To put it bluntly, the ability to laugh at myself has never been my forte. When my dad was already dying, his only parting word to me was: “Try to treat life more cheerfully.”
To put it bluntly, the ability to laugh at myself has never been my forte. When my dad was already dying, his only parting word to me was: “Try to treat life more cheerfully.” Indeed, from early youth, life seemed to me a test that requires great internal stress. I confess that I did not understand and sometimes even condemned “light” people who always found a reason to laugh and even in tragic situations were able to see something comical. It seemed to me that in this way a person refuses to honestly accept and live what he got to share. Such people reminded me of the well-known figurines of monkeys closing their ears and eyes: “I don’t hear bad, I don’t see evil …” For me, this was a manifestation of cowardice (although now I think that in fact this is more of a wise precaution). Then I felt that I was robbing myself with such an attitude to life, depriving myself of unfamiliar sensations, experiences unknown to me, new experience. The writer Gilbert Chesterton, I think, had this in mind when he wrote, “Angels can fly because they are easy on themselves.”* Laughter is healing in the most literal sense of the word. I would like to recall the absolutely amazing story of Norman Cousins**. In 1960, he was diagnosed with a severe form of spinal cord disease with a two-in-a-thousand chance of survival. But he left the hospital and settled in his favorite hotel, where he watched comedy series from morning to evening. After a while, he felt that thanks to laughter, every day he slept longer without painkillers. Cousins stubbornly continued his laughter therapy until a remission came, and later he was even able to return to work. This story formed the basis of the book Anatomy of a Disease, which was later made into a TV movie.
All researchers are unanimous: laughter has a therapeutic effect. An experiment conducted at the University of Maryland showed that people who regularly watched films that made them laugh improved blood circulation and normalized blood pressure. Laughter prevents hardening of the arteries, strengthens the immune system, and even regulates blood sugar levels. But it’s not just biochemistry. Understanding the power of laughter was given to me by the phrase of the psychotherapist Viktor Frankl. “There is always something between our desires and actions that can connect them. This something is our ability to find the strength within ourselves to act. In this skill lies our maturity and our freedom. Laughter helps us find these strengths within ourselves. While we laugh, we get a short respite to sort out our own emotions, to take a fresh look at the situation. We can look at it from an unexpected angle, and this “optical focus” allows us to suddenly feel – yes, we can do it.
* G. Chesterton “Eternal Man” (Eksmo, Midgard, 2004).
** «Anatomy of an Illness (as Perceived by the Patient)». The New England Journal of Medicine, nejm.org
*** V. Frankl “Man in search of meaning” (Progress, 1990).