the wonders of everyday life.

We can learn from the fact that life is impermanent.

As author and meditation teacher Stephen Levine says, “If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?”

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction provides a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Pointers for a Broken Heart: How to Heal the Emptiness Within

By Gabrielle Gawne-Kelnar

These sandstone statues decorate the outside of a cathedral in Nuremburg, Germany. They’re the seven virgins of something-or-rather (my memory has faded out the details). And, after some crumbling of the facade, one of them is pointing to the place her heart used to be. It’s missing. Broken off. Gone. And now she stands with an emptiness, a square of pain that’s plainly visible. 

Have you ever felt like this before? Where some piece of you was missing?

Maybe you lost something, or someone, that just seemed to fit your life, completed it in a way that nothing else quite can, and made it (and you) feel whole. And now they’ve vanished.

What do you do? 

Sometimes the desire can be to try to recapture or re-create what existed beforehand. To will the clock to turn back. To re-build the city just as it was before it fell into ruin. (Interestingly, that’s actually what happened to this very cathedral in the photo. After the Second World War, all the old parts of this city centre were rebuilt almost precisely as they’d once stood before the bombs dropped; faithfully restored from town planning maps). Or perhaps, when faced with great pain or heartache, you just want it to stop. To ignore it. To turn away from it (maybe even run away). Or maybe your style is more to fill the hole, cover the void, block it all up with anything that’s distracting enough to work for a few minutes.

And all of these are potentially very valid ways of coping. Of just getting through it in whatever way you can, minute by minute. Yet maybe the statue is also pointing to another way.

For maybe there’s also a place for just standing there and really feeling the emptiness for a while. To acknowledge the shape of it. To honour it in some way, and to come to know it as another, perhaps equally valuable, part of your life. 

Michael Leunig (cartoonist, philosopher and ‘Australian Living Treasure’) seems to think so:

‘When the heart

Is cut or cracked or broken

Do not clutch it

Let the wound lie open

Let the wind

From the good old sea blow in

To bathe the wound with salt

And let it sting.

Let a stray dog lick it

Let a bird lean in the hole and sing

A simple song like a tiny bell

And let it ring.’

Perhaps all of this is simply about allowing more mindfulness in. What do you imagine that might be like? What sounds might you hear, if you just ‘let it ring’ for a while? And how might that cavernous space within you feel, if you stopped ignoring it or stuffing it full of distractions, and just let it resonate for a while with what is …?

Psyche Central - 1

Relationship Breakup Similar to Addiction Withdrawal

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on July 7, 2010 

 

Rejection by a romantic partner is a bitter pill. New research suggests the trauma is severe because love rejection affects primitive areas of the brain associated with motivation, reward and addiction cravings.

The study is published in the July issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology.

Lucy Brown, Ph.D., clinical professor in the Saul R. Korey Department of Neurology and of neuroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, is the corresponding author of the study. 

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers recorded the brain activity of 15 college-age adults who had recently been rejected by their partners but reported that they were still intensely “in love.”

Upon viewing photographs of their former partners, several key areas of participants’ brains were activated, including the ventral tegmental area, which controls motivation and reward and is known to be involved in feelings of romantic love; the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal/prefrontal cortex, which are associated with craving and addiction, specifically the dopaminergic reward system evident in cocaine addiction; and the insular cortex and the anterior cingulate, which are associated with physical pain and distress.

By tying these specific areas of the brain to romantic rejection, the research provides insight into the anguished feelings that can accompany a breakup, as well as the extreme behaviors that can occur as a result, such as stalking, homicide and suicide.

“Romantic love, under both happy and unhappy circumstances, may be a ‘natural’ addiction,” said Dr. Brown.

“Our findings suggest that the pain of romantic rejection may be a necessary part of life that nature built into our anatomy and physiology. A natural recovery, to pair up with someone else, is in our physiology, too.”