I recently caught a television report on the health benefits of adequate sleep. A number of volunteers were subjected to sleep deprivation – either through scheduled deep-sleep disturbances or through truncated sleeping hours. The discoveries from these studies provided alarming ties to everything from diabetes to obesity to national automobile accident statistics.
As we become increasingly familiar with our own biology and with the positive influences on the sustenance of our vast biological systems, health advocates and advisors continue to update the guidelines. The staples from the health establishment have long been centered on eating right and exercising, the science being grounded in what we intake and what we burn. Credit the endocrine system for teaching us that we also need roughly 8 hours of sleep daily – and proper sleep has been added to the optimum health roadmap.
Now it may be time for us to look more closely at the benefits of laughter. Since laughter has long been considered the best medicine, it is certainly worthy of the analysis.
“Laughter, along with an active sense of humor, may help protect you against a heart attack.” This statement is attributed to the very recent University of Maryland School of Medicine study on laughter and heart disease. According to the findings, “People with heart disease were 40 percent less likely to laugh in a variety of situations compared to people of the same age without heart disease.”
A serious disposition could introduce you to a chest saw. But what is it about laughter that brings comfort to the heart?
“We don’t know yet why laughing protects the heart,” said Michael Miller, MD, Director of the Center for Protective Cardiology at the University of Maryland Medical Center. “But we know that mental stress is associated with impairment of the endothelium, the protective barrier lining our blood vessels. This can cause a series of inflammatory reactions that lead to fat and cholesterol build-up in the coronary arteries and ultimately to a heart attack.”
There are other benefits to laughter as well; a good giggle session can help boost the immune system – as Mike Adams writes in his feature for Natural News: “At the biophysical level, laughter moves lymph fluid around your body simply by the convulsions you experience during the process of laughing; so it boosts immune system function and helps clear out old, dead waste products from organs and tissues. Remember that your lymph system doesn’t have a separate pump; your body needs to move around to properly circulate lymph fluid so that your immune system can carry out its natural functions. Laughter is a great way to support that.”
In these days of more virulent infectious disease and the myriad stress levels encountered in day-to-day life, it is a pleasant surprise to learn that something as enjoyable as laughing (relative to, say, consuming more broccoli) should be incorporated into the healthy living mix. But how can humor be incorporated into a given day? Dr. Miller offers this advice: “We could perhaps read something humorous or watch a funny video and try to find ways to take ourselves less seriously.”
Taking oneself less seriously may be a tall order for many of us – but a treadmill and a bottle of vitamin water are just pieces to the overall health package. If personal longevity is an important goal, then the plan very well may be to eat right, exercise, sleep well, and go to a stand-up comedy club.