Laughter - A free medicine and a relaxant
It is medicine, it is free, and anyone can produce it anywhere at any time. What is it? Laughter.
All you need for your brain to send a signal to the body to laugh is to hear a good joke, be tickled, have nice people around you or experience a funny situation. “Then the reward system is switched on,” is how Michaela Schaeffner of the European Professional Association for Laughter Yoga and Humour Training describes the impulse to laugh that triggers a chain reaction.
An entire cocktail of happiness hormones flows through the body.
Serotonin, dopamine and the “cuddle chemical” oxytocin, which plays a role in breastfeeding and sex, are thought to be released. The body goes into relaxation mode, Schaeffner said. Deep abdominal breathing ensues, pain tolerance can increase and blood pressure can drop.
Laughter’s effects on the body are largely hypothetical because clinical studies of them have been few. The influence of feel—good endorphins, for example, is unproven.
“They’re so ephemeral that you’d have to amuse test persons with a cannula stuck in a vein and simultaneously measure the concentration of these neurotransmitters. That’s tricky,” remarked Carsten Niemitz, a human biologist at the Free University of Berlin. Not much is known about the processes that take place in the brain, either, since the body movements during laughter make magnetic resonance imaging impossible.
Laughter is akin to strenuous manual labour. More than 100 muscles are involved, “ranging from the face, neck and respiratory muscles to the intercostal muscles” that run between the ribs, Niemitz noted.
Forty muscles control facial expressions alone. The more intense the laughter is, the more muscles are moved from head to toe - the more the person is “convulsed with laughter,” as the saying goes.
Someone who says that his or her “stomach hurts from laughing so hard” is describing the sore diaphragm that follows a good belly laugh. “Stop making me laugh! I hurt all over already,” is a plea when laughing becomes a full body workout. “Doubling up with laughter,” like a forward bend in yoga, trains the muscles between the breastbone and pubic bone.
A kind of “internal massage,” laughter can alleviate physical complaints. The deep breathing during laughter facilitates expectoration in cases of colds and bronchitis. Smokers can benefit, too, from the removal of excess residual air in the lungs, according to Barbara Wild, professor of psychiatry at Tuebingen University in Germany.
The pain threshold also rises, said Wild, citing Swiss researchers who found that test persons who genuinely smiled and laughed a lot while watching a Mr Bean film were able to hold their hands in ice water longer afterwards than test persons who had been less amused.
“Cheerful people cope with illnesses better,” Niemitz said.
Hospitals that employ clowns administer the psychological medicine of laughter, which touches people’s hearts and tells them, “Things aren’t so bad.” The goal, said Eckhart von Hirschhausen, a German comedian who studied medicine and has founded a club called Humour Helps Healing, is to “get people in an unpleasant situation involved in something positive.” Laughter, he said, “is foremost a social signal that lowers aggression, binds people into groups and alleviates stress.” It relieves both social and physical tension, he added, so “we physically loosen up when be laugh out loud.” Laughter is a protective mechanism against mental illnesses, von Hirschhausen pointed out, and laughter therapy is used for depression as well as aggression.
“In laughter yoga, people learn exercises that, among other things, convert typical attitudes of anger into relaxed behaviour,” Schaeffner said. Someone who regularly slams doors, for example, learns to set the anti—stress mechanism into motion as soon as he or she grasps the door handle. This may inhibit the production of adrenalin, which normally puts the body in a state of alarm.
People can clearly distinguish between hearty and derisive laughter. Laughing with the eyes closed for a fraction of a second and then looking past the other person comes across as likeable, Niemitz and his team found. “The other person doesn’t feel stared at and threatened,” he said. Giving vent to one’s amusement within a half—second is seen as sincere. Someone who takes longer produces “fake laughter” and forfeits sympathy.
