We all need to smile and laugh more – it makes everything better

You have to laugh. So said a man to me 20 years ago in a pub conversation about painful events going on in the world – including infection (Sars) and terrible conflicts.

He wasn’t being callous. He was talking about the need to keep your spirits up in a world of immense challenges.

Today, we have Gaza, war in Europe, armed conflict in Africa, the growing degradation of our climate, imminent disruption by artificial intelligence, mental health issues and plenty more you could add to the list.

The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn, who saw plenty of suffering in the Vietnam War, wrote that “you need to smile to your sorrow because you are more than your sorrow”.

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In such a world, smiling and laughter can be a matter of resilience and of self-care.

Bringing it to a more personal level, I was very taken by what Prof Rose Anne Kenny has to say about laughter in her book, Age Proof – The new science of living a longer and healthier life. She is head of the Ageing Research Programme at Trinity College Dublin and director of the Mercer’s Institute for Successful Ageing at St James’s Hospital. She was nominated as a Health Hero by The Irish Times in 2018.

Laughter lowers the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline, she writes. Getting cortisol down helps regulate blood pressure and reduce inflammation. Lowering adrenaline “calms the nervous and cardiac systems”.

Back at the end of the 1960s, when I was in Naas hospital with appendicitis, an ambulance driver used to come into our ward during breaks and tell jokes that induced howls of laughter. It hurt like anything after surgery, but it turns out he was doing us all a favour.

Laughter increases endorphins which, in turn, boost the immune system. “Given that immune function declines with age, boosting endorphins is particularly beneficial in older persons,” Kenny writes.

Depression will soon be the second commonest cause of disability, according to the World Health Organisation, she notes. “Because laughter alters dopamine and serotonin, laughter therapy works for patients with depression – either as a single treatment or complementary to antidepressant drugs.”

She isn’t saying you can just laugh off a depression, but “Surely with this long litany of advantages for laughter, we should endeavour to install as much joy and laughter as possible at all stages of our lives?”

As it turns out, we laugh less as we get older. “Healthy children laugh as much as 400 times a day, but older adults tend to laugh only 15 times per day.”

Bonding and laughter are well connected. How often have you heard people make humorous remarks at a funeral, bonding in the face of death?

And Prof Kenny writes that friends spend on average 10 per cent of a conversation laughing.

Many people bond in the workplace through laughter.

In tougher times than these, people turned to laughter to help them keep going in the face of hard odds.

And none of this, as I said, earlier, is about callousness. It’s about resilience and, often, solidarity. As the man said, you have to laugh.

The winds of change keep blowing and this is my last column. For most of its life it was called That’s Men, a title inspired by an Albert Reynolds remark in a Dáil exchange when he declared, “sure, that’s women for you” (he was being heckled by Nora Owen TD), a statement that was still being quoted disapprovingly a couple of decades later.

I’m sorry to see it go, but I can’t complain; it was supposed to end after 12 weeks. Taking advantage of deck chair shuffling in The Irish Times, I followed the example of a man in a Mervyn Wall short story who, visiting Dublin Castle in the weeks after Independence, was handed a cheque and kept coming back, and getting paid for 23 years. Like him, I said nothing, kept sending it in and got away with it for 21 years.

So, I’m laughing too.

• Padraig O’Morain (Instagram, Twitter: @padraigomorain) is accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His books include Kindfulness – a guide to self compassion; his daily mindfulness reminder is available free by email (pomorain@yahoo.com)