While waiting in line at the supermarket I overheard a woman telling her friend about her evening of line dancing. "I'm ashamed to say it, but it was great fun!"
No need to ask why she was ashamed. It was obvious. With all the sorrow and fear in our suddenly unfamiliar world, laughing seems a frivolous luxury.
But there's no moral injunction against joy. In fact, if we want to get back to what we all refer to as normalcy, laughter is our lodestar. Laughter doesn't change the situation but changes the way we relate it.
Stress is one of the many toxic by-products of these past difficult weeks. Humor provides us with a healthy mechanism to cope with all that has occurred and help us to regain our equilibrium. And stress makes us sick. Stress causes irritability, higher blood pressure, increased accident proneness, inability to concentrate, floating anxiety (anxious feelings for no specific reason), insomnia, headaches, indigestion, pain in the neck and/or lower back and lower resistance to infection. There is also the emotional toll that is impossible to calculate as each person responds differently to stress. And stress builds over time. The longer the stress persists, the more severe its effects.
The benefits of laughter have long been underestimated and often overlooked as a way to cope with stress in our lives. Most of us feel that we have the ability to control our lives to some extent. What's challenging about the current situation is that there is little we can do to make things better. We have lost our sense of control, which adds to our feelings of helplessness. But what we can do is try to reframe how we respond to stress.
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