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FeedGiggle It Out
Local laughter advocates find a lot of benefits in a little chuckle.
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He was elderly, depressed and didn’t want to live. “He told me he was giving up,” says Irene Doniger, a registered nurse and psychologist practicing in King of Prussia. “So I told him it was time that we get goofy.”
Doniger put on a silly hat, and he smiled. Then she got him to laugh, but not by telling him a joke. Rather, Doniger suggested that he physically duplicate the state of laughter, without responding to anything funny. She did this by asking the question, “What do they say in Hawaii? Aloha, ha, ha!”
Is it silly? Certainly. Is it the kind of thing you might not want to do in public? Probably. But as a therapeutic tool that releases tension, raises the threshold of pain, encourages cooperation and banishes bad moods?
“Definitely,” Doniger says. “This patient refused to take antidepressants. After I got him to laugh and showed him some deep-breathing exercises, he said the good mood lasted for several days. It gave him back his ability to function socially, too. People who can laugh are more likely to listen to other people and react positively to another’s point of view.”
And not just with adults. A family whose members were emotionally estranged found they could at least listen to each other after a few deep belly laughs. “I had a child come in with anger issues. By getting him to laugh and showing him how to maintain that place within him where he could feel better, he found a way to keep his anger under control.”
A few minutes of laughter, Doniger says, can stimulate the release of endorphins that produce the “runner’s high” of aerobic exercise, raising the threshold of pain, improving breathing and blood circulation, enhancing joint flexibility, easing tension that can promote better behavior at home and work, and bringing on restful sleep.
As a kind of empirical proof, Doniger mentions a broken wrist she suffered a few years ago. “I tried laughing after my wrist was set,” she recalls, “and I didn’t have to take any of the pain medication I was prescribed.”
Then there was the heart attack she experienced. After feeling depressed about the illness, she investigated the use of laughter as a therapeutic tool. She has since used it with individual patients, group therapy and as a leader of the Laughter Club, whose participants have included business executives, bereavement groups, caregivers, high school students and the terminally ill.
“I don’t advocate laughter as a remedy for anyone, and if I’m working with someone who is on medication, I don’t suggest going off that medication,” Doniger says. “But there’s no doubt to me that laughter works on many levels.”
And that’s laughter without comedy and without laughing at anyone or anything. No joke.
About 50 years ago, journalist Norman Cousins made a very strong—and controversial—case for laughter as medicine with the publication of his bestselling memoir, Anatomy of an Illness. In the book, Cousins describes a fateful day in 1964 when he was told he had a paralyzing degenerative disease that would kill him in a few months. Cousins checked himself out of the hospital, took massive doses of Vitamin C, and watched Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy movies to bring on belly laughs and put himself in a better frame of mind. The result, according to Cousins, was less pain, full recovery of mobility, and an end to the degenerating symptoms.
Cousins’ story was made into two films, and his book has never gone out of print. It encouraged a trend in alternative medicines and psychosomatic therapies of which many in the medical profession remain skeptical. Cousins eventually died in 1990 at the age of 75, a full 26 years after he’d been diagnosed with a so-called fatal disease.
The role that laughter and emotions play in the treatment of illness remains controversial in medical science. And yet, enough evidence exists to suggest a correlation between mental attitude and general well-being. If it doesn’t always help, it certainly doesn’t hurt.
In 1995, Dr. Madan Kataria, a physician practicing in Mumbai, India, developed laughter yoga. Participants would meet in an outdoor setting, weather permitting, and combine the physical act of laughing with simple stretches and yoga breathing exercises. According to Kataria’s website, LaughterYoga.org, there are 6,000 groups practicing laughter yoga in 60 countries, including one in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia at Studio 1831.
