laugh your way to happiness

by Frank Chalmers

Tense? Depressed? Stressed? Imagine what it would be like if you could make an appointment at your local health centre and your GP was able to give you a prescription for laughter.

image to accompany feature
© stockbyte

'Have a good chuckle four times a day for the next two weeks – and don't come back until you've finished the full course of treatment!' he or she might say.

Doctors already give exercise on prescription and the good news now is that many advocates of laughter therapy are working hard to ensure that the benefits of 'internal aerobics', as it has been described, receive equal recognition.

After all, research has shown that laughter has a direct physiological effect on the body – reducing stress hormones, increasing the immune system's activity, improving the circulation and exercising the muscles.

the benefits of internal aerobics

Medical researchers say that a dose of laughter can:

lower levels of the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol – reversing the classic hormone response during times of stress
increase endorphin levels – the natural 'feel-good' chemicals in the body
clean old air from the lungs and allow fresh air to replace it
exercise the muscles, nerves and organs of the torso. With a belly-laugh sustained for an hour you could laugh away up to 500 calories.
leave us with an 'afterglow' in which we relax muscle-tension
restore a full and flowing breathing pattern and gently expand our circulation.

laughter therapists

The best-known exponent of laughter therapy is undoubtedly Dr 'Patch' Adams, portrayed by Robin Williams in the recent Universal Studios' film. Adams has established the Gesundheit Institute in Washington, DC, with the aim of 'bringing fun, friendship and the joy of service back into health care'.

If anyone could be described as Adams' alter ego in the UK it is Robert Holden, who heads up the Oxford-based Happiness Project. Holden, a trained psychologist and psychotherapist, launched the UK's first laughter clinics in 1991 with funding from the NHS. When demand began to outstrip supply he set up the Happiness Project in 1995.

'We have three client groups. One is the general public, for whom we run one-day and three-day workshops,' says Holden, who did a joint tour of Edinburgh, Dublin and London with Patch Adams in 2000.

'The real spine of our work, though, is the eight-week Happiness Programme, which is a series of workshops and home-learning modules helping people to make changes and breakthroughs.'

smiling inside

One of the exercises Holden uses to help people relax on the courses is called the 'inner smile'. Participants are asked to start with an 'unreasonable smile – the capacity to smile for no reason at all', he says.

'After that we ask them to imagine that their ears are smiling, that their neck is smiling and their lungs are smiling, then the kidneys, and the bladder and the bowels, the knees and feet – the whole lot really. That's just a simple exercise taken from a model of progressive relaxation, and aimed at introducing a sense of an inner smile.'

Holden's second client group is health professionals – and wouldn't it be great if they all had the bedside manner of comedians like ex-doctor Harry Hill or former nurse Jo Brand?

Unfortunately they don't, and Holden sees it as part of his work to help health professionals stop relating to people 'as their diseases'.

With a bit of self-deprecating humour, he describes himself, for example, as a 'recovering psychologist'. In training, psychologists are usually taught to diagnose everyone with a problem, he says. 'In fact, if anyone didn't have a problem we basically concluded that they were very well-suppressed – as opposed to being happy.'

The good news is that, since 1991, at least 30,000 doctors, nurses and other health professionals in the UK and Europe have learned about the value of laughter by attending at least a one-day programme run by the Happiness Project or its predecessor.

managing a laugh

The third area of work covered by the Happiness Project is described by Holden as 'corporate land'. This has included laughter workshops involving managers at the highest level in companies such as BT, Sony, the Body Shop and the BBC.

comedy double act

Dr Brian Kaplan, a medically qualified doctor specialising in homoeopathy, is another UK pioneer of using humour in medicine.

Kaplan has been doing work with comedian Arnold Brown for a number of years and in 1997 ran a show at London's New End Theatre with Brown and improvisational actor Neil Malarkey. More recently he has been running workshops using 'provocative therapy', which he describes as 'the specific use of humour in a psychotherapeutic form'.

Provocative therapy is to medicine 'what theatre of the absurd is to drama', he says. It works by 'pointing up the absurd side of people's problems'. If you highlight the absurdity in people's problems and start siding with the weaknesses, the people tend to move in the opposite direction, he explains.

'As soon as they start to laugh at the problem, the problem is completely disempowered. What's beautiful about it is that you don't have to go for a whole load of sessions. You go for a few, then you get an audiotape of the sessions that you can listen to over and over again.' Videotapes of the consultation are also available.

the primitive laugh

But why should laughter be beneficial to health? Mike Lonergan, famous for developing the 'HQ' (happiness quotient) computer programme in 1993 – which allows people to measure the changes in their happiness levels – says it's down to evolution.

'When we were evolving as human beings we developed pain to warn us when our body was hurt, and it would be inconceivable that we didn't develop something that tells us our body is well. That signal, which shows us that our mind and body are at peace and in harmony, is happiness.'

Lonergan, a retired US professor of communications who runs the not-for-profit organisation Happy Place, says that during the journey from childhood to adulthood, people often lose the ability to laugh. 'We teach people to be unhappy,' he says. 'We learn it, it's acquired. Unhappiness is absolutely pandemic.'

The key to regaining our happiness is for people to realise that 'nobody is in charge of their happiness except themselves', he says.

help and info

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organisations

The Happiness Project
6 Fazeley Court
Elmfield Way
London W9 3UF
Tel: 0845 4309236
E-mail: info@happiness.co.uk
Website: www.happiness.co.uk
Founded in 1996, the Happiness Project offers courses, workshops, seminars and coaching on success, happiness and relationships.

websites

The Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor
http://aath.org
Created to educate health care professionals and lay audiences about the values and therapeutic uses of humour and laughter. Features an extensive book list.

The Happiness Workshop
www.ivillage.co.uk/ ..
A four-week workshop which aims to help you identify problem areas and provide you with the skills and strategies needed to fulfil your happiness potential.

Humor Project
www.humorproject.com
Aims to help people get more 'smileage' out of their lives and jobs by applying the practical, positive power of humour and creativity. Features discussion boards and a bookstore. American-based.

Homeopathic Physician – Dr Kaplan
www.drkaplan.co.uk
This website, owned by Dr Brian Kaplan, is dedicated to the sharing of stories about homeopathy, homeopaths and patients.

Patch Adams
www.patchadams.org
Official site of The Gesundheit! Institute and Patch Adams, the doctor-clown, whose life was played by actor Robin Williams in the Golden-Globe-nominated film Patch Adams.

reading

	Gesundheit! by Patch Adams and Maureen Mylander (Inner Traditions International, 1998) The story of Patch Adams, the founder of the Gesundheit! Institute, who has devoted his career to giving away health care, his philosophy being that healing should be a loving, creative, humorous human interchange not a business transaction. Get this book

	Happiness Now! Timeless Wisdom for Feeling Good Fast by Robert Holden (Hodder Mobius, 1999) The founder of the Happiness Project gives his advice on how to be happy from day-to-day through a combination of stories, exercises, meditations, poetry and prayer. Get this book

	The Healing Power of Humor by Allen Klein (Jeremy P Tarcher, 1989) Offers techniques for using humour to reduce stress and promote physical and mental healing. Get this book

	Thanks for the Mammogram! Fighting Cancer with Faith, Hope, and a Healthy Dose of Laughter by Laura Jensen Walker (Revell, 2000) In this energetic and hope-filled book, the author draws on her faith and sense of humour to write about her experience of breast cancer. Get this book

	The Beginner's Guide to Humor and Healing by Bernie Siegel (Sounds True, 2002) Audiobook that discusses research on the ability of laughter to boost the immune system and shares true stories of miraculous spontaneous remissions in 'terminally ill' patients. Get this book

	'Humor: An antidote for stress' by P Wooten in Holistic Nursing Practice, vol 10, issue 2 (1996), pages 49-55. This paper describes the therapeutic consequences of using humour as a self-care tool to cope with stress. It is available to read at www.jesthealth.com (click on 'articles'), along with a range of other articles on laughter as therapy.