Do you laugh with abandon?
Hi fun folks,
Recently, I read that children laugh 300 times a day and adults only 15. In my rebel book, that’s completely unacceptable. What’s going on here? Why do adults laugh so little?
The author of Laugh For No Reason, Dr. Kataria, says children laugh unconditionally whereas adults need reasons. Have we forgotten how to laugh? Have our adult lives become so dull and predictable that there’s nothing left to laugh at? Even TV shows have canned laugh tracks to let us know when we are supposed to laugh.
Maybe if adults laughed more they’d feel better. The American School of Laughter Yoga reports that laughter can be
- an age-inhibitor
- a pain reducer
- a stress buster
- a depression reliever
- an immune stimulator
Instead of giving us drugs, perhaps doctors should give us prescriptions for laughter?
Since I tend to laugh at the slightest provocation, needing a reason to guffaw feels alien to me. My third grade teacher actually put me in the corner for laughing! Looking back that made no sense. Punishing a child for what? Disrupting a bunch of ongoing non-laughter? The last kind of person tossed into a corner ought to be a happy one.
Want to try something unpredictable? Pick a day next week and keep track of the number of times you laugh and what you laugh at. I’m going to do it too. My new action step? Get my laughs back up to 300 a day …
Muse thx,
Giulietta
p.s. Check out the American School of Laughter Yoga at http://www.laughangeles.com & the book Laugh for No Reason.
RSS
“adults need reasons” Thats is SO true! It is like we are being evaluated when we feel like laughing, and if we don’t have a good reason, we will be chastised. Or if we feel like laughing, we need to lie down until the feeling passes.
Great observation about feeling evaluated Peter. Now that you mention it, I’ve experienced that too. I’ve had people say, “what are you laughing it?” It’s a great activity and right now it’s still free!
Thanks for stopping by … Giulietta
I think you’re right about the “adults need reasons” point. I do laugh here and there, listening to Wait Wait Don’t tell me and such. But I think in the last month there were only two times when I laughed myself to tears. One was earlier this evening when my writing group did an “Exquisite corpse” activity–the stuff that comes out of that is absurd.
Sometimes I’ll smile and suppress giggles about a funny thought and my daughter will ask me what’s so funny, and I hesitate to tell her.
Sally, That’s great you laugh yourself to tears twice a month. What a fab start! I’m intrigued by the Exquisite Corpse activity. What is it?
Thx!
Exquisite Corpse: In this case, we all wrote the same starting sentence in our notebooks, then passed notebooks in one direction, and each person wrote a sentence to continue the story, and passed it along. Each writer was only allowed to read the preceding sentence before writing their sentence. At the end each of us read the story from our notebook. It can get absurd and hysterical.