Here’s a statistic for you. Our laughter rate drops from 400 a day as toddlers to the grown up average of 15. Ugh.
Retain youthfulness….laugh!
I Love to laugh. Big laughs, belly laughs, chuckles, giggles, chortles, snickers, snorts, guffaws….I do them all. I find a lot of things funny. Luckily, so does everyone in my family and all my friends.
Laughs are so distinct I love how each one is different – unique to the laugh-er. I’ve always thought of humour as a gift. It opens the heart, erases fear, unites people and heals.
Norman Cousin’s book, Anatomy of an Illness, illustrates the powerful effect of laughter and humour on the cells of the body and how they can be transformed from diseased to healthy. In Game of Thrones George R.R. Martin writes, “laughter is poison to fear”.
Until a clever someone comes up with a way to bottle laughter we can choose to look at things from a funny, lopsided or slightly askew perspective.
It’s another strategy to keep fear and worry at bay and put a little song in the heart.
“Laughter is carbonated holiness.” Anne Lamont
reACTION [to change in the response to stimulus]: Day 28 – laugh
Just for fun…take an issue, problem or obstacle you are facing and apply a funny solution.
Here’s one of mine. When my daughter Kelly was in university she lived a pressure cooker existence. She was a good student, spent a lot of time studying and the rest training and playing as a member of a highly competitive NCAA Div 1 sports team. She set high expectations of herself. Sometimes, when I talked to her she felt heavy and wasn’t laughing which was not a good sign for a girl who had the humourous, quirky perspective on almost everything. Since we were separated by 1000km I came up with the idea of taking funny pictures of her dog (who of course was now ‘my’ dog). I dressed Tip (the dog) for every event and holiday…all in an effort to keep her spirit light and make her laugh! It was a silly project that went on for 3 years and it garnered laughs…lots of them. Whenever I felt heaviness in her it was time to dress the dog….and dress the dog I did… 3 years and 30 costumes worth!
Here’s Tip’s tribute to graduation day.
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