Exercising Your Funny Bone to Energize Your Work & Home

What’s so funny? This is a serious situation that Americans are in up to their eyebrows in stress and it’s killing them. If we’d just lighten up a little, step back, and take time to work out our funny bone instead of our growl scowl, we’d be much more healthy both physically and emotionally.

Choose to laugh at a situation now instead of years down the road. In many instances it is only the passage of time that makes something turn from unpleasant or embarrassing to hilarious. Why not decide to look at the funny side of it earlier on? Having a sense of humor will energize you and those around you while combating stress and disease. 

CEO’s state that a sense of humor is one of the key ingredients they seek in candidates who are successful and well balanced. People with a sense of humor have three times more energy than those without much of a sense of humor. Research also indicates that people with a sense of humor get sick less often than those who don’t. When we are smiling and laughing, it automatically stimulates our thymus gland, and our thymus gland aids in the production of T-cells. T-cells help fight diseases, and so those with more humor in their lives naturally have better immune systems and physically get sick less often than those who are worry warts.

You can manually stimulate your thymus gland by doing the thymus thump – just tap your chest area 10 times in the area just below your collar bones in the center of your chest about two buttons down on your shirt. This action won’t give you an immediate thrill, but it will stimulate your immune system to energize you in the long run.

Cultivating your lighter side builds up resilience to stress which helps you cope with negative situations. Sometimes things are so serious, it is hard to see the humor in them, yet it is our humor that pulls us through tragic times and keeps our spirits up to help us cope with reality. Allen Klein’s book The Healing Power of Humor  as well as the research by Norman Cousins in Anatomy of an Illness are excellent examples of how humor can help us through the tough times and sickness.

Laughter is one of the strongest medicines around and without harmful side-affects.  It has been known to cure diseases, and can certainly cure temporary lethargy or the doldrums with its uplifting effects. Studies suggest that 10 minutes of good belly laughter can bring on two hours of restful sleep without any other medicine for chronic pain sufferers. It’s impossible to be stressed out and laughing at the exact same moment. 30 second later you can be stressed out, but not at the exact same time that you are laughing. Laughter exercises your respiratory system, your abdominals, your cheeks, and relaxes your muscles. That’s why you fall out of your chair or onto the ground if you laugh hard enough. That’s why some people wet their pants if they laugh too hard. Their muscles are relaxing as they expel either the ho, ho, ha, ha, or hee, hee with each breath. It acts as a release of pressure from the body – much like crying, only more positive.

As an official Certified Laugh Leader, I am authorized to facilitate Laughter Club Sessions around the world. These Laughter Clubs started in India by Dr. Madan Kataria and have grown in popularity around the globe. In America, we are sanctioned by The World Laughter Tour. Visit www.worldlaughtertour.com to find out about clubs in your area. At the time of printing, there are approximately 3000 Certified Laugh Leaders internationally, and our goal is to have world peace through laughter – think globally, laugh locally.

Laughter has been found to stimulate the immune system, boost our beta-endorphins (the body’s naturally occurring “morphine”), increase growth hormone levels (a marker of eustress – good stress – as well as an immune enhancer, help connect people, exercise our lungs, and work out our diaphragms. Dr. Lee Berk who works in the psychoneuroimmunology center at Loma Linda Medical Center has compiled numerous studies about the release of these endorphins and growth hormones in what is known as the Biology of Hope, where he studied the release of these hormones while subjects viewed comic videos. He also found that the subject’s endorphin and growth hormone levels increased by laughter and the release even occurred three days prior to the test subjects viewing a comic video when they were told they would be seeing it.

The concept of the Biology of Hope embraces the thought that these eustress hormones are even released when subjects are just anticipating that they would soon be experiencing a positive event. Imagine the possibilities of Dr. Berk’s research that we can pump up our good stress hormones by merely planning an enjoyable event and then anticipating it. We already know this on an unscientific level. Observe how our energy goes up towards the end of the week as we anticipate the weekend, especially if we have something really fun planned for the weekend. Or notice how your energy rises as you anticipate a long-awaited vacation, particularly if you have put lots of research into the planning, or have been dreaming of it for years. Now is a good time to start planning something that you can anticipate to get your eustress in gear and bring the Biology of Hope into play.

Studies have also shown that adults only laugh an average of 15 times per day while children laugh over 350 times per day. No wonder they have so much more energy than us? Have you laughed yet today? Cultivating a humorous outlook on life can not only help you through a difficult situation, it can help you stay healthy, connected to others, and make people wonder why you have a smile on your face all the time.

Duke university also sanctioned a study that found job satisfaction to be the leading factor in living a long life. It beat out good health habits and good genes along with 788 other factors to longevity. It seems that if we are full-time workers, then we spend at least one-third of our lives either happy or unhappy. If we consider this research with the Biology of Hope research, we can see the reasons why comedians who have a healthy lifestyle live so long such as George Burns, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Bob Hope. They are laughing all the time, loving their jobs and anticipating their next workday making other laugh. What are you doing to put more laughter into your day and into the lives of your family, your friends, or your co-workers? Go ahead and exercise your funny bone, even if it’s the only thing you exercise today, at least you will be doing something good for yourself, then you can hit the real exercise circuit tomorrow and laugh at how funny you look in your spandex.

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