Laugh Your Way to Health

“They,” say that laughter is the best medicine. Fifty-eight years ago, Norman Cousins proved that the saying is true. In fact, he is the they they’re talking about. He wasn’t a doctor, and he didn’t know or care why it worked. He didn’t need to know. Norm wasn’t like me. I sometimes think I’d rather understand the mechanics and die with the knowledge than just laugh myself healthy without knowing what made it work. Norm didn’t “prove” his point with charts, graphs, and stories about how electrons moved from one molecule to the next. He jumped right over that nonsense and proved it by not dying.

Science can be so very precise when looking through a microscope or a telescope. With the most finely polished lenses, we can see the mysteries of the universe light years away and the tiniest of particles. But despite being able to know so much, no one can tell you exactly why laughing makes us healthy, because it’s just too complex… But the good news is that it doesn’t matter. You don’t need to understand how a match works in order light your campfire. Just “close cover before striking,” and there you have it.

In 1964, the dark ages in terms of modern medicine, Norm went to see his doctor because he just felt bad all over. After numerous tests, the doctor still couldn’t tell him exactly what it was that he had, except that it was serious. The tests were indicative of some sort systemwide failure, an autoimmune disorder, except in 1964, no one knew about the mechanisms of autoimmune disorders or how they happened. All the doctor could tell him was that he was dying; he needed to be in a hospital and he needed to get his affairs in order. But Norm wasn’t that guy.

He went home and made the decision that he was going to enjoy whatever time he had left. He was tired and weak and really couldn’t do much, so he called everyone he knew and invited them over. In the early days of television, back when the movie theaters actually showed movies with a projector and film, he got his hands on movie reels from the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, WC Fields and anything else that was funny. If you wanted to feel sorry for him and cry over his impending demise, you were not welcome in Norm’s house. When you went there, you were only there to laugh, whether you felt like it or not. Norm sat in his home theater with his friends, and they all laughed like little children. And Norm got better. This one “dying man,” lived for thirty-six more years, dying at the age of 75 from a heart attack, not the mysterious autoimmune condition that was supposed to have killed him three decades earlier.

Norman Cousins wrote Anatomy of an Illness, to share the best cure in the world, in the days when doctors didn’t know enough to even diagnose half of the fatal diseases that scare us today, until the autopsy. But Norm not understanding any of that didn’t hinder him in his quest to be well. We don’t always need to know why, and in so many cases, we never will.

So today I’m going to break with tradition and not bore the crap out of you with a ton of details and minutiae. I’ll just tell you what you need to know to make this work. OK, I’ll bore you a little bit, because I think it will help…

My best friends know how important humor is to me. They know that more than half the messages they get from me are jokes or comics. The Far Side, Tundra, Mr. Boffo, Willie and Ethel, Bizarro, Speed Bump, Mallard Fillmore… I have a massive library, because I love to laugh, and I know how important it is to laugh every day.

First, the keys to happiness: Posture & Breath, and a system called Neuro Linguistic Programming. NLP is how you can make yourself feel better when everything around you says you should feel worse. It’s a fairly simple program, but we gave it a long, important-sounding name, because it makes us practitioners feel superior, and makes it sound like something really complex that you should trust, because… you know, it’s science! Let’s start with posture.

When you feel your worst, people who know you can tell it from a mile away. Crap happens; you feel down. Your shoulders drop down; your head slides forward; and the back of your body becomes longer while the front side gets shorter. Your breath becomes shallow and your eyes narrow. It’s a tell. But it’s also the key. If you put your body into that posture right now, I guarantee you that the world will look darker, and all your troubles will seem closer. So, the solution is obvious, isn’t it?

Key #1, Posture: Sitting, standing, or even lying down, draw in a deep breath, focusing on getting the air as far down into your belly as possible. Feel your sternum moving upwards, pull your shoulders back and bring your head back and up to align your spine, making yourself as tall as you can be. If you’re standing, tilt your pelvis back just enough that your knees unlock. Boom! You feel better already.

Key #2, Breathing: The secret to happiness is to breath twice a minute, which sounds a lot easier than it is. Most people breathe at a rate of twelve to twenty cycles per minute, so two might initially be challenging, but it will fix what ails ya. Just breathing deeper and less often will work wonders.

Wait, what? That’s it; that’s all there is to it? Yep. Here’s the proof. Breathe like a rabbit, one breath cycle every second, sixty breaths in a minute. Don’t hyperventilate, breathe very shallow, like a wittew wabbit. In just 60 seconds you’ll feel tension, stress and fear. You’ll be as frightened as a lost baby bunny wabbit. OK, stop that, it was just to show you. NOW… breathe in through your nose, very slowly and deep into your belly. You don’t need to watch a clock, just breathe in slow and steady until your lungs are full. Pause for a few seconds, then let your breath slowly flow out (mouth or nose) until it’s all gone and then pause again. If you do this slowly enough, you’ll experience peace and joy. If you can do it without moving anything other than your diaphragm, you might even experience yourself separate from your body in mystical bliss.

In just five minutes, you can fix your posture, slow your breathing and turn a bad day into a great day. But wait, there’s more!

 The main superhighway of your immune system is your Vagus Nerve. But what happens in vagus doesn’t stay in vagus. It connects your gut and intestines, where most of your immune system resides, with your brain. It may be the most important nerve in your body, and I’ll show you the key to activating it. Step one is not overthinking it.

From the teachings of the Tao, we are told that “Your duty is to be, not to be this or that.” Anyone who knows me well can tell you that that was the hardest lesson of my entire life, and it’s one that I still haven’t mastered. We are also told that “Only the one who knows that enough is enough will ever have enough.” That one was easier and that one was a key for Norm. Those two lessons helped me write my first book, Meditation, now out of print, an instruction manual for anal retentive jerks like me who didn’t know how to just be. Inside that book were my two most popular and most requested guided meditations, that I used in my meditation classes. Both meditations ended, every single time, with a room full of people laughing themselves to tears.

Why those two were important is because sometimes stuff happens that can disable your sense of humor. Sometimes, when you most need to laugh, you just can’t manage to find anything to laugh at. That’s OK, because the key to laughing yourself healthy is actually mechanical – through the principles of NLP, your body can control your emotions, or your emotions can control your body — you get to choose. The syncopated rhythm of contractions of the diaphragm that occur when you’re laughing activate the vagus nerve and magic happens, science magic! And you can experience the magic of laughter by tricking your vagus nerve

The reason laughter works is that these rapid contractions activate your vagus nerve in just the right way to stimulate your gut-brain connection to pump out endorphins: serotonin, oxytocin, dopamine and more, your “happy hormones.” The key isn’t so much being happy enough to laugh as it is laughing enough to be happy. After spending a lot of money, going to school and getting certified in NLP and hypnotherapy, I came to realize what Norm figured out on his own, for free.

After inducing relaxation, with posture and slow breathing, we’ll proceed to play with the various options of “H,” the magic letter of breath that stimulates your gut. We’ll be using vowel sounds with H for this meditation: Hah, hay, heh, hee, hih, ho, hoo, huh. And the structure isn’t important; use any combination that works for you. We’ll start slowly, then get fancy, moving from a steady rhythm to a sort of jazzy scat, mimicking the tempo of spontaneous laughter. This is amazingly powerful in a group, but it can still work if you’re all alone

Start by slowing your breathing and emptying your mind, as best you can. Don’t worry if troubling thoughts keep recurring, just ignore them.

Begin by practicing your sounds (repeat the first line a few times so everyone gets locked in)

Hah, hay, heh, hee, hih, ho, hoo, huh…

Now repeat each sound twice:

Hah, hah, hay, hay, heh, heh, hee, hee, hih, hih, ho, ho, hoo, hoo, huh, huh (repeat once or twice)

Now four times:

Hah, hah, hah, hah, hee, hee, hee, hee, ho, ho ho ho, huh, huh, huh huh (repeat)

Notice the feeling of relaxation and loss of inhibition that you’re creating.

Now each one seven times, using hah, hee, ho and huh, and get out of rhythm; make it chaotic:

Hah, hah, hah, hah, hah, hah, hah (imagine laughing at the last prank you pulled on a friend)

Hee, hee, hee, hee, hee, hee, hee (imagine Herbert Lom from The Pink Pather movies)

Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho (like Santa Claus!)

Huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh (the quite laugh of the shy)

Finally, just let go and let the laughing sounds take control and run wild. Let your mind fill with funny images. If you’re really anal-retentive like me, you can even do this silently, by “laughing” through your nose so no one can hear you… But anyone who sees you will notice the smile.