Medical Laughter and Tears
The path out of emotional trauma is both simple and complicated, depending on how you want to look at it.
Laughter and tears affect hormones and other brain signals in ways we still do not understand.
As Grok puts it,
Both laughter and crying activate the limbic-motor axis, linking emotion to physical expression, and engage the autonomic nervous system (laughter via sympathetic arousal, crying via parasympathetic calming).
They release endorphins, shifting brain signals toward a post-event calm (higher alpha, lower beta). Socially, both leverage mirror neurons, syncing group brain activity in contagious laughter or empathetic crying.
New studies seem to indicate that emotions are even linked to the healing of some allergies. In fact this has lead to a new area of study called Psychoneuroimmunology. I’ll leave it there
Also, we know that hypnosis is able to reduce and even eliminate the brain’s ability to feel pain in subjects with cooperative natures.
These are just a few reasons why we are wise to continually work on our attitudes and stay as optimistic as we can, especially when life gets hard.
Part of relating with others involves humor. We are more likely to laugh to the point of tears around friends and loved ones when we are happy and relaxed. And part of being able to relax involves trust. It’s called “letting our hair down,” which is really funny if you don’t have much or any hair.
One of my favorite activities are board games, card games, dominos, anything that gets people around a table or in a circle for some silly activity that draws out our inner children.
And as already described above, the process recovery from grief needs to involve laughter and tears. Without these we will remain stuck and depression from the fatigue of cyclical poor thinking will take us further down a very dark path
So when you are in a tough place, don’t forget to laugh and cry.
And try not to hide when you do it, because this has been shown to improve brain clarity and calmness.
The same goes for getting enough sleep, down time and taking vacations.