Laughter: the #1 Medicine

I decided at the beginning of the year that I wanted to start it off by reading the Book of Proverbs.  However, I didn’t want to just read it; I wanted to make sure I gleaned from it.  I have known since last year that I wanted to focus on the importance of self-care in my blog, and I knew that Proverbs would be a great place to start. 

I love to see someone smile.  And the best sound in the world to me is a child’s laughter.  There is just something so peaceful about it.  When a child begins to laugh, you cannot help but laugh yourself.  In my opinion, this was a purposeful design by God.  A child is innocent, and therefore their laughter is free from all the cares of this world.   

Laughter is one of the elements necessary for positive mental health!

Proverbs 17:22 states:

“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: But a broken spirit drieth the bones."

According to the National Library of Medicine, laughter was studied for several years, but it wasn’t believed to have any significant effect on someone’s health until around 1979.  Can you believe they didn’t take the word of God seriously?  In that same article, I found this interesting little tidbit.

Other studies have linked laughter and humor with increased levels of pain tolerance. In one, 200 subjects were subjected to a painful cold-pressor stimulus after being shown a film. Those who viewed a humorous film had a significant advantage in pain tolerance time after a 30-minute wait period.20 Another experiment of 40 subjects found that a laughter-inducing narrative, as opposed to other forms of distraction such as an interesting narrative audio tape, increased discomfort thresholds.21 Similarly, a study of threat-induced anxiety involving 53 subjects found that those exposed to a humorous tape recording consistently rated themselves as less anxious and reported smaller increases in stress as the time to receive an electric shock approached.22 

The Laughter Prescription-National Library of Medicine-2016

Laughter should be one of the easiest self-care tools out there, and best of all, it’s free.  Simply laugh!  Laugh despite your circumstances.  Laugh in the face of your circumstances.  Surround yourself with people who make you happy, and you will find yourself laughing.

At times, our family will ride down the road and ask questions about ourselves and each other.  The other day, the question was asked, “What brings you joy?” My daughter immediately spoke up and said, “I know yours, mom.  It’s making people happy.” How right she was!  Plus, it made me happy to know that she noticed it.  There is just something about someone laughing along with me at my mistakes, my new words (that’s a whole other subject), or just seeing a smile when I hand them a loaf of sourdough bread.

Keeping a merry heart doesn’t have to be hard.  Unfortunately, we make it hard.  We tend to allow our flesh to reign supreme and show us all of the negative.  Yet, if we would learn to lean a little more into the spirit, we could cast away some of the things that cause us to “dry up.”

I believe 100% in the power of prayer.  I believe that God is the answer to all of our problems in life. And when He inspired each and every writer in the Bible, He left us with answers on how to properly care for ourselves, both spiritually and physically.  That is why, when life starts to beat you down, you need to push yourself into prayer and delve into His Word for answers.

So what are some ways you can bring joy and laughter back into your life?

One way is to get rid of the negatives in your life.  Are there people you surround yourself with who tend to speak negatively all the time?  Put some boundaries in place and begin to look for more positive influences in your life.  If the news continually brings you down, then stop reading or watching it.  Begin to replace anything that brings on a negative feeling with something positive. This includes your so-called social media friends.

I personally love Calvin and Hobbes.  It is one of my all-time favorite cartoons.  I follow a group on Facebook just so I can see the cartoons.  I started doing it so that I could see something funny on my personal feed.  Now, whenever I see one and start laughing uncontrollably, I save the photo and send it to my daughter and one of her friends.  Why?  I want to share the laughter!

What are some things that you used to do that brought you joy and made you laugh?

I’m sure if you took a moment and really thought, you could dig up some old memories and start laughing right now.  Is this something that you can do today?

For us, we love to play games as a family, but we also love to have a few friends over from time to time and play games as well.  My husband actually has a thing for collecting games that he thinks would be interesting at our next game night.

One of our favorite games…Taco, Cat, Goat, Cheese, Pizza!

We were introduced to this while visiting friends in Oregon, and it has become a go-to when we get together with family and friends.

The bottom line is this: our first step in self-care is tossing out all of the things that bring us down.  Life is going to always be just that—life.  There will be times when it seems like everything is coming at us and bringing us down.  Yet, if we learn to turn to God, tune in to His voice, and put the negative behind us, then laughter has a chance to return.  And remember, laughter is medicine. So starting with it will help us be able to move on to another step of self-care.