Laughter is Good Medicine

I have a game for you guys to try.  The next time your wife is stressed, look her in the eye, make the biggest smile, and say in a voice as silly as you can, “Don’t smile!” It’s really hard for her not to smile. 

There was a Swedish study that told people to frown after seeing smiling faces.  People couldn’t do it! If your wife doesn’t smile after you do, she has outstanding conscious effort.  Tell her, “Wow honey, your ability to consciously frown is beyond what most people can do. You have so many gifts, I am so blessed to be your partner!” See if she smiles then.

There’s an area of your brain that controls automatic responses.  It also controls your facial expressions. When we see someone smile, we automatically smile.  The benefit of mutually smiling (on a biochemical level) releases feel-good endorphins. It’s like a reward system.  When we smile, and someone smiles back, we’re both getting “high” on endorphins. 

Now take that feel-good mechanism, and “up the ante” (level up⏫) with laughter.  Laughter is like smiling squared. Smiling times smiling. Super smiling. Smiling makes you feel better.  But laughter. Laughter really does the trick. Energetically, laughter shifts your aura into a higher color frequency.  A higher vibration. I know I know, woo-woo stuff. Let’s look at the biochemistry.

Inside your brain, when you laugh, it momentarily ends the firing of anxiety pathways.  The 2 pathways can’t fire at the same time. Laughing will literally help you step outside your current line of thinking, and look at problems from a different perspective.  When overwhelmed, and stuck in a repeat-pattern problem-solving circuit, try laughing. You change circuits. Shift gears. Jump tracks. You can now look at your problems with a different light, diminishing conflict.  Cool huh?

There’s about a gajillion other studies showing how laughter positively impacts hormones, stress, the immune system, even longevity.  I’m not going to bore you with the nitty gritty details. But what I will tell you is that laughing helps with love and bonding. Those who laugh together stay together.