The Benefits of Laughter (Episode 89)

We have all heard that laughter is the best medicine.  Brent and Janis discuss the benefits of laughter not only on our physical and mental health, but also the benefits to our relationships and sense of connectedness with others.

Transcript:

Welcome to Life and Love Nuggets, where licensed therapist Brent and Janice Sharpe share how you can thrive in your life, your love, and your relationships. Hello, friends. Welcome to Life and Love Nuggets. Today, we're going to talk about just the benefits of laughter. It's pretty amazing as we've looked into this, just how powerful this is in our life. There's simply nothing like the sound of a child's laugh. It's so free and inhibited.

Kids find joy in the simplest of things. We talked about play. We talked about how kids lead us in that. This is certainly one of the joys of being grandparents is we get Instagram and text pictures and videos often of our grandkids just doing the funniest things and laughing. Just the warmth of it and the giggles. We get this wonderful inflow of all of that, the squeals from kids. Just yesterday, our son-in-law was, I don't know if he's still around, and had a video following this big trail.

He didn't know exactly what was going on until he came into this little teepee kind of thing. The two little boys were in there.

They were found. They had been hiding and seeking. They were found in just the squeals and the giggles. That's so cute. I just literally couldn't get enough of this. It's just such an amazing thing. Sometimes, we'll be sitting around.

It's a funny thing for us as grandparents. Sometimes, we'll be sitting around. Kids are in school. It's work week and everybody's busy. We go, we have not gotten anything today or yesterday from the kids. Where are our cute videos? What are they doing?

Don't they know we need this? Do they think they have a life or something? Exactly. That's when I send them the text. They go, are your kids still cute? That's kind of the cue. They're going to send me something.

In this crazy world that we are in, we need laughter. We need joy. We need hope. We're going to talk about laughter today, the benefits to our health, both physical and mental, and the benefit to our relationships. It's good for us. I found a quote by Brene Brown, who doesn't love Brene Brown. It's the only universal language I know of that wraps up joy and gratitude and love is laughter.

I believe in the healing power of laughter. I believe laughter forces us to breathe. I think laughter between people is a holy form of connection, of communion. It's the way you and I look at each other and without words say, I get exactly what you're saying. It's important to me. That's beautiful. We're going to start and just simply look at the benefits of laughter.

One of them is that it actually improves blood vessel function. These studies are really rather amazing. They really are. One study conducted at the University of Maryland found that laughter protects our cardiovascular health, acting as a protective factor against heart and brain diseases caused by insufficient blood flow. Is that not remarkable of what laughter can do and the impact it can have? As we go through these, it just gets better and better. Laughter also boosts our emotional health.

Stanford University found that laughter and a sense of humor in general activate the emotional reward centers in the brain. That releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter linked to those feelings of pleasure. It also increases our serotonin level that generate feelings of tranquility and calmness and it enhances the relief of endorphins, which help us cope with pain and can generate a state of euphoria. It actually increases your attractiveness, which is all of our goals in life, right? Increase our attractiveness constantly, but it obviously is important in the world to most of us in some ways. A study conducted at the University of Western Ontario said in dating, people are drawn to someone who makes them laugh. It helps break the ice.

It brings people closer together in social settings, making us and others just feel more at ease. Laughter reduces our stress and our anxiety levels. Laughter immediately improves our mood, producing a feeling of joy and relaxation. The chemicals produced, as I said earlier, when we laugh, help us deal with pain. And dozens of studies have revealed that humor helps build resilience. If we can laugh at ourselves and find humor around us, we are much more able to rebound from difficult circumstances or deal with difficult circumstances. And I think we know that intuitively.

I think that's why when you've had a really hard day, it's like, yeah, I don't want to watch anything serious. Let's watch a Seinfeld episode or let's watch The Neighborhood or something that makes us laugh because we want to feel better. You know, just thinking about at funerals, you know, there's such a difficult time, but oftentimes when somebody's able that knows the person so well is often is able to say some funny things about them and everybody laughs. You can just tell it's healing. It is.

And they join in. Yeah. Laughter helps us get better insight and can help with our problem solving. So when we're stressed, we get distracted. We aren't as creative or insightful and don't have that burst of creativity in ways that we would if we were not stressed. So studies have shown that to discover a brilliant solution to a problem, we need to be relaxed. And one study found that even just smiling, just purposely smiling increases our ability to see the bigger picture and be open to new possibilities.

Is that not amazing? So smiling and laughing help our focus as well. That's great. Laughter is good for our respiratory system. I guess that's obvious, but I was surprised when I read this for some reason. Laughter helps us breathe better and deeper. It's the simplest way to regulate our breathing and to cleanse our lungs.

A deep, prolonged laugh immediately increases heart and breathing rates as well as oxygen consumption. You know, we've talked about breathing exercises in the past and deep breathing helps us. It helps regulate us emotionally. It just helps in so many ways in our lives. So we can do it by laughing instead of the patterns that we 4-4-4. Laughter helps us in all kinds of relationships. We had very strong-willed four, very strong-willed children and just some of the, just their wills kind of fighting against each other.

Just getting them up dressed out of the house could be a challenge. And we just found that making up silly songs or jokes just often ease the tension and it just helped so much better get everybody going the same direction. Yeah. Laughter is good for our marriage. One study showed that how important laughter was in keeping that kind of giddy boyfriend, girlfriend, you know, kind of being in love kind of feeling um, for, for consistent passion in a relationship. Laughter is essential. Yeah. You know, Brent, as, as we mentioned in one of the studies that you just mentioned, how many times have we heard couples say to us when we say, what drew you to your partner?

Oh, he makes me laugh or she's so funny. We have those jokes when we're dating. We have funny things we share with each other and we laugh a lot when we're dating. And yet as time goes on, it's so easy to stop joking, to stop laughing and to get serious. There's a quote from Balzac. I read it as a quote. I didn't read a lot of deep balls at when you get older, you don't stop laughing, but stopping laughing makes you grow older.

If we aren't laughing and joking with each other, it's both, I think a symptom and a contributor to what I call turning into old people. We don't want to be old married people. We don't want to settle for that. And there's a saying, this is, it doesn't mean that we don't want to be married when we're old, but you know what we mean by old married people. We just, you know, a couple that's sitting in, you know, corresponding recliners, 10 feet away from each other all evening, staring at a television or something and have no connection, barely talk to each other. And so yes, we can, um, we're almost into 47 years here. So we're, we're enjoying the journey even though we're old people. Yes. Yes. So there's a saying that says people who laugh together last together.

And I think that's true. So to cultivate a good marriage, we need to laugh together, but not at each other's expense. This is not being critical in a passive aggressive way. This isn't saying anything that hurt the other person, but to just laugh over simple things like recalling funny moments that we've had together or talking about positive experiences that we've had, what we were like, you know, we say sometimes we were young and dumb when we got married, but you know what? It worked. It's sharing silly jokes or having our own special inside jokes that nobody else knows about. We have one funny situation that will go to our grave without telling anybody, but all we have to do is add it and we will both crack up.

So laughter creates a sense of connectedness and it helps us treasure this relationship because of our shared joy and our shared experiences. Yeah. So we do have another funny that we will share. We've got lots of funnies. We may have shared this one before, but we've talked about trout. We love to travel. And so we've got a lot of funny stories from traveling and situations that we just were unaware of, you know, that we were not playing for things that had happened that we look back on that are just funny and they're just, and so gosh, this has been over 35 years ago.

Now, the very first time we went to Paris we had this idea of we were in England and we were, this was before the channel people. So if you know we were again, we're it's been a while. And so we took a ferry across from Dover to Calais, France and hopped on a train and we were trying to figure out, no, this is when we went again, no internet folks. So this is when we had one of these little books on traveling in Europe on $25 a day or something like that. So we didn't have an itinerary really planned. And we, you were able, cause you had, you knew enough French that you were able to get on the phone. It took us about five minutes to figure out how to phone worked first of all.

And you were able to call and make a reservation at a hotel on the West bank in Paris. And, and so we felt pretty confident. They said, get off at this subway station. And so, and so we hopped on the train and we calculated how long we thought it would take. We thought we'd get in at, you know, I don't know, six or seven o'clock or something like that. I think you can now. It took like forever.

And we get into the train station at like 11 o'clock, 10 o'clock. And, you know, everybody, you get on the subway, got on the subway. And, you know, there was not as many people around 10 30, you know, in the subway area. And so again, never been on a subway before, certainly not in Paris and trying to figure out, looking at a map, how to get off, you know, we get off and everything. And so we're just like these American tourists. I mean, we have these hard, you know, these suitcases, American tourists are hard, you know, again, 35 years ago. And to top it off, it was may.

And so we went in Oklahoma may close. So we had on bright cottons and, you know, white pants and everything. And it was freezing. Yes. And so no backpacks, no, anything like that. Okay. So we had all these hard case suitcases lugging around.

So we're going through the terminals and getting the subway station and, you know, got alcoholics over here, urinating on the wall. It was just, we're like, oh dear, what have we gotten ourselves into here? So we get up, we're standing, waiting on the, on the subway, the subway to come. And, and all of a sudden these gangs come up, one on our side, they were, they were dressed in American baseball uniforms, opposing teams, had their bats with them. And they're screaming at each other across from, across the train tracks. And we're, we're sitting there going, oh my, we are going to die.

We're from Oklahoma. We don't see these things in our parts.

Oh my gosh. Oh, it's terrifying. It was terrifying. They were screaming, screaming, screaming at each other. We, you know, we didn't know what was going to happen. They didn't turn on that. I mean, right.

We didn't know what was going to happen. So all of a sudden, the sub comes, the subway comes and we hop on and felt some relief and, and then found our, um, exit. A nice station. Yeah. And walked up and it was a beautiful Paris evening and families with their little kids. Cause they eat late there. It got dark late and, and very peaceful and very amazing.

And didn't feel another threat the whole time. But we lived through the first day. Yeah. Now that was kind of a scary kind of slash funny thing. As we look back on a bit, oh my gosh, what a story. But anyway, just the idea of that. Yes. We can laugh over it. Yes. And laughing is good for us, you know, but to laugh deeply, it really requires us letting go.

It's not taking ourselves or our lives too seriously. It's more like being kids. Um, it's to live open-handedly and not grasping and striving for life as we think it should be, or this should happen. It's really trusting God that he is with us in this and we can relax with a simple trust as a child. I can laugh as a child. You know, I can be at peace. I can find joy in the things around me and enjoy in my father.

Cause I know that he's going to take care of the hard whether it's in the right timing that I wanted to be or in the right way. I know he's going to take care of me. And so I can enjoy the simple things of life and I can experience laughter for a lot of my clients. Um, you know, especially those that have gone through loss of a spouse, either through death or fruit through divorce. I use the scripture Proverbs 31 25 that says she is clothed in strength and dignity. She can laugh at the days to come. We can laugh because we know that God's got us that we can trust him.

But laughter is like a lot of things in our lives. You know, we spontaneously laugh when we're feeling peaceful and relaxed and joyful, but sometimes we have to be intentional. We have to be intentionally smiling or laughing or looking for things that make us smile or laugh that help us relax so that we can laugh more. So I have a very embarrassing story. And, um, it made sense to me as I was researching laughing, it really made sense to me when we went to Iona a couple of years ago in Scotland. Some of you heard our podcast with Tracy Balzer on Iona. Um, you know, we had such a great time.

It's so peaceful. And I was sitting there at dinner one night and there was a picture that was over a painting that was over the fireplace of the dining room. And there was a young couple that was with us and they know us, but they knew me as Pastor Janice. They didn't know me as, you know, pretty much a person, silly, funny, yes. And so we're sitting there at dinner and I lean over and I seriously look at him and I go, Hey guys, I really want the painting that's over the fireplace. And they were like, Oh, okay. I said, so if you could like sneak down tonight, I think if you take it off the wall, I don't know that you'll have to cut it out.

I think you can pull it out and just roll it up and I'll get it to tomorrow or something so that I can take it home. And they were like, ha ha ha. And I'm like, no, I really, I really do want it. So so probably tonight would be a good time. And then they just looked at me kind of funny. And and then I brought it up again later. And the look on their face, I started laughing so hard.

I literally could not stop because it was so shocking to them because I try to keep as straight a face as possible. I laughed so hard. It was embarrassing. And I could not stop. And people were like, what is she drinking?

And I can't even drink alcohol. Not only do I not drink it, I can't even drink it. But I realized as we were doing some research on this, it's because it was one of the most relaxed times I have ever been in my life. I was fully relaxed and I was ready to play and have fun. So I was playing a joke on them. So wonderful. It was great.

So if all of these benefits are true, then how do we increase this in our life? Because we live in a kind of a troubled world, you know, so we have to actually cultivate laughter. It's not just going to happen automatically every day of our lives. I, you know, I think about just our bodies being made strong, you know, I mean, for used to be that most people would do some manual labor and they kept their bodies strong. Well, in the modern world, most of us don't do that every day. So we have to purposely make, take effort to strengthen ourselves so we don't become weak. Because if we're weak, then it's even harder to make ourselves exercise, to become strong.

So it's similar in the pressures of world, this constant sense of kind of gloom and doom just by the scrolls. If you watch the news or social media, which were, you know, hopefully people are minimizing that, you know, in their life. But, you know, news is news because it's sensationalized in some way and, you know, and it catches people and it can take the joy out of your life. And so how do we in the midst of that, how do we purposely work these joy muscles, these laughter muscles or hope muscles or trust in God muscles? And it takes effort even when we don't feel like it. So how do we do the things that can actually build our laughter and joy muscles? Well, one of the interesting things I found in studying some of this was that gratitude is really linked towards laughter. For sure.

And so it's really practicing gratitude intentionally. It's it's writing it down. It's talking about the things that we're grateful for. And sometimes we have to keep writing things down over and over again, but not just the basics.

I'm thankful for my family. I'm thankful for my house. But really, I'm thankful for just the funny things that the grandkids did or looking for a variety of things that that you're grateful for and thinking about and writing down the things that make you smile and that are funny. Looking around for funny things, pictures, comics, greeting cards that somebody has given you that make you laugh, keeping those around to look at them. I always love it when they come out in the news with the release of the finalist in the funniest wildlife pictures. You always see the funniest pictures and they just make me smile or they make me laugh. You know, figuring out what funny movies or TV shows or books or magazines or comedy videos that make you laugh.

It's important to have those around. So if you need a humor boost, if you need to relax, that you can do something like that. I look at jokes, joke websites and silly videos online. You can listen to humorous podcasts. You can go to a comedy club, but you don't want something that is cynical or critical. Anything that feeds cynicism, that's going to defeat the purpose. We want something that it may be stupid, but it gives you a really deep belly laugh that you really, really enjoy.

And then laugh at the things in our daily lives. You know, when you watch a movie and there's somebody in the movie and a string of things go wrong in their day, you start laughing at it after a while. It's like, oh, my gosh, what else can happen? And so the next time we're late to work and you spill mocha all over your car and then you realize your socks don't match or you have two different earrings in, let yourself laugh about it instead of like, oh, what is wrong with me? Let yourself laugh and go. There's days like this. We used to sing with our kids when they'd have a bad day.

Mama says there'll be days like this. Just laugh at those things as you would at a movie. I remember one time. It's been years ago, but I went to work all day long and then I had a women's meeting that night and I got home and looked in the mirror and my earrings matched. But apparently one of my earrings had gotten caught on another earring. And so it was hanging off the second earring. So I had one normal earring and the other one had an accessory to it.

Nobody says fashion. I know I was so far ahead of everyone.

I mean, I didn't notice. And nobody said anything to me all day. I couldn't help but laugh. Yeah. Yes, I did that. Yes. You know, there's actually laughter yoga.

That people kind of practice laughing as a group. And that's obviously a bit forced at first, but it just seems to kind of take hold and kind of spontaneous leads to spontaneous laughter. Again, simple, just being very intentional about this. They did this one study that still just boggles my mind. They said, if you if you took a pen and put it in your mouth, like you had a cigar in your mouth or something, clenched your teeth on it. It's just neutral. They don't find there's any change in mood or anything.

But if you turn it sideways where it makes you smile. It actually actually they found that actually changes your mood because it kind of for now you're not even. Intentionally thinking about anything funny, but just by this, the muscles in your mouth moving in the shape of a smile increases mood. It's telling your brain you're happy. And so I just it's amazing what our body can do if we can help it, you know. And then these days with the pen, you want to use a hand sanitizer on it before you stick it in your mouth. I have to make a disclaimer.

Thank you very much. Obviously, spend time with people that make you laugh. I always tell people, be just be careful with who you're around. Yeah. You know what influence we generally become like those that we're around. And and if people have certain negative attitudes or pull down, it doesn't mean we don't want to care for the world and go try to influence others in a positive way. But I have a few friends that just are good laughers.

You know, they just are funny and they, you know, I make help me laugh easy. And I just I find myself sometimes craving for that because I can I can tell it's because I've. Just we know we deal with a lot of serious stuff all the time and life is just becomes really heavy. And so I really need those inspirations at times. And so you've already mentioned this, but sharing funny stories and listening to those looking for jokes to share. Now, again, being very careful, we don't want to use it in an inappropriate way or any kind of hurtful way of any kind. But, you know, there are some people that use real sarcastic humor that's really cutting and hurtful. And. That's not what we're talking about here, you know, and so we want pure, simple, simple laughter. Yeah. So laughter is good for us physically, mentally, emotionally.

It helps us connect with other people and it helps us in our marriage. Laughter helps connect and reconnect our family, even when our kids are grown. I think maybe especially with our kids are grown for sure. And laughter can be healing. I don't know if we've told this story or not, but many years ago, when our son Spencer was little, there's a lot of Spencer stories that we share. He was little and we would go on family vacations. And this was before we could afford to have a car that had a video TV.

Yeah, that's right. Yes. Video screen for our kids. So everybody is reading or doing something. And Spencer would get to the point where he just kind of got restless and he had these two puppets, Barry, which was a bear and Lionel, which was a lion. And we'd all be just riding along. And all of a sudden you'd have Barry come on one side and Lionel come on the other side and go, hey, what are you doing?

And it was like Spencer, but Barry and Lionel up. And then we'd hear, mom, Spencer has Barry and Lionel out.

Tell him to stop. It was so obnoxious, funny and wonderful and obnoxious. And it really was. And so a number of years ago at Christmas, I did a funny thing of just saying I'm bequeathing family heirloom. To different people. And so I gave this box to his wife and said, this is the family heirloom that I'm sharing with you. And she opens it and it's Barry and Lionel.

So we got a good laugh over that. But then years after that, we we were up in Colorado. The whole family was there for my sister's memorial service. She had just died and we were there for her memorial service. It was it was a very tough day for me. It was getting weepy. It was just really, really difficult.

And we had rented a big Airbnb for all the family to be together. And so we were back and we were sitting around the table and we were eating pizza. And I was just kind of sitting there. And all of a sudden, Barry came on one side and Lionel came on the other side. And I died laughing that he would bring those to Colorado and that he knew that would crack me up. And I just needed that burst of joy. And so it was a situation that felt very healing and very positive.

So God's given us this gift that we need to cultivate, you know, so as we go today, I think about how do you cultivate laughter in your life so that we can enjoy the journey regardless of the circumstances around us? We can't control those. We can't we can't change those. But we actually do have the ability to to change how we are interacting with each day. And so we trust that you'll grab a hold of some idea here that you might be able to enjoy the journey at a greater level. So go in peace today. Blessings as you go.

The Life and Love Nuggets podcast is a 501 C3 nonprofit and is supported by gifts from people like you to donate, go to Life and Love Nuggets dot com slash donate. This podcast is produced by Clayton Creative in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The content should not be considered or used for counseling, but for educational purposes only. The Life and Love Nuggets Podcast is a 501 C3 nonprofit and is supported by gifts from people like you to donate, go to Life and Love Nuggets dot com slash donate.