Isn’t it ironic that people love laughing yet they just don’t do it enough. An average baby laughs/smiles about 300 times per day and I know some adults who can get a fantastic figure like a zero with a capital Z.
In the early days of behaviorist therapy, they used to try breaking the depression pattern by telling people to laugh for no reason every morning. Seems quite out of the line at first glance, well to be honest it still looks odd even at the second glance but it sounds much better than what most people do every day: they wake up in the morning and say to themselves “oh, shit. The weather is terrible, haven’t slept enough, my girl friend left me, I am miserable…” and the list goes on till they feel bad enough to start another day in hell.
The best year of my life was when I was working in a mental hospital as a psychologist. Working with people with severe mental illnesses seemed like a challenging task at first but when I first went to the hospital and entered the hall, I saw dozens of smiling faces looking at me. The only one who wasn’t smiling was me because there wasn’t anything funny going on, yet. In the following days, I’ve figured that most of those people were even happier than my colleges at the hospital. In fact, many of them didn’t have any stres related problems (such as psychosomatic illnesses), no chronic pains, no heart conditions and so on.
Laughing was so common among them that after a while I felt like I didn’t need to wait for a joke or anything funny to happen to have a good laugh. As I was treating those people, I was watching them real close to get a sense of their way of happiness, which seemed to be working much better than mine. Many of them would laugh for no reason while watching tv or even in the middle of a conversation and some of them would laugh even before going to bed. Curiosity got into my blood and three weeks later after my first day at the hospital there I was laughing real hard with one of the patients in his room. We did that every day and sometimes a couple times a day. God, it felt so good as if my brain was releasing a cocktail of happiness into my blood circulation. My body was going “you crazy son of a gun, give me more”.My colleagues were quite surprised because people were feeling way better after my visits and they wondered how I managed to do it in such a short time. “Put a little smile on your face” I said. They were expecting scientific explanation so they didn’t believe.
It’s been five years since I’ve worked for that institution and I still practice the laughing sessions.
Fire'n Light - A World in Stories 