“Laughing everyday keeps the doctor away”

I have a friend who is Chilean and is studying translation in the university. Recently, he has written an assignment which is about the relationship between the mental state and health. He wrote it so brilliantly and I agree with what he'd said in the essay. That's why I would like to share it with the rest of you...

“Laughing everyday keeps the doctor away”

It is no mystery that one of the main ingredients to make our lives more bearable is humour. Up to now we have thought of laughter as a way to escape from the daily stress that work or study gives us. We do this by watching a comedy film or reading cartoons, even singing funny tunes can make us feel relieved when we are about to break down. But what we do not know is that a good sense of humour can also prevent us from several illnesses that are not directly related to our mind.

Laughing involves lots of organs working; organs that most of the time are quiet due to our sedentary lifestyle. Nowadays we barely move to get some food or to get back home, we prefer to order our meals from delivery services or to go to work by bus. This doesn’t help much our health, but having a good sense of humour can be a useful way to fight the symptoms that the lack of exercise generates. Recent studies have demonstrated that when people laugh, their blood pressure increases and it boosts blood circulation. The effect that laughter produces in our bodies is similar to the one of taking pills against cholesterol or doing light exercise. Laughter also increases the production of endorphins, a kind of hormone that works as a natural analgesic and helps to wear off the pain. This is why we see each day an increasing amount of “clown doctors” helping the actual doctors to do their job. When we laugh we are also moving about 400 different muscles that otherwise would stay still, we secrete saliva and thus thousands of new antibodies that fight most of the viruses and bacteria that infect our body. If the laughter is very strong it can make us shed some tears, and this way we can eliminate toxins and the excess of hormones that sometimes leads us to anger. Regarding this unusual pair, humour and health, many studies have been done by scientists from all over the world. One of them was developed in the United States by the University of Baltimore and it investigated the link between heart illnesses and the mood of the people who suffer them. They found out that people with cardiovascular problems are less likely to laugh in situations that would make healthy people laugh. They chose 20 people to examine them while they were watching comical situations on television and the results were not far to what they thought. Everyone from that group had their blood pressure increased between 20% up to 50%. The director of the Center for Preventive Cardiology at the University of Maryland Medical Center, Dr. Michael Miller, said that they wanted to do more research on this when they realized that most of their patients were not very cheerful. They were asked to answer a questionnaire on things they thought were amusing, but none of them could answer easily. This led to a major investigation and the results were later published in the scientific magazine “Heart”.

To sum up, it should be known that humour is more than just a means to relax for a moment. People must be aware that the answer to many of their health problems is right in their hands, for free. Laughter could be as useful as an apple to keep the doctor away, since it has important effects in the way our body operates, from moving little muscles to help us removing unhealthy secretions out of our systems. Apart from that, everybody knows that humour can make us have a better attitude towards the world in which we live.

*Written by Rodrigo Concha*