HUMOR ME!
By Mary Louise Peers

How many of us have tried to cheer up a friend suffering from ill health only to be told not to bother because they’ve lost their sense of humor?  Whenever I hear this, my mind goes off on a tangent running through their house, trying to ascertain where they left it.  Maybe it’s under the bed with the balled up socks, I surmise.  Or better yet, perhaps they left it with their keys.  Everyone loses keys!  And keys can open all kinds of things.  Maybe they could find the key to the door where their sense of humor is hiding.  Losing one’s sense of humor is not funny!  It’s a downward spiral, and a sure sign that we’ve gotten off track regarding our health. 

Giving credence to our emotions, and their power to affect disease, is nothing new.  Even Hippocrates, the father of medicine, required that his students pay attention to the emotional life of patients.  But a positive attitude is more than just a mood; we are learning that attitude affects brain chemistry.  And it is, in fact, only in the later part of the 20^th century that studies have been done that explored the actual affect of positive emotions on the biology of a patient. 

One of the individuals who did so much to advance the study of humor on the body-mind connection was Norman Cousins.  In his book ANATOMY OF AN ILLNESS, Mr. Cousins chronicled his own experience - and successful recovery - with serious illness three different times in his life.  He knew that much had been said regarding our ability to make ourselves sick.  But if we had that ability, wouldn’t it follow that we could also make ourselves well?  Norman Cousins believed so.  And he believed that laughter was one of the keys. 

During his battle with illness, laughter became an integral part of Mr. Cousins’ self-treatment.  In 1976 he reported that ten minutes of hearty laughter gave him two hours of pain-free sleep.  At that time, his disease manifested with inflammation in the joints and spine.  His Doctor did sedimentation testing both before and after his bouts of laughter.  Sedimentation measured the degree of inflammation in the body.  Not only did the sedimentation decrease, it was also cumulative.  In his subsequent book, HEAD FIRST, Mr. Cousins commented that, upon reflection, the subsequent reduction in pain was a result of endorphins activated by the experience of laughter.  Stress hormones have also been noted to change after hearty laughter, inferring a support to the immune system. 

Obviously, none of this is meant to diminish the need for medical care, but rather to awaken us to the fact that we do, indeed, participate in our health and well being by the way we live our lives.  Individuals that combat stress with humor and levity are less likely to become rundown by daily regimes.  We can do a great deal to bolster our systems.  Maintaining a good diet and regular exercise has been part of the prescription for a healthy life for years.  Now we know that laughter is more than just fun.  It is a wellspring, a biological pharmacy that can provide natural medication, and help strengthen our body’s resistance to disease. 

We are increasingly learning that the mind is a frontier without limits.  Health gurus have promoted meditation, visualization, and hypnosis, just to name a few.  And we are learning that the body has an awareness level that we can tap into.  The human body has a powerful drive to heal itself.  But the belief system of any individual has the ability to activate that drive…or to shut it down.  How we respond to life’s challenges matters: emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. 

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