How Humour Heals

How Humour Heals

Laughter stimulates the body's natural painkillers and 'feel good' enhancers, known as endorphins, helping relieve stress and heal the body. When Norman Cousins was diagnosed with the debilitating illness ankylospondylitis, the doctors told him they could no longer help him and that he would live in excruciating pain before he died. Cousins checked into a hotel room and hired every funny movie he could find: the Marx Brothers, Airplane and The Three Stooges, etc. He watched and rewatched them over and over, laughing as hard and loud as he could. After six months of this self-inflicted laughter therapy, the doctors were amazed to find that his illness had been cometely cured - the disease was gone! This amazing outcome led to the publishing of Cousins' book, Anatomy of an Illness, and the start of massive research into the function of endorphins. Endorphins are chemicals released from the brain when you laugh. They have a similar chemical composition to morphine and heroin and have a tranquillising effect on the body,

81

The Definitive Book of Body Language

while building the immune system. This explains why happy people rarely get sick and miserable but complaining people often seem to be ill.

Why Laughter Is the Best Medicine

Why Laughter Is the Best Medicine

As with smiling, when laughter is incorporated as a permanent part of who you are, it attracts friends, improves health and extends life. When we laugh, every organ in the body is affected a positive way. Our breathing quickens, which exercises the diaphragm, neck, stomach, face and shoulders. Laughter creases the amount of oxygen in the blood, which not only helps healing and improves circulation, it also expands the blood vessels close to the skin's surface. This is why people go in the face when they laugh. It can also lower the heart rate, dilate the arteries, stimulate the appetite and burn up calories.

79

The Definitive Book of Body Language

Neurologist Henri Rubenstein found that one minute of solid laughter provides up to 45 minutes of subsequent relaxation. Professor William Fry at Stanford University reported that 100 laughs will give your body an aerobic workout equal to that of a ten-minute session on a rowing machine. Medically speaking, this is why a damn good laugh is damn good for you.

The older we become, the more serious we become about life. An adult laughs an average of 15 times a day; a preschooler laughs an average of 400 times.

What Brain Scans Show

What Brain Scans Show

Most women have the brain organisation to out-communicate any man on the planet. Magnetic Resonance Imaging brain scans (MRI) clearly show why women have far greater capacity for communicating with and evaluating people than men do. Women have between fourteen and sixteen areas of the brain to evaluate others' behaviour versus a man's four to six areas. This explains how a woman can attend a dinner party and rapidly work out the state of the relationships of other couples at the party - who's had an argument, who likes who and so on. It also explains why, from a woman's standpoint, men don't seem to talk much and, from a man's standpoint, women never seem to shut up. As we showed in Why Men Don't Listen & Women Can't Read Maps (Orion), the female brain is organised for multitracking — the average woman can juggle between two and four unrelated topics at the same time. She can watch a television programme while talking on the telephone plus listen to a second conversation behind her, while drinking a cup of coffee. She can talk about several unrelated topics in the one conversation and uses five vocal tones to change the subject or emphasise points. Unfortunately, most men can only identify three of these tones. As a result, men often lose the plot when women are trying to communicate with them. Studies show that a person who relies on hard visual evidence face to face about the behaviour of another person is more likely to make more accurate judgements about that person than someone who relies solely on their gut feeling.

14

Understanding the Basics

The evidence is in the person's body language and, while women can do it subconsciously, anyone can teach themselves consciously to read the signals. That's what this book is about.