Beyond
Walking

By Ronda Gates, MS

Ronda Gates, MS, is a pharmacy grad who traded her white coat for a pair of athletic shoes and never looked back. Her health promotion business, LIFESTYLES, provides motivational speaking, program development, and fitness assessment services to support people making a lifestyle change. She has developed health promotion programs for many organizations nationwide.
Visit www.rondagates.com for a complimentary subscription to Ronda’s weekly email newsletter.

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

— Henry David
Thoreau

Laughter: The Best Medicine for Stress

“I’m stressed out.” How often have you heard that? Or worst yet, how often have you said it yourself? The incessant talk about feeling stressed indicates how stressed we are and how difficult it is to manage that stress.

I define stress as “a condition or circumstance (not always adverse), which can disturb the normal physical and mental health of an individual.”

The “I’m stressed” comment is inevitable in a world where, for example, responsibilities to others, pressure at work, a polluted environment, traffic jams, or unexpected positive or negative change challenge us daily. We also generate much of our own stress. Erroneous beliefs, lousy attitudes, or unexpressed expectations of ourselves and others magnify our stress. In fact, under the bright light of self-examination, few of us can deny that our thoughts, moods, and emotions may be the most significant contributors to the level of stress in our lives.

Stress isn’t all bad. We need some stress to motivate us, to keep us on our toes, and to give us the push we need to accomplish our goals. However, too many of us have more stress than we can manage successfully, and much of that serves no purpose. As we attempt to cope with life’s incessant changes, accumulated stress drains us physically, mentally, socially, emotionally, and spiritually.

Here’s how it works. A stressful event stimulates a specific region of our brain, which in turn triggers a fight-or-flight mechanism designed to help us cope with the unanticipated challenge. Hormone secretion is increased: Adrenalin, for example, prepares us for action by increasing heart rate and blood pressure, which, in turn, speeds blood to muscles. Cortisol, another powerful hormone that stimulates the immune system in normal low doses, has the opposite effect when it overflows in warrior mode. Soon we are vulnerable to disease.

At this point, if we can’t eliminate detrimental stressors, we must turn to coping strategies. In a best-case scenario, we avoid tactics that further harm us. Although smoking, overeating, drinking to excess, using drugs, driving too fast, or behaving aggressively may reduce stress, we know immediate gratification is not the best course of action for us if we want to actualize our potential. Instead, it behooves us to develop and use one of the many positive stress-reducers that gives us a payoff without a price — including exercise (especially taking a walk in the company of a supportive friend), listening to music, meditation, napping, playing with a pet, self-directed biofeedback, writing in a journal, or my favorite stress-buster, laughter.

It’s no joke that laughter is the best medicine. The idea that laughter is good for our health is as old as recorded history.

In 1976, the healing power of laughter was mainstreamed when Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review, published “Anatomy of an Illness (As Perceived by the Patient)” in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.
Cousins’s article, later followed by a book, described his own remarkable recovery from ankylosing spondylitis. This is a painful, potentially fatal illness of the spine and joints that reversed after he designed and used a maverick treatment program of humor therapy.

Cousins reasoned that, “If the negative emotions, including stress, produce negative changes in the body, wouldn’t positive emotions produce positive changes? Is it possible that love, hope, faith, laughter, confidence, and the will to live would have therapeutic value?” He cultivated an environment that brought these qualities to his life, including watching funny movies and reading funny books. He soon noted that one ten-minute period of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and produced two hours
of pain-free sleep. Shortly thereafter, Franz Ingelfinger, MD, the departing editor of the journal that first published Cousins’s perspective, estimated that 85% of all human illnesses are curable by the body’s own healing system.

Cousins’s well-publicized experience inspired scientific work that validated the psychophysiologic (psycho = the mind; physio = the body) impact of laughter, positive emotions, and humor on improving our health. Barring sarcastic, flippant humor that is alienating and blocks communication, people who bring a smile to our faces are people we want to see again.

Laughter is easy to find if you open your heart to viewing life with a humorous perspective. Hang out with children who laugh hundreds of times a day — until we de-condition them to do so — to learn again how to use this easy stress management tool.

In addition to your daily walk, cultivate experiences that bring more belly laughs to your life to relax every muscle in your body. Watch funny movies, send funny cards to friends, and nurture realistic expectations and positive thinking.

As Bobby McFerrin’s popular song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” encourages, practice looking at the brighter side of life. Lighten up and put your body’s own healing system to work through laughter.