A merry heart does good, like medicine, But a broken spirit dries the bones. – Proverbs 17:22
Would you laugh more if your life depended on it? The Japanese government certainly thinks you should. Citizens in the northern province of Yamagata have been ordered by law to laugh daily for the sake of their health.
The edict was inspired by research from the local university which found regular laughter can reduce your risk of heart disease and help you live longer. Researchers from Yamagata University who published their study in the Journal of Epidemiology, worked with 17,152 participants aged 40 or younger and tracked how often they laughed over several years and concluded that increasing the frequency of laughter will reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and increase longevity.
Are they having a laugh? Actually, no. The health benefits of laughter are increasingly being studied and recognised globally. A recent study published in the journal Preventive Medicine suggests that older people who laugh regularly with friends and family could be significantly less likely to develop health problems than those who do not.
Another study in Nursing & Health Sciences, indicates that laughter dramatically suppresses stress hormones, such as cortisol, reduces anxiety through lowering adrenaline levels and activating the body’s natural relaxation response.
A recent study from Brazil, presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in 2023, showed that those struggling with coronary heart disease who regularly watched comedy shows had benefits to their heart and circulatory system compared to those who watched serious documentaries. It was the first randomized clinical trial to study the effects of laughter on heart health.
“It’s true. Laughing will have a positive impact on your health,” says Robin Dunbar, an emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, who has studied both the psychological and physiological effects of laughter on health. “Laughter will not only help your heart health but make you feel good, boost your immune system and mood,” he says. His study on the effects of laughter found that when we belly laugh, the physical exertions of the rib cage trigger the release of protective endorphins, the brain chemicals that help us to manage pain and promote feelings of bliss and help promote heart health.
But it’s not just the physical act of laughing that has such a profound effect on us but the role of laughter to create connection with others, he continues. “Monkeys and apes form social bonds and ‘friendships’ by grooming each other, which sends signals to the brain that trigger the endorphin system,” he explains. “And laughing produces an endorphin reaction similar to grooming.”
Evolutionarily, Prof Dunbar believes that laughter is the human equivalent to physical grooming in primates. “Primates spend 20 per cent of the daytime grooming,” he says. “This imposes an upper limit – a kind of glass ceiling of around 50 in group size and the group tends not to grow beyond that unless you solve the bonding problem in some other way. Laughter solves that problem,” says Prof Dunbar.
“It’s hard to separate the physical effects from the social effects of laughter,” says Sophie Scott, a professor at UCL and the director of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, who has studied laughter and how it shapes our bodies and behaviour. (Her TED talk ‘Why We Laugh’ has been viewed over four million times.)
“Yes, studies show that laughter has a positive effect on the body but because you are more than 30 times more likely to laugh if you’re with somebody else than if you’re alone, it’s difficult to gauge whether it’s the impact of laughter or the physiological and psychological effects of being with people you like,” she says. “But what we do know for sure is that laughter will help you create deeper connections with people. If you can get somebody laughing, they will tell you more intimate information about themselves because they feel closer to you. And emotional closeness creates a whole raft of positive physiological effects on the body.”
It will also keep your marriage alive. Prof Scott references a study conducted by Prof Robert Levenson, a UC Berkeley psychophysiologist and behavioural neuroscientist. His study invited married couples, men and women, into a lab and asked them stressful questions such as “what is something your wife does that irritates you?” while he wired them up to a polygraph.
Prof Levenson discovered that the couples who manage that feeling of stress with laughter, not only immediately become less stressed but felt physically feeling better. The study found that couples who report high levels of satisfaction in their relationship and stay together for longer laughed together.
The quality of our relationships says Prof Dunbar is the number one factor in terms of heart health. “The number and quality of close friends you have, and by friends, we include family members, has a massive effect on not only your mental health but also your physical health and wellbeing.” He quotes a large study published in 2010, which looked at all the factors which helped survival rates 12 months after a heart attack and it was the quality of your close friendships that had the most significant effect on whether you were still alive a year later. “And laughter plays a huge part in what bonds those relationships together.”
But what if you don’t have a significant other to laugh with or you’ve just moved to a new area away from family and friends? For the more adventurous, laughter yoga might be worth investigating.
Started by Dr Madan Kataria, a former GP in 1995, with a small group in Mumbai, India, laughter yoga (an exercise programme encouraging ‘deliberate laughing’) is now a global movement with over 5,000 clubs worldwide. One study shows that it significantly reduced stress in the workplace. The NHS has recently begun offering it to patients through GPs as part of a social-prescribing pilot in Bristol.
Lotte Mikkelsen, 56, made the leap from a career in technology to becoming a trainer in laughter therapy when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in her 20s. “I researched the benefits of laughter and how it boosts the immune system. I don’t want to be over-confident, but I believe laughter therapy has kept me well all these years – I don’t take medication for my MS,” she says.
If laughter yoga sounds a step too far, Prof Scott uses a recording of cricket presenters Jonathan Agnew and Brian Johnson laughing uncontrollably during a cricket programme to induce laughter in her lab. “Humour is subjective. But one thing guaranteed to make you laugh is watching someone else laugh. Laughter is contagious.”
How does Prof Scott create more laughter in her life? She started a comedy night at home with her teenage son where they both sit down once a week and watch old comedy shows together. “He’s obsessed with Tony Hancock recordings. We started it in Covid but now we’ve continued the tradition,” she says.
Prof Dunbar says watching funny television can be good. His research found that slapstick comedy works better at creating guffaw – but it’s not enough. If you really want to laugh, switch off the television and put down the phone, he says.
His research has found that we are happiest and laugh most when we are in face-to-face contact with a conversational partner, whether this was in person or online video conferencing; this effect was reduced for phone conversations, and lowest of all for text-based interactions.
