According to a variety of studies published in established journals right from the 70s, laughing is extremely good for body health. Even ten minutes of a good laugh is enough for an anaesthetic effect on our bodies and also for pain-free sleep.
Laughter is associated with stronger immunity, reduced depression systems and reduced pain for people having diseases like cancer.

Laughter As A Medicine

<ol>
<li>It relaxed muscles.</li>
<li>Enhances blood circulation.</li>
<li>Releases endorphins in the brain.</li>
<li>Gives the lungs a good exercise.</li>
<li>Toxins are exhaled.</li>
</ol>
Medicine is more than just science and the human body can work wonders using its own positivity and the will to be healthy.

The Reason Laughter Works

<h4 dir="ltr">Sep 3, 2019·8 min read</h4><figure><img alt="Image for post" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/500/1*an9gneNq3WGIte2WDGjgVQ.jpeg" width="785" height="491"><figcaption class="ia ib do dm dn ic id ap b aq ar fr" data-selectable-paragraph="" dir="ltr">Illustration: <a href="https://www.carolynfigel.com/" class="db ie" rel="noopener nofollow" dir="ltr">Carolyn Figel</a></figcaption></figure><img alt="In" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/500/1*0lnMs5FzpfjMkFrsY-GIa" width="79" height="79"> 1964, at age 49, Norman Cousins — then best-known as the editor of the Saturday Review, a now defunct weekly magazine — collapsed in the middle of his living room floor. He was rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with sudden-onset degenerative collagen disease, a connective tissue condition that rendered him nearly quadriplegic and caused him severe back pain. His doctor gave him a one-in-500 chance of recovery.A lifelong optimist, however, Cousins figured he could beat the odds.“He knew that there was research and evidence showing that negative emotion — fear, anger, anxiety — was bad for you,” said Anne Harrington, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University, as quoted in the book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fingerprints-God-Learning-Spiritual-Experience/dp/1594484627" rel="noopener nofollow" dir="ltr">Fingerprints of God</a>. “But he felt that there had been little study of whether positive emotions might have the opposite effect on your health, that it might be good for you. He felt he had nothing to lose, because he wasn’t going to get better through conventional means, and perhaps he had a lot to gain.”Cousins checked himself into a hotel room and developed his own treatment. He hired a doctor to pump doses of vitamin C through his IV and prescribed himself a “laughter routine” in which he read funny excerpts by E.B. White and watched episodes of “Candid Camera” and Marx Brothers films.According to Cousins, it worked.“I made the joyous discovery that 10 minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep,” he wrote in a special report published in a 1976 <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM197612232952605" rel="noopener nofollow" dir="ltr">issue</a> of The New England Journal of Medicine. “When the pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off, we would switch on the motion picture projector again and not infrequently, it would lead to another pain-free interval.”After the article was published, Cousins’ career took off. He signed a book deal, which was made into a TV movie, and was hired as an adjunct professor of psychiatry and bio-behavioral science at UCLA.Not everyone was convinced of Cousins’ findings, however. Arnold S. Relman, who began editing The New England Journal of Medicine just months after Cousins’ article was published, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/1986/10/21/norman-cousins-still-laughing/e17f23cb-3e8c-4f58-b907-2dcd00326e22/" rel="noopener nofollow" dir="ltr">told</a> The Washington Post that “I’m of two minds about Mr. Cousins. I agree with the basic verities he articulates, but I’m concerned that much of what he says appears to take an anti-scientific, irrational approach to medicine that would seek to turn the clock back.”Cousins himself initially expressed some uncertainty in what had happened to him. “It is quite possible that this treatment — like everything else I did — was a demonstration of the placebo effect,” he wrote.<img alt="E" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/500/1*4IEY8Sg_9rzPDu9KKooZV" width="79" height="79">ven if there’s more nuance to Cousins’ recovery, the idea that laughter can be used as medicine has a long history, dating back to the Medieval Ages. In the early 14th century, the medieval French surgeon Henri de Mondeville wrote that humor — including listening to jokes and silly stories — seemed to help his patients recover. The philosopher Immanuel Kant and the English medical doctor William Battie saw laughter as a cure for illnesses and the neurologist Sigmund Freud argued that laughter was a form of catharsis, a way of releasing “nervous energy.”In 2009, William Fry, Jr., an emeritus professor of medicine at Stanford, who founded the study of laughter in the 1960s, co-authored a study that <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2814549/" rel="noopener nofollow" dir="ltr">confirmed</a> some of Cousins’ anecdotal claims. Authentic, non-forced laughter appeared to lower blood pressure and improve overall cardiovascular function, he found.Since then there have been several more studies on the subject, some published just this year. This new research has linked laughter to stronger immune systems, improved <a href="https://www.psychiatryadvisor.com/home/depression-advisor/laughter-yoga-shows-promise-as-alternative-therapy-in-depression/" rel="noopener nofollow" dir="ltr">depression</a> symptoms, and reduced pain in people with cancer. While it’s still unclear exactly why or how laughter might be associated with health benefits, experts speculate that it works in part by relaxing muscles, enhancing circulation, and releasing endorphins in the brain. Laughter also helps people build relationships, which is crucial for coping with life stressors.Yet while the research into the health effects of laughing is growing, many of the studies are difficult to fully rely on, in part due to small sample sizes as well as the fact that there is no uniform definition of laughter. Some of the studies ask people to listen to stand-up comedy routines while other studies have participants get into groups and force one another to laugh. It’s hard to know whether forced laughter has the same impact as natural laughter.That hasn’t stopped a wave of therapists from embracing laughter as a form of medicine. The self-styled Indian guru Madan Kataria is the originator of modern laughter therapy and became popular for his “laughter yoga” exercises in the 1990s — in which he teaches that forcing yourself to laugh frequently is the key to good health. His method, and best-selling book Laugh For No Reason, has been celebrated by the likes of Oprah as well as celebrity doctors like Sanjay Gupta and Mehmet Oz.<BLOCKQUOTE>“Put on your equipment. I never call them clown noses; I always call them ‘equipment.’”</BLOCKQUOTE>Steve Wilson, a laughter therapist and founder of the World Laughter Tour, teaches laughing techniques to executives and conducts one-on-one laughter therapy sessions. In his “Uh-Oh Squad” exercise, Wilson gives out hundreds of red clown noses to the people attending his workshops. “If things go wrong and you get a funny feeling in the pit of your stomach,” he tells his audience, “and a voice in your brain is going ‘uh-oh,’ that’s a signal that you can either fall apart, or you can pull together. Put on your equipment. I never call them clown noses; I always call them ‘equipment.’”At 79, Wilson is the oldest of a new guard of laughter therapists, which also includes Sebastian Gendry, a Frenchman in Los Angeles; and Corinne Cosseron, a Frenchwoman in Paris. They’ve given themselves nicknames — Wilson is a “joyologist,” Cosseron is a rigologiste or “laughologist.” Gendry insists he’s engaged not in “laughter therapy” but in “laughter medicine,” although none of them are medical doctors. All three distance themselves from Kataria, and argue that laughter should not be forced. They believe it is more than a biological cure; authentic laughter is an instigator of positivity, kindness, and a sense of community.“As a psychologist, I don’t think you could fake an emotion that produced the catharsis of the emotion,” Wilson says. “You can’t fake crying and produce the effects of true grieving.”Wilson began his practice in October 1984 when he gave a talk at a community center to a cancer support group about the benefits of humor. He entered into his lecture nervously, reading off of notecards. He started to worry that talking about humor and telling jokes wouldn’t be well received in a room of sick people.“I was wondering, is this going to go over?” he remembers. “I don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. I don’t want them to think I’m taking their cancer lightly.”It quickly became apparent, however, that laughter was precisely what they wanted. A middle-aged man in the group named Lester introduced himself and said he had liver cancer. “My doctor told me I have six months to live,” he said somberly. Then: “That was a year ago, and I gave away my winter coat.”Wilson stood still. He didn’t know what to do. Was he allowed to laugh? Did Lester want him to laugh? Then Lester cracked up, and the others joined him. “Lester was making a joke!” Wilson says. “As the group is laughing, I realized, well, maybe this is going to be okay.”<img alt="I" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/500/1*nJ4eOyrxUIEMv7jVza0ZU" width="79" height="79"> was curious what actually doing some of the laughter therapy exercises might feel like so I asked Gendry to conduct one with me. Born in Strasbourg, France, Gendry moved to England during the dot-com boom of the 1990s, where he made a small fortune working in computer telemarketing, co-founding a business called EIMS.biz. After he made his first few million, he decided enough was enough. “I got to a point where I decided very clearly that I was not going to die the richest man in my cemetery,” he says. He traveled to India, where he met Kataria, then moved to California to work as a laughter yoga instructor himself, setting up workshops and a world lecture tour.As we settle into the laughter exercise, Gendry tells me he’s “more into emotional benefits” of laughter. “You can’t fake it ’til you make it. There are some days where you will never laugh, and that’s perfectly fine because this is not the primary purpose of the activity.”With his close-cropped gray hair and square-framed glasses, he tells me to take a deep breath and to make a big smile. “Emote your best expression,” he says, with the trace of a French accent. “Give the best expression of who you are.” He instructs me to maintain the face while thinking, “You and I have nothing in common. We’re different.” Then, pause, another deep breath, recreate the smile, and, this time, think, “I don’t know what, but we have something in common.”He asks: “Does it feel the same?”Smiling while thinking of oneself as fundamentally different from another person feels good. Gendry tells me that I should try this out in day-to-day life. “The next time you go out, on the subway, on the street, just sit somewhere and look at someone and go through this exercise,” he says. “Laughter medicine is not about thinking but choosing [to be positive]. It’s not about forcing. It’s about allowing.”Gendry insisted that smiling while thinking positive things makes you feel much better than while thinking negative things. In truth, just the act of smiling did make me feel better — even if I didn’t actually laugh.<img alt="A" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/500/1*IxNtrjFXw9-oRRArtnYAo" width="79" height="79"> decade after Cousins’ degenerative collagen diagnosis, he was walking in Manhattan and ran into one of the specialists who had initially diagnosed him with a one-in-500 chance of recovery. Cousins made a point to give him a firm handshake, to show that he was back in top form.“He said he could tell from my handshake that he didn’t have to ask about my present condition, but he was eager to hear what was behind the recovery,” Cousins wrote in his first book. “‘It all began,’ I said, ‘when I decided that some experts don’t really know enough to make a pronouncement of doom on a human being.’”“Most doctors recognize that medicine is just as much an art as it is a science,” Cousins continued. “The most important knowledge in medicine to be learned or taught is the way the human mind and body can summon innermost resources to meet extraordinary challenges.”

In 1964, at age 49, Norman Cousins — then best-known as the editor of the Saturday Review, a now defunct weekly magazine — collapsed in the middle of his living room floor. He was rushed to the…

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1964, at age 49, Norman Cousins — then best-known as the editor of the Saturday Review, a now defunct weekly magazine — collapsed in the middle of his living room floor. He was rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with sudden-onset degenerative collagen disease, a connective tissue condition that rendered him nearly quadriplegic and caused him severe back pain. His doctor gave him a one-in-500 chance of recovery.

A lifelong optimist, however, Cousins figured he could beat the odds.

“He knew that there w as research and evidence showing that negative emotion — fear, anger, anxiety — was bad for you,” said Anne Harrington, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University, as quoted in the book <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.amazon.com/Fingerprints-God-Learning-Spiritual-Experience/dp/1594484627" rel="noopener nofollow">Fingerprints of God </a>. “But he felt that there had been little study of whether positive emotions might have the opposite effect on your health, that it might be good for you. He felt he had nothing to lose, because he wasn’t going to get better through conventional means, and perhaps he had a lot to gain.”

Cousins checked himself into a hotel room and developed his own treatment. He hired a doctor to pump doses of vitamin C through his IV and prescribed himself a “laughter routine” in which he read funny excerpts by E.B. White and watched episodes of “Candid Camera” and Marx Brothers films.

According to Cousins, it worked.

“I made the joyous discovery that 10 minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep,” he wrote in a special report published in a 1976 <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM197612232952605" rel="noopener nofollow">issue </a>of The New England Journal of Medicine . “When the pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off, we would switch on the motion picture projector again and not infrequently, it would lead to another pain-free interval.”

After the article was published, Cousins’ career took off. He signed a book deal, which was made into a TV movie, and was hired as an adjunct professor of psychiatry and bio-behavioral science at UCLA.

Not everyone was convinced of Cousins’ findings, however. Arnold S. Relman, who began editing The New England Journal of Medicine just months after Cousins’ article was published, <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/1986/10/21/norman-cousins-still-laughing/e17f23cb-3e8c-4f58-b907-2dcd00326e22/" rel="noopener nofollow">told </a>The Washington Post that “I’m of two minds about Mr. Cousins. I agree with the basic verities he articulates, but I’m concerned that much of what he says appears to take an anti-scientific, irrational approach to medicine that would seek to turn the clock back.”

Cousins himself initially expressed some uncertainty in what had happened to him. “It is quite possible that this treatment — like everything else I did — was a demonstration of the placebo effect,” he wrote.

ven if there’s more nuance to Cousins’ recovery, the idea that laughter can be used as medicine has a long history, dating back to the Medieval Ages. In the early 14th century, the medieval French surgeon Henri de Mondeville wrote that humor — including listening to jokes and silly stories — seemed to help his patients recover. The philosopher Immanuel Kant and the English medical doctor William Battie saw laughter as a cure for illnesses and the neurologist Sigmund Freud argued that laughter was a form of catharsis, a way of releasing “nervous energy.”

In 2009, William Fry, Jr., an emeritus professor of medicine at Stanford, who founded the study of laughter in the 1960s, co-authored a study that <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2814549/" rel="noopener nofollow">confirmed </a>some of Cousins’ anecdotal claims. Authentic, non-forced laughter appeared to lower blood pressure and improve overall cardiovascular function, he found.

Since then there have been several more studies on the subject, some published just this year. This new research has linked laughter to stronger immune systems, improved <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.psychiatryadvisor.com/home/depression-advisor/laughter-yoga-shows-promise-as-alternative-therapy-in-depression/" rel="noopener nofollow">depression </a>symptoms, and reduced pain in people with cancer. While it’s still unclear exactly why or how laughter might be associated with health benefits, experts speculate that it works in part by relaxing muscles, enhancing circulation, and releasing endorphins in the brain. Laughter also helps people build relationships, which is crucial for coping with life stressors.

Yet while the research into the health effects of laughing is growing, many of the studies are difficult to fully rely on, in part due to small sample sizes as well as the fact that there is no uniform definition of laughter. Some of the studies ask people to listen to stand-up comedy routines while other studies have participants get into groups and force one another to laugh. It’s hard to know whether forced laughter has the same impact as natural laughter.

That hasn’t stopped a wave of therapists from embracing laughter as a form of medicine. The self-styled Indian guru Madan Kataria is the originator of modern laughter therapy and became popular for his “laughter yoga” exercises in the 1990s — in which he teaches that forcing yourself to laugh frequently is the key to good health. His method, and best-selling book Laugh For No Reason , has been celebrated by the likes of Oprah as well as celebrity doctors like Sanjay Gupta and Mehmet Oz.

“ Put on your equipment. I never call them clown noses; I always call them ‘equipment.’”

Steve Wilson, a laughter therapist and founder of the World Laughter Tour, teaches laughing techniques to executives and conducts one-on-one laughter therapy sessions. In his “Uh-Oh Squad” exercise, Wilson gives out hundreds of red clown noses to the people attending his workshops. “If things go wrong and you get a funny feeling in the pit of your stomach,” he tells his audience, “and a voice in your brain is going ‘uh-oh,’ that’s a signal that you can either fall apart, or you can pull together. Put on your equipment. I never call them clown noses; I always call them ‘equipment.’”

At 79, Wilson is the oldest of a new guard of laughter therapists, which also includes Sebastian Gendry, a Frenchman in Los Angeles; and Corinne Cosseron, a Frenchwoman in Paris. They’ve given themselves nicknames — Wilson is a “joyologist,” Cosseron is a rigologiste or “laughologist.” Gendry insists he’s engaged not in “laughter therapy” but in “laughter medicine,” although none of them are medical doctors. All three distance themselves from Kataria, and argue that laughter should not be forced. They believe it is more than a biological cure; authentic laughter is an instigator of positivity, kindness, and a sense of community.

“As a psychologist, I don’t think you could fake an emotion that produced the catharsis of the emotion,” Wilson says. “You can’t fake crying and produce the effects of true grieving.”

Wilson began his practice in October 1984 when he gave a talk at a community center to a cancer support group about the benefits of humor. He entered into his lecture nervously, reading off of notecards. He started to worry that talking about humor and telling jokes wouldn’t be well received in a room of sick people.

“I was wondering, is this going to go over?” he remembers. “I don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. I don’t want them to think I’m taking their cancer lightly.”

It quickly became apparent, however, that laughter was precisely what they wanted. A middle-aged man in the group named Lester introduced himself and said he had liver cancer. “My doctor told me I have six months to live,” he said somberly. Then: “That was a year ago, and I gave away my winter coat.”

Wilson stood still. He didn’t know what to do. Was he allowed to laugh? Did Lester want him to laugh? Then Lester cracked up, and the others joined him. “Lester was making a joke!” Wilson says. “As the group is laughing, I realized, well, maybe this is going to be okay.”

was curious what actually doing some of the laughter therapy exercises might feel like so I asked Gendry to conduct one with me. Born in Strasbourg, France, Gendry moved to England during the dot-com boom of the 1990s, where he made a small fortune working in computer telemarketing, co-founding a business called EIMS.biz. After he made his first few million, he decided enough was enough. “I got to a point where I decided very clearly that I was not going to die the richest man in my cemetery,” he says. He traveled to India, where he met Kataria, then moved to California to work as a laughter yoga instructor himself, setting up workshops and a world lecture tour.

As we settle into the laughter exercise, Gendry tells me he’s “more into emotional benefits” of laughter. “You can’t fake it ’til you make it. There are some days where you will never laugh, and that’s perfectly fine because this is not the primary purpose of the activity.”

With his close-cropped gray hair and square-framed glasses, he tells me to take a deep breath and to make a big smile. “Emote your best expression,” he says, with the trace of a French accent. “Give the best expression of who you are.” He instructs me to maintain the face while thinking, “You and I have nothing in common. We’re different.” Then, pause, another deep breath, recreate the smile, and, this time, think, “I don’t know what, but we have something in common.”

He asks: “Does it feel the same?”

Smiling while thinking of oneself as fundamentally different from another person feels good. Gendry tells me that I should try this out in day-to-day life. “The next time you go out, on the subway, on the street, just sit somewhere and look at someone and go through this exercise,” he says. “Laughter medicine is not about thinking but choosing [to be positive]. It’s not about forcing. It’s about allowing.”

Gendry insisted that smiling while thinking positive things makes you feel much better than while thinking negative things. In truth, just the act of smiling did make me feel better — even if I didn’t actually laugh.

decade after Cousins’ degenerative collagen diagnosis, he was walking in Manhattan and ran into one of the specialists who had initially diagnosed him with a one-in-500 chance of recovery. Cousins made a point to give him a firm handshake, to show that he was back in top form.

“He said he could tell from my handshake that he didn’t have to ask about my present condition, but he was eager to hear what was behind the recovery,” Cousins wrote in his first book. “‘It all began,’ I said, ‘when I decided that some experts don’t really know enough to make a pronouncement of doom on a human being.’”

The Promise of Laughter As Therapy

Laughter As A Medicine

The Reason Laughter Works

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