Medicinal mirth: The health benefits of laughter

Why a laugh a day keeps the doctor—and the cardiologist and the psychiatrist—away.

Mary Desmond Pinkowish | August 2009 issue

Laughter yoga is playful, not silly or comical, proponents say.

Photograph: Jordan Hollender

"If you increase your humor quotient, it will change your life," says Steven Sultanoff, professor of psychology in the Graduate School of Education and Psychology at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and an authority on the therapeutic uses of humor. "Laughter is a physical response to humor," says Sultanoff. "Muscles contract, blood flow increases, breathing rate speeds up and circulation increases." For most people, the alternating contraction and relaxation of muscles feels good. This is, in fact, a standard tense-release technique used in many forms of relaxation therapy—minus the laughter. Laughter even increases pain tolerance. Sultanoff says he listens to tapes of comedian Robin Williams on his way to the dentist. But is laughter just a feel-good bandage for occasional tough times?

The strongest evidence for the health benefits of laughter comes from psychiatric research. Evidence has been accumulating for years that people who suffer with chronic anxiety, anger and depression have multiple physiological problems. Anger and depression have been linked to heart disease, while gastrointestinal troubles are said to result from uncontrolled anxiety. The American Heart Association (AHA) warns people who’ve had heart attacks that depression can slow their recovery and increase their risk of future cardiac calamities. The AHA also urges its cardiologist members to get psychiatric help for heart attack patients who show signs of depression. What does this have to do with laughter? "We know that in the human condition, you cannot experience emotional distress and emotional uplift at the same time," Sultanoff says. "When you’re experiencing mirth, you are not experiencing depression, anxiety or anger." Mirth reduces the negative impact of anger and other distressing emotions.

Gendry, the Manhattan laughter yoga instructor largely responsible for introducing the technique in the U.S., told our class essentially the same thing: "This will not change your life. You will not be happy all the time from laughter yoga. I myself am not happy all the time. Sometimes I am disturbed or unhappy. But the laughing helps me cope with the stress." His corporate presentations of laughter yoga, Gendry says, help employees deal with stress, increase productivity and creativity, and improve communication and teamwork.

In his late 1970s classic Anatomy of an Illness , Norman Cousins described how the Marx Brothers helped his recovery from a painful illness that was never satisfactorily diagnosed. Their movies gave him hours of pain-free sleep, and he eventually recovered. Some mainstream medicos were dismissive of Cousins, but today, approximately 20 percent of National Cancer Institute-designated treatment centers in the U.S. offer laughter or humor therapy—not because it will cure cancer, but because it helps patients cope.

Could laughter kill cancer cells, too? Mary Payne Bennett, director of the Western Kentucky University School of Nursing, has evidence that it does, at least in the test tube. She and her colleagues conducted experiments to assess the activity of natural killer cells before and after volunteers watched a so-called "humor stimulus" (in lay terms: something funny). It’s the business of natural killer, or NK, cells to kill cancer cells, among other chores. The strength of this anti-cancer response can be assessed by placing NK cells in a container with cancer cells and measuring cancer cell death after four hours.

In Bennett’s study, blood was drawn from the volunteers before they watched a funny video and again afterward. Bennett found some of her volunteers laughed out loud, while others simply looked amused during the video. Both sets of NK cells were tested against the cancer cells. Although both groups reported decreases in psychological stress, NK cells from the laughers were more active against the cancer cells after the funny video. "We can say for sure that mirthful laughter causes reductions in self-reported psychological stress, and it is also associated with decreases in the stress hormone cortisol, which is evidence of a reduction in physiological stress," Bennett says. "Laughter is a good thing, with no major harmful side effects. This is a longstanding component of major belief systems around the world, but now we’re documenting it."

A prevalent stereotype suggests humorless, angry people have more heart attacks than happy ones. That’s obviously grossly overstated, as most of us have known jollity-bringers who’ve dropped dead of heart attacks and sour people who’ve lived to be 100. Nonetheless, Michael Miller, director of the Center for Preventive Cardiology at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, investigated the link between humor and heart health in 2005. Miller enrolled 300 people in his study, 150 of whom had a history of heart attacks or bypass surgery. The others, of the same age and gender, were healthy. The volunteers completed a humor survey to determine how much individuals laughed in certain situations and to assess anger and hostility. Not surprisingly, people with a history of heart disease weren’t as good as healthy people at recognizing or acknowledging humor in everyday situations. Even in positive situations, they were more likely to demonstrate anger or hostility.

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