Stillness 8-3: How often in the day do you actually laugh out loud? We use emojis and LOLs, but when was the last time you burst out into a loud guffaw or chuckled audibly in merriment? We allow external circumstances and our serious brain’s response to them—raging against fate, politics, or injustice, for example—to utterly oppress us. But laughter can set us free.
You’ve probably heard results of the extensive research that’s shown how laughter lifts our mood, eases depression, and soothes anxiety. That it makes us feel good because it increases endorphins released by our brain. It makes us breathe more deeply so our heart, lungs, and all our muscles get more oxygen, which also enhances our good mood. Our tense muscles relax and our sluggish circulation gets stirred up. Our heart rate and blood pressure calms down—literally, laughter lowers them. Our immune system is boosted because laughter releases neuropeptides that fight stress and illness. Laughter relieves pain by encouraging our body to produce its own natural painkillers. And so on and so forth.
We all have a sense of humor—it’s not something we have to learn. It’s part of human nature. But if your humorousness feels buried or rusty, you might need to take it out and polish it up a bit. Do this simply by bringing your attention to the humor in any given situation. Turn it around, turn it upside down, turn it inside out, reframe it. We get way too stuck in how we’ve always regarded an issue. Laughing at it can be like turning it into an imaginative work of art!
Today let’s exhilarate! Here’s how: Place both your hands on your abdomen, bend your knees slightly so you feel your center in your lower body. Feel yourself grounded, balanced, light and bouncy on your feet. Now laugh out loud. You don’t have to have a reason or a joke: just go through the motions. Laugh very high, then very low, then middling. And again. Out loud. Pretend with your entire body. Wave a hand around in helplessness of laughter. Bend over. Throw your head back. Abandon yourself to hilarity.
What happens when you do this is that your body sends strong currents to your way-too-serious brain, telling it to relax. Telling it to smile and be cheerful. Your brain doesn’t have to know why something is funny for it to believe your body that says it is. Your brain is not as smart as you think: it is there for your good, not for its good. It will willingly do your bidding. If you want to feel cheerful, this is a fabulous way to “trick” your brain into believing it is cheerful. It will then support your endeavor of merriment and you will actually feel merrier.
Embrace the hilarity in your heart and feel exhilaration course through you and out into the world. When you exhilarate, you help others to feel cheerful, lively, joyous. You gladden them. Thus you gladden yourself even more.
Here’s a mantra to say whenever you remember: my heart is whole, my heart is happy, my heart is hilarious.