Humor and Health on April Fool's Day

AL SIEBERT, author of Survivor Personality, says according to his research, a good sense of humor significantly helps survivors cope with extreme stress. “Mental efficiency is directly related to a person’s general level of emotional arousal,” he says. “People are less able to solve problems and make precise, coordinated movements when strongly worked up. Laughing reduces tension to more moderate levels and efficiency improves.”

Anyone in a prolonged stressful situation can attest to this basic principle. Gerald Coffee, for example, was a POW in Vietnam. His captors treated him with unbelievable brutality. At one point he was taken to a “shower.” He hadn’t bathed at all in three months. This shower was littered with garbage. It was small and the walls were covered with slime. The water was cold, came from a rusty pipe, and only trickled out.

As he was trying to wash off, he felt depressed. He hadn’t held up under torture as well as he expected of himself. His head was down and he felt tired and sad and deeply disappointed in himself.

Then he looked up and saw someone had scratched a message on the wall that said, “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!”

Coffee laughed out loud. The message was so out of place, it was funny. But Coffee also laughed because, he says, he appreciated so much “the beautiful guy who had mustered the moxie to rise above his own dejection and frustration and pain and guilt to inscribe a line of encouragement to those who would come after him.”

Humor can have a powerful affect on your mood and your ability to cope with difficult situations. The man who inscribed the Candid Camera line improved his own mood, and the moods of men who came after him, raising their spirits and making them more resilient.

In experiments, researchers have found humor also improves your cleverness. Imagine someone gave you a box of tacks, a candle, and some matches and told you to stick the candle to a cork board in such a way that the candle doesn’t drip wax onto the floor below. Could you do it? Whether or not you could do it, Alice M. Isen and her colleagues found, might depend on whether or not you’ve just seen the humor in something.

Before they were given the problem to solve, students were shown either a comedy film of bloopers or a film on math (which was not funny at all).

After watching the math film, 20% of the students successfully solved the problem. But 75% of the students who watched the comedy film were able to do it. That's a big difference! The solution is to pour the tacks out of the box and tack the box to the board, and then put the candle in the box.

Isen said, “Research suggests that positive memories are more extensive and are more interconnected than are negative ones, so being happy may cue you into a larger and richer cognitive context, and that could significantly affect your creativity.”

Let's use this insight. Let's raise our level of resilience and cleverness. On April Fool's Day, it is traditional to play practical jokes. It's been a custom in several countries for centuries. It may have its roots in the Hilaria festival of ancient Rome. I'm not making this up.

A good laugh is good for you, and a good practical joke is good for a laugh. I invite you to (safely and in good taste) have some good laughs today. And to get you started in the right direction, enjoy these compilations of practical jokes:

Read more about the value of humor and how to improve your sense of humor: See the Funny.

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Stress is Bad for Relationships

AT THE OHIO State University Medical Center researchers followed ninety couples for ten years. The couples they chose were free of risky behaviors or psychiatric problems, and the researchers specifically tried to choose only people who were happy with their relationships.

The researchers wanted to find out how stress affects the likelihood of divorce. After the ten-year study, this is their conclusion: The more stress a couple experiences while talking to each other, the more likely they will divorce.

According to the researchers, women register higher levels of stress hormones during conflicts (adrenaline, ACTH, and cortisol) than the men they're arguing with. And women with the highest level of stress hormones during conversations with their spouses did not have higher levels of stress hormones than normal in other circumstances in their lives.

Does this concern you? Do you have stressful arguments with your spouse? You can do something to change it. Here are some things that will lower your stress during difficult conversations with your spouse:

1. Reduce the amount of caffeine, alcohol, and sugar you consume. These substances can increase your body's reaction to stressful circumstances. Read more about how they influence stress. Reducing or eliminating them may make things worse for a day or two, but then your stress level will begin to drop.

2. Learn better ways to argue. It seems the content — the actual topics — of your arguments would have the biggest influence on how much stress you experience, but the process you use is more important. If you use a good process, the intensity of the argument remains lower, which reduces the stress of that particular argument. So your arguments become more productive, which lowers your stress level over time too. Here is how to argue with a good process.

3. Learn better ways of listening. One of the biggest causes of stress in an argument is the lack of good listening. You cannot make your spouse listen well, but you can change the way you listen, and that's good enough to alter the course of the conversation. Learn more about listening here.

4. Lower your general upset-ability through meditation. Regular meditation makes you calmer to begin with, and makes your stressful reactions less intense during arguments, leading to more productive and less destructive interactions. Here's more about what meditation is, how it works, and simple instructions for meditation.

Do any of these and you will personally feel better, you'll be healthier, and your relationship will be happier. If you're married, you'll be less likely to divorce. And all this will improve your mood immediately and over time.

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How to Gain a New Perspective

WHEN YOU SAY, "Thanks, that gave me a new perspective," it's usually because something was causing you stress, someone gave you a different way to look at the problem, and it made you feel better.

If you're like most of us, you usually gain a new perspective because someone you know gives you some good counsel. But you can gain a new perspective deliberately on your own, and it will change your mood (and the way you handle the problem) just as well. Here are three ways to gain a new perspective:

1. Make a comparison reframe. My wife and I were in line at a grocery store, commenting on how busy it was, and grumbling about waiting in line. The man in front of us got to talking with us, and in the course of the conversation, he said he wished his wife were alive. My wife and I both made the same comparison reframe in our minds. All of a sudden waiting in a long line seemed so insignificant! Comparison reframes can give you a sudden and dramatic change in perspective. Find out how.

2. In your imagination, look at it from someone else's point of view. Who do you think might have a good perspective on your situation? It could be someone you know, or someone from history. Think of someone you admire. How do you think that person would look at this setback? How about Abraham Lincoln? Or Gandhi? Of course, you don't really know, but you can imagine it. This five-minute process can often completely change your perspective.

3. Set a goal that will change your perspective. For example, I once lost my job. The company went out of business. At first I was stunned, but my wife and I talked about it and decided we'd make sure we were glad this happened, which meant the next job had to be significantly better that the old job. I sat down and listed all the things I liked in the old job, all the things I didn't like, and all the things I wanted in my next job. Then I went after a job that would fit all those criteria. This goal changed my perspective on my new (and potentially stressful) circumstances. I found the job I was looking for. And we did, in fact, become genuinely glad the other company went out of business. A goal can change your perspective dramatically.

When you gain a new perspective, you feel better. And you respond differently to your circumstances because your response depends on how you're looking at it. Because of your lack of distress or panic, you'll make better decisions.

You can change a perspective right now. Think of something stressing you out, choose one of the three techniques above, and use it today. Mastery of perspective is an important skill in your ultimate goal of feeling good more often.

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A Day of Ease

IN THE OLD DAYS, people used to have "nervous breakdowns." For awhile, they were out of commission. They couldn't function at their jobs or in their relationships. Back then the remedy was simply rest, quiet, and relaxation. They took a break from work, from chores, even from normal human relationships.

They just laid around and sometimes got up to eat or to go sit outside and listen to the birds chirping.

Imagine what it would be like to do that, and how slowly and leisurely you would move when you walked down the hall to get some food. You would have all the time in the world. There would be no need or desire to move at anything over half-speed, like you had completely stepped out of the rat race and none of it meant anything to you any more.

The assignment I have for you, in our quest to raise our moods, is to spend one of your next days off moving like a person who had a nervous breakdown back in the 1950s. And do this for a whole day.

Move slowly. Try not to be efficient about anything. Flagrantly waste time. Deliberately be as unhurried as you possibly can.

Watch very little or no TV that day. Television programs and advertisements make you mentally move quickly. And don't get on your computer. But if you want to do something physical, like mow the lawn or do the dishes, go right ahead, but only if you're doing it just to have something to do. Do not do it to "be productive," or because you feel you should. Don't do anything that day you feel you "should" do.

Let's call this exercise "a Day of Ease." The experience is so restorative, so peaceful, and so elevating, I think you'll be pleasantly astonished. The process is also illuminating.

Why? Because our perpetual efficiency is driven by a kind of greed — trying to cram as much in as we can — but perpetual greed wears on you and brings you down. The never-waste-a-moment mentality has become a deeply-ingrained habit of more more more — and it is so universal, most of the time we don't even notice that's the state we're living our lives in.

The Day of Ease exercise is a break from the pressure of this grinding greed. You've got to try it! Believe it or not, it's kind of hard to do. You'll keep forgetting. You'll find yourself walking quickly or being efficient with your time. This driven hurry is compulsive, and to that degree it is unhealthy.

When you are deliberate in an area you're normally compulsive, you have an opening to gain some freedom. You have choice. Like eating after fasting, you'll find you have a much better appreciation of what you're doing after taking a break from it.

You don't need a nervous breakdown to get a Day of Ease. Those days are over. In the 21st century you can relax just because it's healthy.

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Your Mood Makes a Difference to Others

DO YOU THINK improving your mood is a selfish indulgence? Do you think you should stop trying to feel better and do something productive instead? Well, get ready to overturn your thinking because a new study shows that your good mood has a strong influence on the happiness of others.

Improving your own mood does something valuable for the people who know you.

Using the voluminous data collected in the Framingham Heart Study, researchers looked at 5000 people over a period of twenty years. Many of the participants knew each other, so the researchers fed all the connections and their mood data over the two decades, and discovered something deeply heartening. Each person's happiness ripples out into others' lives.

In other words, your happiness — your good mood — causes a ripple of good moods for the people you know, and the closer people are to you, the stronger the effect.

Here's another uplifting finding from this study: Good moods have a greater ripple effect than bad moods. In other words, your good moods have more of a positive effect on others than your bad moods have a negative effect on them. And their good moods influence you more than their bad moods.

This is good news all around. Your good mood has a measurably positive effect on the people you know. And good moods are more influential than bad moods.

Read more about the study here: Use Your Mood to Improve the World. And from now on, take your mood more seriously, and encourage the people you know to do the same.

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Solving Problems Like an Artist of Life

IMAGINE YOU live in an apartment, and just when you're going to sleep every night, the neighbor's infant is on the other side of your bedroom wall in the apartment next door, crying her heart out.

You can't sleep because you can hear the poor baby crying so loudly. Studies show one of the most upsetting sounds to most people is a crying baby. The baby is beside herself with anguish, wailing loudly in her loneliness night after night.

Imagine yourself in this situation. What would you do? Complain to the parents? Talk to the manager? Contemplate moving to another apartment building? Bang on the wall? Get earplugs?

A woman in this situation came up with a creative and actually fulfilling solution to this problem. She figured that since she could hear the baby so clearly, the baby would be able to hear her too. So she sang the child to sleep.

Isn't that beautiful? What a humane, creative, compassionate, and even satisfying solution!

Now think about a problem you have. Think of a problem that really has you pulling your hair out. And try to think of a solution that will not only solve it but creatively and compassionately fulfill you at the same time.

Can't think of a solution like that? Of course you can't! Good ideas usually take longer than three seconds to come up with.

In your spare time while driving and showering and doing the dishes, go over the problem in your mind, and don't just try to "solve the problem." Don't just try to figure out a way to make it go away. Come up with a creative, compassionate, and even fulfilling solution.

If you're in a hurry, use more than your spare time. Do some concentrated thinking on a constitutional or sitting still once or twice a day.

It may take you days or even weeks to think of one. But when you do, wow! You are on your way to becoming a true artist of life.

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