Did you know that on average, babies laugh 300-400 times a day and adults only 17.5 times? The competitor in me read this and thought; game on little humans, I’m going to chuckle all day…
Whilst it may be difficult for the average adult with three kids, a business to run and relationships to nurture to find the time to laugh, I was more than up to the task. I committed to laughing often and fully, for at least a week. The only problem was I forgot to keep count. I have no idea if my diaphragm was spasming more often than a kid’s. I can report that a silly grin was often affixed to my face.
However, something magical happened when I made a concerted effort to find the funny side of things. Life felt measurably easier and fun. The longer I made the effort to laugh, the easier it became. People seemed to be more inclined to help. Opportunities began to fall at my feet.
Freud believed that laughter was a means of taking one’s mind of common stressors, that it acted like a release valve. This makes sense to me, as the funniest jokes are often about taboo subjects. It’s almost as if the tension in a joke is as integral to its humour as its punchline. What I found in my week of concerted giggles was that the annoying stuff, the bad stuff still happened – I just found a way to reframe it. I didn’t dwell or wallow in it. Laughter helped me to move through it and therefore past it.
There’s a neuroscientist at MIT called John Gabrielli. He does neuroimaging studies to explore how the brain works. He showed people a picture of a patient in hospital and told them to imagine they were the person in the picture and that their death was imminent. He then did a functional MRI to find out which parts of the brain lit up.
He discovered that in this scenario, there was increased activity at the left amygdala which is the part of the brain responsible for processing negative emotions. He then showed the same picture and told them to imagine it was them in hospital almost fully recovered, just needing a little more rest till you can be released from hospital. The functional MRI in the second scenario showed increased frontal cortex activity (the part of the brain that we use to make considered decisions and problem solve) and decreased amygdala firing.
This is a process they called Conscious Reappraisal. It represents the idea that what makes us emotional is not the situation we are in but the way we think about it.
The important thing to note is that this can work in both directions; spiralling up or spiralling down. What I found in my week of chuckles was that humour is a beautiful way to gain a clear perspective on our worries. Often, it’s not the actual problem but our attitude to it, that makes all the difference. In a world where we are often trying to botox away any lines that betray our aging process, I’m going to hold onto my laughs lines, and even make a conscious effort to deepen them.
