Giggle The Gloom Away

Merv Neal was well known for his ability to make others laugh. It was what first attracted his wife to him when they were 17 and still in high school. Laughter and being the ‘fun guy’ helped to stand out among his friends and colleagues.

So, when at the age of 45, he was diagnosed with aplastic anaemia, a blood disorder that occurs when the body’s bone marrow can’t produce enough blood cells, the IT entrepreneur from Melbourne reacted the only way he knew how—he laughed.

The fatigue, bleeding gums, nosebleeds and bruising he’d brushed off now made sense. His condition was so serious that the diagnosis caused him to reassess everything.

Unbeknownst to Neal, the condition had also been working away at his brain, causing mini-strokes and small bleeds that had, over time, led him to develop uncontrollable laughter.

One week went by, then another, until seven months after he was diagnosed, Neal’s specialist reported the good news that his brain scans and blood biopsies were all clear. His medical team viewed the uncontrollable laughter not just as a symptom of the aplastic anaemia, but also a powerful antidote.

Now a grandfather, Neal turned his personal experience and citizen science insights into a career by founding Laughter Yoga Australia, based on the work of Indian scientists and a growing school of thought on the benefits of laughter therapy in complementing the treatment of mental and emotional stress.

Laughter yoga combines physical exercises like stretching and breathing with laughter-evoking exercises to stimulate a response to the immune system. It’s not about sharing jokes, rather the therapy involves laughter exercises, often in a group setting, that induce a positive physical response.

Laughter Yoga

The study of the benefits of laughter yoga originated in India in 1995 with the formation of a small laughter club. Dr Madan Kataria and Dr Madhuri Kataria started the club with just four people. Gathering in a Mumbai park, they exchanged jokes to produce laughter. The club’s success quickly grew, increasing to more than 50 participants within days, but soon dwindled as the tone of some jokes caused offense, causing a fake laughter response.

While reviewing his observations of the laughter club interactions, Dr Kataria, a family physician, noted that the human body appeared unable to differentiate between genuine laughter and false laughter as the body reacts the same way—producing the same ‘happy chemistry’, a mix of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins.

He also theorized that fake laughter had the potential to develop into genuine laughter. Sure enough, when he tested this theory on the group, their laughter was indeed contagious—in as little as 10 minutes the participants had turned their fake laughter to a hearty genuine laughter.

Inspired by the results, Dr Kataria continued his research and developed laughter therapy techniques, founding Laughing Club International. He began incorporating yogic breathing exercises into the practice, which produced stress-relieving results. He followed up with the book, Laugh for No Reason in 1999, where he argues that we need to include laughter into our daily routines.

Today, there are roughly 1,00,000 Laughter Yoga Clubs, plus online laughter clubs which came about due to COVID-19.

Health Benefits

Scientifically speaking, it’s still a mystery why people laugh, but one thing is certain, it gives us relief from pressure and stress. And as laughter is usually shared, there’s a “bonding and sharing capacity that comes together over laughter,” says social science researcher Dr Barbara Plester, an associate professor at the University of Auckland. “Physiologically, your body does quite a lot when you laugh.” Your diaphragm gets a workout—almost like an ab workout—so maybe we should laugh more instead of going to the gym, she says.

Laughter also regulates our blood pressure, increases oxygen levels, relaxes our muscles, manages pain through the production of endorphins, and prevents cholesterol build-up and hardened arteries. In December 2021, Merv Neal monitored a laughter session which went on to air in 2022 with the neurological scientist Dr Sarah Mckay, founder of Think Brain and director of The Neuroscience Academy. They found that in just half an hour of a laughter yoga practice, cortisol levels were decreased by up to 65 per cent.

Laughter also helps the mind focus on the present, instead of fixating on what might happen in the future or past anxieties. “It shifts our mental perspectives,” explains Neal. “If someone is suffering challenges, illnesses and diseases, it interrupts their negative thought processes.”

In 2013, Laughter Yoga participated in a research study to measure the impact of laughter in treating depression among long-term dialysis patients. In 2013, under Deakin University’s Associate Professor Paul Bennet’s leadership, Merv Neal and a research team collaborated to test whether laughter and exercise could assist with kidney dialysis treatment. Being hooked up to a machine that removes, cleans and replaces a patient’s blood is extremely testing. Doing this for five hours every second day is, as Professor Bennet describes, “mind-numbingly boring.”

“The people are experiencing depression, even suicidal tendencies” he says. “And often they get secondary illnesses such as cancers because of the process. It’s a horrible situation. And they never recover from it … the people that I was working with were on the non-transplant register because of their age or circumstance. So, this was their life.”

Together, Professor Bennet, Neal and the team from Deakin, designed a laughter exercise programme for patients undergoing dialysis treatment. The results, which were published in the Seminars in Dialysis journal in 2014, were fascinating.

“They [the patients] just lit up as soon as we walked into the room,” says Professor Bennet. “They would go, ‘Oh, here’s the laughter people. We’re going to have some fun.’ That was what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to make them not so depressed—and you can’t be depressed when you’re having fun.”

People undergoing kidney dialysis treatment experience extremely low blood pressure, so during the study patients checked their blood counts for 30 days. What they discovered was that their blood pressure was getting higher.

“We knew that laughter decreased high blood pressure, but this was the first time—medically and scientifically—that we’d proven that laughter can increase low blood pressure. That was our ‘wow’ moment,” says Professor Bennet. “That’s significant because all of a sudden, there’s 15 [fewer] times that people go into emergency situations, which causes lots of stress in the ward.”

The drop in emergency incidents was measured by the activity of intradialytic hypertensive episode (IDHE) alarms being set off. An IDHE alarm is triggered when a patient is about to go into cardiac arrest or suffer organ shutdown. “Four weeks before the study, 19 alarms went off in the ward,” explains Professor Bennet. “During the study, 19 alarms go off in the ward.” Medically, that was important because the research team thought the laughter exercise may result in more alarms going off. However, four weeks after the study, only four alarms went off. “And the only thing that was different was laughter.”

Why Laughter is Important

Laughter holds much potential as a form of treatment and management tool to help navigate the negativity caused by stress in the workplace. “We live in a stressful world,” says Neal. “Stress doesn’t cause illness, but it is a catalyst which drives it.”

Adds Dr Barbara Plester, a social scientist and ethnographic researcher at the University of Auckland, “I think there is more stress in the workplace today. Work has changed. It’s increasingly fast-paced. We also work in different modes now … so my latest research is looking at humour, fun, and hybrid work, because that’s what a lot of offices have gone to.”

Dr Plester encourages workplaces to establish warm, inviting and safe environments, where people can prosper “and enjoy a little bit of fun and laughter together.”

The Simplicity of Laughter

Neal continues to develop Laughter Yoga and now combines play-based exercises such as rhythmic clapping and body movements with laughter exercises to stimulate extreme health benefits. Like meditation, laughter focuses on breathing.

“When we talk about yoga, we think of putting our body into funny poses,” says Neal. “But there’s about a thousand different types of yoga and all of them are about the unity of the mind, body and spirit. Laughter exercises don’t have to be complicated or clever.”

So, if you are looking to boost your mood, ease your stress or simply want a bit of fun, why not give Laughter Yoga a go? As Merv Neal says, “Get up in the morning, and just smile. And once you’ve smiled, why don’t you just laugh?”

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