Humour me: laugh 5x/day; Happy 2025!
A blessing of humour from the church of Public Health
‘Another year over, a new one just begun.’
Start it with laughter, it won’t go far wrong.
Laughter and good humour help us to deal with life’s “heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”. (Hamlet)
Laughing can help your humour; and feels good in itself. Great muscular activity, especially if the laugh comes from the belly and the soul. Try it: laugh for good or bad or no reason (yoga). It’s good for you!
We have more negative emotions than positive ones. A 2013 paper on where each emotion is felt:
Happiness is everywhere. Love, a little more focussed. Still small red toe-tips. Bad feelings centre on the head - with anxiety burning the chest, and disgust ready to fuel an up-chuck. Look at the burning eyes of shame.
I was inspired by a TED talk on humour as “the blessing we get for the curse of mortality.” First, I checked. Evidence supports laughter as salutogenic (health-creating). But the quality and quantity of evidence is limited - nobody makes money from selling laughter; do they? (See below for the evidence.)
[Laughter Yoga is a non-profit that helps people laugh together and more. I don’t think they’re making money.]
Laughing is available to all at no cost. It feels good and has other benefits (eg, cardiovascular workout; social connection). Famously, Norman Cousins cured himself with laughter.
So, my future Public Health Religion provisionally adopts laughter as our first edict (or commandment). [Or perhaps fist edict to be really strong; thanks Winston!]
Strong belief, loosely held. If something else is shown to be of more importance, it loses first place. But what is this religion?
The Church of LoveKind
I stole the name from Buddha’s loving-kindness practice (‘metta’ in Pali). I know he won’t mind. He’s dead! LoveKind does not yet seem to be a word, but captures a core purpose of community. And reflects Buddha’s wisdom being supported by neuroscience. And specifically, the illusion of self that is the root of so much despair and destruction. The Universe is One. And we are part of that integrated whole, not external observers as we imagine.
I imagine a a public health religion using evolving science and the traditional wisdom found in religions. The aim: how to be healthy and happy and how to treat each other for peace and prosperity. Religions are fairly consistent in what they tell us not to do. Buddha’s five precepts and the five negative commandments of Moses’ ten match for four of them (see below). But religions offer less consistent advice about healthy habits. How many tell you to brush your teeth? Or to laugh?
Buddha offered a a middle path between asceticism (self-denial) and sensualism (self-indulgence): the ‘Noble Eightfold Path’, the ‘ 8 rights’: view, resolve, speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration.
Neuroscience has shown the value of Buddhist practices, with special mention for mindfulness, equanimity, and compassion. With ourselves as the most important object for that compassion. (Watch how you talk to yourself; are you being a friend or foe to yourself? Make sure you’re being a good friend to yourself; there’s nobody else that can do it quite like that.)
The name also reflects what I think of as Jesus’ main commandment: “love each other, as I have loved you”[John 15.12]. Or Paul’s “Love is patient, love is kind.”[Corinthians 13:4], before listing all the things it is/does not: envy, boast, proud, dishonor others, self-seeking, easily angered, keep record of wrongs, or delight in evil. Before closing with the positive: Love “rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”[Corinthians 13:7-8]
And to weave Islam in, why do they pray five times a day? To stay connected, as humans are forgetful and distractible. And to give structure to day and night. Good physical activity too! We can substitute laughter for prayer to edict “Laugh five times a day; use those times to mark your day and night.”
We can use our laughter to connect us to creation, our higher power, and ourselves. It’s just an attitude of gratitude to for this one breath, this one moment. Humans are forgetful and distractible, so need frequent reminders; and we all benefit from a structured routine.
It is said, that the Prophet Muhammad received the gift of salat (prayer) when he met Allah. It was a gift for humans to connect; not something that Allah ‘needs’. Allah first instructed the Prophet to pray fifty times. And he planned to bring this message home. But Moses tells the Prophet to go ask for less. After nine times going back and forth, the required number is reduced to five. Perhaps, the point of the story is that we can always be doing more, but let’s get the basics right. And make it practical.
The five times are on waking and before sleeping; in the middle of the day and towards its end; and another one for sunset. It spits both night and day into halves, plus the time from the start to end of the sunset:
Salat al-fajr: the dawn or any time before sunrise
Salat al-zuhr: midday, after the sun passes its highest
Salat al-'asr: the late part of the afternoon
Salat al-maghrib: dusk or just after sunset
Salat al-'isha: between sunset and midnight
The aim of salat is to connect. Body, mind, and soul connected to our higher power and our community. With the right attitude, laughter can be a prayer.
Of course, you can laugh as often as you want. Just as you can pray as much as you like, but we do ask that you laugh five times a day, starting with a good roar as you wake up and start your morning rituals.
Not sure if it needs to be before sunrise, but that can be a good time to start the day. The salat schedule gives a clock for the time before clocks; and in a land with only an hour’s difference between summer and winter sunrises.
What not to do
The Torah, the five books of Moses, became the first five chapters of the Christian Bible. The first five of Moses’ 10 commandments tell us what to believe and how to act on sabbath and towards our parents. The other five are all negative commandments or prohibitions. In order, are not to murder, commit adultery, steal, lie, or covet (yearn to possess what is not yours).
The Buddha’s five precepts are commitments to abstain from killing living beings, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying and intoxication.
Or the same five, except that Buddha has intoxication as a ‘no’, but not Moses. The Bible waxes lyrical both for and against alcohol. The 10th commandment to ‘not covet’ can be interpreted as not having an unhealthy desires. And Buddha identifies desire as the source of life’s suffering or dissatisfaction (‘dukkha’).
So, the Abrahamic religions, Buddha, and most other religions agree on the bad, with interesting differences at the edge. As words go, covet is an one. So is the 10th commandment.
[It does categorize a wife as her husband’s property. And while women were not exactly men’s property, wives had no separate legal existence in the UK until the second half of the 19th century with full legal equality not achieved until the 20th century. Including the vote; with NZ an early exception in 1893.]
Evidence on laughter
‘Laughter is the best medicine’ is a common aphorism. From Biblical wisdom: “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.” [Proverbs 17:22]
Aphorisms capture traditional wisdom. This one also intuitively feels right, but intuitions can deceive. What do studies find?
A narrative review states: “laughter promotes physical, mental, and emotional health and contributes to health, happiness, and wellbeing”. A 2022 systematic review found 47 eligible studies (randomised controlled studies) on laughter and concluded that “Laughter-inducing interventions showed positive effects on mental health, physiological, and physical health outcomes.”
But the quality of the evidence was only moderate to low for different outcomes. But the review did not find publication bias, making the findings more robust. Only one of the 47 studies reported on adverse effects, but these were mild. I would expect that extreme laughing could trigger pre-existing reparatory or cardiac problems, as does exercise. Surprisingly, simulated (over spontaneous) laughter had the largest positive effects on mental health.
A 2024 review of laughter yoga in nurses and nursing students found 10 eligible studies and concluded that it decreased “stress and burnout levels, depression and anxiety, salivary cortisol levels” and improved ‘psychological well-being, life satisfaction, subjective happiness increase in and general health”
A 2024 review of cancer patients found 8 studies and concluded that; “Laughter therapy could effectively relieve stress, depression and anxiety of cancer patients.”
And there are newer randomised studies in addition to a growing body of evidence to support it. So, let’s add laughter to our list healthy habits; and why not at least five times a day? And perhaps, use those times to structure your activities of day and night. One day at a time.
For health practitioners, 2016 article offers “understanding of laughter’s physiologic effects and makes a recommendation for how physicians might best harness this natural modality for their patients. who want advice on how to use laughter.”
Annex 1. Reason to be cheerful: longer life
As we finish the first quarter of the 21st century, let’s look back. This century has not gone well, after the alleged ‘end of history’ in the 1990s. Following the optimism of the promise of the internet and the collapse of the Soviet Union, gloom is on the rise as is fascism, rudeness, fear and hatred.
Yet, humanity continues its historic progress as measured by continued growth in life expectancy, briefly disrupted by the Covid pandemic in most countries - but not NZ!
The above chart is a ‘period life expectancy’, that is calculated from the mortality at different ages in one year.
Below, the chart shows the mortality experience of those born in that year - for England and Wales:
They have compared the changes every 20 years, and can see that we continue to project increased life spans; with the largest improvements in the first half of the 20th century. A startling statistic is that 10% of those born in the 19th century would be dead within a couple of years. Of those born in 1931, 10% had died by the age of 10 years, but that had increased to age 55 years for those born in 1951. For those born this century, 90% will reach the age of 80 years or more.
But much suffering is invisible
Public Heath is not just about preventing deaths. And as we noted above, laughter is not just a blessing for the curse of mortality, it also helps us live better.
Public Health aims to prevent disability, disease, and death in the population. And this recent US survey highlighted how much suffering continues to be caused by Covid long after the infection:
“In 2023, 6.4% (95% CI = 6.3–6.6%) of the noninstitutionalized U.S. adults nationwide were experiencing Long COVID when surveyed.” This suffering is not very visible. And for 1 in 5 had major limitations:
Annex 2. Christmas
Aotearoa (NZ) is no longer a Christian nation (less than a third according to 2023 census, with over half having no religion). But Christmas remains the most important holiday, marking the end of the year and also the start of the summer holidays.
In the fourth century, Christ replaced the official God of the late Roman Empire: Sol Invictus (‘Invincible Sun’). His day, was 25 December. I presume because by then the days had started to lengthen after the winter solstice (‘sun still’). when the sun is furthest away that is on 21 or 22 December.
And the early church decided that Sol’s day would become Jesus’ birthday.
In the Southern hemisphere, our days are shortening, but summer is still to come. The timing at the end of the calendar year, also marks the start of summer holidays and he end of the year. Perfect for reflection and planning. More next week?
One of the better human traits