Speaker
proves laughter is the best medicine
Sept.
6, 2002
When’s
the last time you had a good laugh?
I’m not talking about a little chuckle — not even a
giggle. I’m talking about a full-out belly laugh ...
a guffaw. Think about it.
We all had a good laugh at the Choose to Move meeting
Wednesday night.
Dr. Joanne Joseph, an associate professor of psychology
at SUNY Institute of Technology at Utica/Rome, spoke
about stress and what triggers it. (Which is just about
anything.)
Joseph showed us a video called “The Joy of Stress”
($17.99 on Amazon.com), which featured Loretta LaRoche,
a truly comical adjunct faculty member at the Behavioral
Institute of Medicine, an affiliate of Harvard Medical
School.
This woman should be on the standup comedy circuit.
She had everyone laughing so hard, some people were
crying.
They say laughter is the best medicine; apparently that’s
true.
Laughter can build up your immune system, says LaRoche,
who also is a nationally recognized speaker in the area
of stress management. She advises us all to laugh every
day.
Did you know that an adult laughs only 15 times in the
same time a child laughs 400 times? LaRoche encourages
adults to learn from children — especially when dealing
with stress.
For example, she said, some adults get very upset when
it rains and immediately start worrying. Kids, on the
other hand, say “It’s raining, let’s go jump in the
puddles!” They don’t say, “Boy, I’d love to jump in
those puddles, but I’ll get all wet.”
Stress is all about perception, Joseph says. Any situation
can be seen as positive or negative — it’s up to us.
Sometimes we cause our own stress.
Many women feel responsible for other people’s emotions
— very stressful. A lot of men think they should know
everything — of course, that’s impossible. But that’s
how we put undue pressure on ourselves.
Another way is through negative thoughts.
Joseph says 75 percent of conversations are negative
after age 11. That’s huge.
It may not seem important, but Joseph says these negative
thoughts affect our physical health. “When people talk
negatively, their body reacts that way,” she says.
Most of us spend a lot of time “catastrophizing” and
“awfulizing,” LaRoche says. That’s when people share
with their friends and co-workers how awful everything
is. She said her goal in life is to stop global whining.
If we could be a bit more optimistic, we might even
live longer. Joseph says people who are optimists do
better in every area of life, plus they live longer.
LaRoche’s take on things: “Pessimists are accurate,
but they don’t live as long.”
Her final thought, on a more serious note:
“Yesterday
is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift,
that’s why they call it the present.”
So I guess we should relax and enjoy life instead of
sweating the small stuff.
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