Laughter – a natural energiser and health-promoting activity?

Does the ability to laugh affect our overall life experience or does our life experience affect our ability to laugh? Strangely enough, the answer to both questions is an unequivocal yes.

Firstly, there is no doubt that the ability to laugh speeds up healing processes, increases pain tolerance, and reduces the risk of suicide, depression and heart disease. For instance, cardiologists at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in the US found that people with heart disease were 40 percent less likely to laugh in a variety of situations compared to people of the same age without heart disease. The study found that people with heart disease responded less humorously to everyday life situations, generally laughed less, even in positive situations, and displayed more anger and hostility. The study could not explain why laughter helped except perhaps as a stress antidote as the act of laughing helps to lower the levels of stress hormones in our bodies. Stress is known to impair the functioning of the lining of blood vessels, which leads to inflammation, plaque build up and ultimately heart disease.

How does a sense of humour affect other areas of life such as our relationships? Laughter appears to play a major role in sexual attraction as well as the formation of long-lasting relationships. However, research published in the Evolution and Human Behaviour Journal found a distinction between the role of women and men in the interplay of humour. Women generally want a partner who makes them laugh. Men generally want a partner whom they can make laugh. While both sexes can and do laugh a lot, women appear to laugh more than twice as much, on average, than men. The level of laughter in a woman represents an index of the health of the relationship while a man’s happiness is linked to the laughter levels of his partner.

Career advancement and success also appear to hinge on having a good sense of humour. Over 90% of top executives interviewed in one large study considered a sense of humour to be an important requirement for career advancement.

So while the ability to laugh clearly affects our life experience how does our life experience affect our ability to laugh? Analysing and measuring a sense of humour is an extraordinarily difficult task but there is some good research demonstrating that a sense of humour develops as a learned trait, influenced principally by family and cultural environments, rather than an inherited characteristic.

A study of 127 seven pairs of female twins, 71 of whom were identical and therefore had 100% of their genetic material in common, at the Twin’s Research Unit at St Thomas’ Hospital in London demonstrated some interesting findings. Surprisingly, the identical twins shared no more common responses to jokes than the non-identical twins who have only 50% of their genes in common (similar to ordinary siblings). The variability in the reaction to jokes was found to be predominantly due to shared environmental effects, such as family upbringing. Genetic factors did contribute at all to the variability in reaction.

This, in short, means we can all learn to laugh and augurs well for people who appear to be short on a sense of humour. So whether we want to enhance our health, relationships and career prospects by laughing more or start to cultivate a sense of humour we can all benefit from introducing humour into our lives. We can do this by regularly reading something humorous, watching funny films and trying to find ways to take ourselves less seriously. This could involve taking up fun new hobbies which put us in different and unexpected situations.  Or we could simply resort to tickling more as this remains one of the best and most reliable ways to stimulate laughter and has been employed by humans since time immemorial.

The tickling process is inherently social; we cannot get the same response if we tickle ourselves. Most people enjoy tickling and being tickled and employ it as a way to show affection. Tickling is probably at the root of all playful social interactions and is compulsively reciprocal. Everyone feels compelled to tickle the tickler. Sadly, studies show that tickling, and the associated sense of playfulness, declines dramatically in middle age with people experiencing progressive ‘tactile disengagement’ from life. This is perhaps another reason why grandchildren play such an important role as they bring tickling, touching and playing back into middle to old age.

We can also all start, quite simply, by smiling more. Research has shown that even if you force a smile by grasping a pencil between your teeth, you feel happier. When people are happy they smile but an area of research called propioceptive psychology shows that the same process also works in reverse. Get people to behave in a certain way and you get them to experience a range of emotions and thoughts. The slogan of the successful Alcoholics Anonymous programme, You have to fake it to make it, exploits this basic premise of human life. And we should all learn to do likewise to re-energise our physical and emotional health. We have nothing to lose.