We’ve got to learn to celebrate God and all His generosity! God wants us to be happy. He gives us the resources to be happy. But somehow we miss it. Our Creator knows that happiness is essential to wholeness and health.
Many of you have heard the story of Norman Cousins who faced a lifethreatening illness from metal poisoning. Nothing worked to give him relief. So he decided to include laughter therapy in his treatment plan. He started watching old, funny movies, instead of obsessing over the problem. In just a short time the excruciating pain became manageable without pain medication.
He found that about 10 minutes of laughter got him enough relief to sleep for 2 hours. And eventually he laughed himself back to health. Of course, he was vilified for taking a public strand about the power of laughter until research began to verify what he experienced. On January 27, 1989, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article entitled “Laugh If This Is a Joke.” (Lars Ljungdahl, 1989)
The Swedish researcher who wrote that article concluded that “a humor therapy program can increase the quality of life for patients with chronic problems and that laughter has an immediate symptom-relieving effect for these patients, an effect that is potentiated when laughter is induced regularly over a period. If you’ll do some on-line research you’ll see that there have been volumes of research that has since confirmed what our creator said all along, laughter is a powerful medicine.
The following information was taken from the Discovery website about the Science of Laughter: When we laugh, natural killer cells which destroy tumors and viruses increase, along with Gamma-interferon (a disease-fighting protein), T-cells (important for our immune system) and B-cells (which make disease-fighting antibodies). As well as lowering blood pressure, laughter increases oxygen in the blood, which also encourages healing.”
