Is laughter good for our health?

Is laughter really the ‘best medicine’? We all feel better for laughing, but is there any evidence that laughter can really improve our health, and if it can, is this due to the laughter itself or to something else? 

 

In this article we explore the health benefits of laughter:

• Are there really health benefits?
• Gelotology
• Laughter in hospitals
• Too good to be true?
• What happens when we laugh?
• Can we laugh alone?
• Can laughter be bad for you?
• Bring more laughter into your life
• Conclusions

 

Are there really health benefits?

Laughing may make us feel better and more able to cope with the stresses and strains of everyday life. However, is there any evidence it has actual health benefits?

 

 

One large study in Japan researched 20,934 people aged over 65. It found those who reported laughing every day were less likely to experience heart disease than those who never, or almost never, laughed.

A number of small studies have also suggested potential health benefits, for example that laughter may help to:

• Improve learning ability and memory, as seen in a US study involving 20 participants, published in 2014. This study compared how learning ability improved after watching a humorous video compared with sitting calmly.
• Achieve improvements in memory, sociability and communication for people with mild dementia. That’s the conclusion from a very small study where 12 people with mild dementia observed and took part in stand-up comedy.
• Improve the ability to tolerate pain through the release of endorphins (natural painkillers and mood enhancers). For example a 2019 study with 40 participants concluded, ‘Thirty minutes of watching a comedy which elicited mirthful laughter favourably influenced pain tolerance in young and healthy humans.‘
• Possibly reduce depression in older people, according to a study of laughter therapy in Malaysia published in 2020. (However, a larger, earlier study in Australia, published in 2013, also with older people, found that laughter caused no significant reduction in depression, although it did find that ‘agitation’ was significantly reduced).
  

Agitation is an unpleasant state of extreme arousal.  An ’agitated’ person may feel stirred up, excited, tense, confused or irritable. MedlinePlus, an online health information resource

 

• Reduce anxiety, depression and stress in cancer patients, according to a systematic review of eight articles, published in 2019.
• Reduce stress symptoms following stressful events. According to a longitudinal study published in 2020, how often people laughed, rather than how hard they laughed, had a greater effect on the reduction of their stress symptoms.
• Improve body weight, BMI, subjective stress, subjective wellbeing and health-related quality of life later in life, according to a study of 235 elderly Japanese community-dwelling individuals, published in 2022. Half of the participants had received a 12-week laughter programme.
• Reduce the severity of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) symptoms, according to a study published in 2019. Participation in a laughter yoga group had more effect on IBS symptoms than participation in anti-anxiety-medication groups or control groups.

Gelotology

Findings such as those above have even led to a new field of research called gelotology.

Gelotology is the study of laughter and its effects on the body, from a psychological and physiological perspective.

 

Laughter in hospitals

Hospitals in the US, Europe and Australia have all recognised the benefits to patient health from having ’medical clowns’ in the hospital, in particular in paediatric wards. This practice is also being used increasingly for patients with dementia.

A systematic review of the evidence, published in 2016, concluded that hospital clowns play a significant role in reducing stress and anxiety levels in children admitted to hospital, as well as reducing stress and anxiety in their parents. A 2020 systematic review in The British Medical Journal published similar findings. 

Too good to be true?

A number of questions have been raised about studies like these. For example:

Small numbers of participants in the studies 

The number of people taking part in many of these studies is usually small – in the examples above usually from 12 to 90 people – although the Australian and Japanese studies involve between a few hundred and several thousand participants.

Poor quality of the studies 

A 2019 systematic review and meta-analysis of published research findings found the overall quality of studies in this field was low, with a substantial risk of bias. However, it did note that, subject to more rigorous research to confirm this, with rising health care costs and increasingly elderly populations, laughter-inducing therapies were potentially low-cost, simple interventions that could be administered by staff with minimal training.

Are the health effects just the side-effects of being sociable? 

As we’ll see below, laughter is much more likely in social situations than when we’re on our own, so it may be that just being sociable produces its own health benefit. We know that, conversely, feeling lonely is bad for both our health and our longevity.

Also, current studies tend not to distinguish between laughter and humour and the presumed effects that may come from the playful settings of these behaviours. 

What happens when we laugh?

Laughter has a powerful effect on both our bodies and our minds. It affects our brain, our lungs, our heart, our muscles, our hormones and our immune system. Together, these effects make a powerful combination and may help explain some of laughter’s potential health effects. 

Case study: Cousins, who suffered from a painful rheumatoid disease, began a strict laughter regimen. He would later testify in his book, Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient, that 'ten minutes of laugh allowed two hours of pain-free sleep'. His disease eventually went into remission.

 

Can we laugh alone?

Laughter is part of the way we bond with each other. Research suggests that we are less likely to laugh when we are on our own. In the example here students were 30 times more likely to laugh in social situations than when alone.

In fact, researchers believe that laughter is more a response to social situations than a response to particularly funny comments.

However, this doesn’t mean that we can’t laugh on our own. Hearing/seeing laughter on the radio and television has been shown to trigger laughter, which may offer the same health benefits. For example, it was discovered in 1950 (on the television show, The Hank McCune Show) that canned laughter made audiences laugh more.

Can laughter be bad for you?

Under certain circumstances, too much laughter can be dangerous.

Researchers looked at studies from 1946 to 2013 and found that, alongside the many reported benefits, there were occasional dangers of too much, uncontrollable laughter. These dangers included asthma attacks, headaches, jaw dislocation, cardiac rupture and, in rare cases, death (this unfortunate person had a racing-heart syndrome).

Bring more laughter into your life

Here are four ways you can bring more laughter into your life:

• Make a goal to laugh once every day.
• Slow down and recognise absurdities that happen every day.
• ‘Schedule’ your laughter: look forward to something funny!
• Surround yourself with a social network of people who appreciate and reciprocate your humour.

(Lindsay Wilson-Barlow, PhD Clinical Psychology, Texas Tech University)

Conclusions

• Laughter may not be the ‘best medicine’, but overall it seems to do our health more good than harm.
• Whether this benefit is through the physiological changes that laughter induces in our body, or through the social situations we’re usually in when we laugh (or both), is still being debated.
• The best way of using laughter to keep you healthy seems to be by being sociable: stay connected with friends and family to increase your exposure to situations where there are opportunities to laugh.
• Other options include watching or listening to comedy, joining a laughter-based exercise or yoga class, and making time for fun activities.
• The only caution is probably not to laugh so much (uncontrollable laughter) that you risk doing yourself an injury. Other than that caution, there seem to be few harmful side effects of laughing.

Emma Juhasz, November 2022. Next review date October 2026.

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Other relevant articles on the Age Watch website:

• Mind: Building our resilience
  
  
• Mind: A body–mind approach
  
  
• Mind: The power of positive thinking