Look after your mind – February 2026
GSOH
I daresay we’ve all heard that ‘laughter is the best medicine’. It’s a cliché of course, but like many clichés it contains some powerful truth. In the same way that our thoughts affect our behaviour, so our behaviour affects our thoughts. It’s a feedback loop, whether negative or positive. So, if we try to cultivate and maintain a good sense of humour, this can only have beneficial results. The Mayo clinic website for instance tells us that in the short term a good laugh enhances the intake of oxygen-rich air, dampens the stress response, relaxes us and eases tension. Longer term benefits, the website claims, strengthens the immune system, prompts the body to produce natural painkillers (endorphins), improves mood and can make it easier to cope with difficult situations.
One of the most astounding incidents I’ve come across of the healing benefits of laughter concerns a man called Norman Cousins. He was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. This is a crippling and highly painful condition from which only one in 500 people fully recover. Cousins knew, as many of us do, that negative emotions such as frustration and suppressed rage are linked to a raft of illnesses. He reasoned then that positive emotions, including laughter, would likely bring benefits.
To help ease his pain, Norman Cousins decided to try ‘laughter therapy’. He watched Marx Brothers’ films, episodes of ‘Candid Camera’, and read selections from E. B. White’s ‘Subtreasury of American Humour’. Cousins quickly discovered that just ten minutes of induced hearty laughter would produce about two hours of painless sleep.
After several years of following this regime (including taking large doses of vitamin C to help repair his immune system), Cousins was experiencing no pain in his day-to-day life. He went on to live to the age of 75. He tells his remarkable story in the book ‘Anatomy of an Illness’.
Cousins himself admits that ‘putting positive emotions to work is nothing so simple as turning on a garden hose’. This is especially true in the throes of illness, or if times are difficult in other ways. But the principle is to use whatever opportunities we can to take direct positive action. Doing something is always better than doing nothing.
For myself, I remind myself often to try and see the funny side of things. I watch and rewatch my favourite comedy programmes and read books of humorous quotes and jokes; I delight in the laughter and playfulness of children, I enjoy making puns and generally try to look at the world through the lens of benign good humour, bearing in mind what the author Mary Pettibone Poole said, that ‘He who laughs, lasts’.
Steve Bowkett
