A belly-wrenching fit of mirth, or laughter, is one if the most enjoyable and healing of human experiences.
Thankfully, life’s ironies and incongruities can often penetrate walls of despair and the paralysis of anxiety, giving people in distress moments of relief.
“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut, author. “I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”
A Universal Tonic
Laughter makes us gulp oxygen, stimulates vital organs, increases circulation, and soothes muscle tension—a universal tonic for whatever ails us. Optimism generated by humor releases neuropeptides that reduce stress levels and boost the immune system. Merriment also causes the body to manufacture its own painkillers that can interrupt the pain-spasm cycle accompanying some muscle disorders.
“I know why we laugh. We laugh because it hurts, and it’s the only thing to make it stop hurting,” said author Robert S. Heinlein.
For people with intense stress, or with symptoms of anxiety or depression, laughter is an excellent coping strategy. It lifts lethargy, punctures paralysis, helps us see things anew, and maybe take ourself - and our problems - less seriously. “If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane,” is how the poet Robert Frost put it.
Wine for the Soul
While laughing is not a cure, it may prevent symptoms of anxiety or depression from completely coloring our life.
“It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels,” writes Stephen Fry of his depression. “Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.”
Laughter is said to be a cheap medicinal, a cure for a variety of ills, wine for our soul, an antidote to fear, carbonated holiness, the shortest distance between two individuals, a stress eraser, a highly effective weapon, the sound of souls dancing, and the other side of weeping.
“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.” ~ William Hazlitt.
