Seriously? Is the weather not driving you crazy? All the trouble in the world not bringing your head down? Are you in a bit of a slump lately? So many factors can lead to us not feeling very well emotionally, and those feelings, in turn, affect many bodily functions. Have you been told you have high blood pressure, high blood sugar and/or high cholesterol? Even more to worry about! What can one do to turn this all around? Something simple, that doesn’t cost a lot? Laughter!
You’ve heard the expression, “Laughter is the Best Medicine” a thousand times, but probably not thought very much about it or taken it very seriously. But it’s true. There are lots of studies supporting the truth of that statement. While people will say they just feel better after a good laugh, there is science that backs that feeling up. Some studies have looked at the effect laughter has on glucose (blood sugar) and show that it can be lowered after people laugh. This is especially important for people with pre-diabetes or diabetes, which is caused by too much sugar in the blood.
Hearty laughter relaxes blood vessels, which in turn, lowers blood pressure, putting less stress on the heart and lowering your risk for heart attack or stroke. Less stress equals a healthier heart. Cholesterol comes in two main varieties – LDL and HDL. LDL is that sticky stuff that clogs your arteries and, if a chunk dislodges, can travel to the brain, heart, lungs or other organs blocking their blood supply. But, happily, the level of HDL cholesterol, the “good” cholesterol that protects the heart, rises with laughter.
There are chemicals called “neurotransmitters” that are increased with laughter. Dopamine, serotonin and endorphins float around making you feel happier and less tense. Endorphins are naturally occurring pain killers and are especially important for you if you suffer from chronic pain, as many truckers do. Dopamine and serotonin affect our moods, and we feel happier when we have enough on board. Dopamine is the “feel good” hormone that helps us experience things like pleasure, reward, and motivation. Serotonin helps with feelings of happiness.
There’s another hormone called cortisol that is great when we are in a “fight or flight” emergency situation – our life is threatened by something dangerous, and we need to be able to move in a hurry. It raises our blood pressure and heart rate and gets glucose moving to our muscles at a rapid pace to deal with the extreme threat. But when we feel stressed all the time, even when situations are not a matter of life or death – getting a load delivered on time, sitting in traffic, missing family, for example – our bodies also produce more cortisol. Cortisol increases our blood sugar, causes weight gain, and alters the immune system, making us more susceptible to infection and auto-immune disease (the body attacking itself), and inflames muscles and joints causing pain.
Now, after all that negative information I just fed you, think about how you feel after a good laugh. We use all these facial muscles and belly muscles when we laugh, tightening them up and then relaxing them. Our overall sense afterward is that of relaxation. More oxygen, necessary to feed our cells, gets into our bodies with our laughter breathing than with our regular breathing. The ability to laugh at ourselves is important when it comes to our mental health. Laughing at mistakes you have made is a form of acceptance of yourself as a human being – there’s no need to chase perfection. We all make misteaks (Ha! See what I did there?)!!
How does one get a daily dose of laughter? Try listening to a funny podcast while you are rolling down the highway. If you are a reader, there are many comedians writing books. One of my all-time favorites is Dave Barry, but your idea of funny and mine might be very different, so listen to/read different comedians to see who you like best. If you prefer TV, there is even a channel that is completely devoted to making people laugh – Comedy Central. There are late night comedians on the major networks telling jokes, or you might want to watch comedies you have enjoyed over the years (some movies can be watched over and over and are still funny every time).
But what if you don’t have a great sense of humor or can’t really tell a joke? Not to worry! All of the above – lower blood sugar, lower blood pressure, etc. – happens even when you are fake laughing. However it happens, it’s the physical act of laughing that makes the positive changes in the body, so you don’t even really have to find something funny in order to laugh. For that there’s Laughter Yoga (not a joke). Just the act of laughing provides all the benefits mentioned here. There’s even trucker-specific laughter out there in the form of Tik-Tok videos and such (just search “laughter for truckers”).
Laughter doesn’t take the place of eating a healthy diet or exercising, but it can lessen the need for medications for pain and depression when engaged in routinely. Find someone to laugh with in person or on Zoom, or even when you’re alone. Get those happy hormones pumping – seriously, you’ll feel better when you LOL for better health!