By Adithi Shetty

Humor is a perspective that enables one to view stress and pain with a softer edge. Though not an immediate cure for trauma, chronic illness, or emotional difficulty, humor can be a therapeutic tool. It offers relief outlets for chronically ill patients and also for stressed medical and corporate staff.

Until the New England Journal of Medicine published the Norman Cousins case study in 1979, few considered the therapeutic uses of humor. The first documented case of humor positively affecting disease was in 1964 when Norman Cousins, published Anatomy of an Illness. Medical professionals were for the first time shown that humor biologically reversed Cousins’ ankylosing spondylitis, a painful disease causing the degeneration of the spinal connective tissue. Given a one in five hundred chance of recovery, Cousins decided to infuse himself with humor treatments. With his self-designed humor treatments, he discovered that 15 minutes of hardy laughter could produce two hours of pain free-sleep. Blood samples also showed that his inflammation level was lowered after the humor treatments. Eventually, Cousins was able to completely reverse the illness.

Enda Junkins is a practicing psychotherapist and advocates the use of laughter to resolve several emotional issues and more serious depression, anxiety, and psychosomatic disorders. There is a frenzied quality about our demand for drugs on every condition, depression, even mild depression, is no exception. A society becoming more depressed needs a natural, effective-solution to combat their woes, and laughter is that solution. Unfortunately, we tend to stop laughing when we feel the blues, and when feeling really low, we stop doing anything emotional at all. We avoid laughing, crying, or even getting angry, thus getting miserably numb! Our general negative feelings in our lives are a result of anger and sadness, which we haven’t allowed ourselves to acknowledge, much less feel. Our laughter, while valued as a good thing, is unfortunately undervalued and underestimated as a natural way of taking care of us. It heals our bodies and our emotions so we can cope with life as we experience it. Why then do we persist in overlooking this natural medicine, which bubbles up from within?

According to Madan Kataria (a physician in Allopathic system of medicine), laughter therapy has several health benefits. Physiological responses to laughter include increased respiration, circulation, hormonal, and digestive enzyme secretion and levelling of blood pressure. It has been proved by psycho-neuro-immunologists that all negative emotions like anxiety, depression, or anger weaken the immune system of the body, thereby reducing its fighting capacity against infections. Laughter helps to increase the count of natural killer lymphocytes (a type of white cells) and also raises the antibody levels. It also helps increase the levels of endorphins in our body, which are natural painkillers. Blowing forcefully into an instrument and blowing balloons is one of the common exercises given to asthmatics. Laughter therapy does the same job, more easily and cheaply by improving the lung capacity and oxygen levels in the blood.

A Japanese study that was published in the February 2000 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at people allergic to dust mites. When the subjects were injected with dust-mite allergens, they developed smaller skin rashes after watching the Charlie Chaplin movie, Modern Times than they had before watching the movie. When the subjects watched weather, their response was not affected.

It is a form of therapy that encourages us to use the natural, physiological process of laughter to release negative emotions of anger, pain, anxiety and fear. We are happier when we laugh; this is because every time we laugh, we heal. This is why we feel better after laughing, not before. It does not minimize the importance of our problems. Rather, it’s nature’s way of aiding our survival by giving us a new perspective so we may find ways to cope with our difficulties.