The Key to Joy and Wellness, Laugh MORE!

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1:06This is the Ed Myerich Show. Welcome back to the show, everybody. This week's important, and it's important because we're going to talk about laughter. You know, I talk often about the fact that the quality of our life is really based on the quality of our emotions, the quality of our feelings, what we feel inside ourselves. and you know one of the things that's not talked a lot about in personal development or self-help is laughter and the benefits of it and the joy that comes with it and how what a quick hack it is to a better life and i often do podcasts and videos like this for me as much as i do for you and so many of you know i've been on a bit of a sabbatical for a health break just focusing on my my wellness and my health and when you do that you have a tendency to get a little bit reflective And I look back at the last, you know, couple decades of my life and I said, you know, how many times did I belly laugh?

1:59You know, and if I look at the best moments of my life, many of them involve laughing with good friends and family. Did I give myself and my family the gift of enough of that? Did our home have enough laughter in it? Not just enough love, not just enough achievement, but enough laughter. It's one of the best emotions in the world. Yet we're all pretty serious, aren't we? There's so many serious things going on in the world that require our attention and focus. And I think what gets lost in that is oftentimes just giving ourselves some gift of laughter, some gift of a smile, some gift of joy. You know, one of the things I love to do is make fun of myself.

2:39I think one of the funniest things in life is someone who will poke fun at themselves. And so I laugh pretty hard at me, how crazy I am, how weird I am, my weaknesses, my frailties. And that's helped me a lot in life and get through. I don't take myself very seriously. And I think it's actually a hack to self-confidence is actually healthy, um, looking at oneself and poking fun, not negative talk. Like I'm not good or I'm not enough. That's not what I'm talking about. That's different. I think it takes a confident person to laugh at themselves, but I would ask you as we begin today, take an inventory.

3:13How many times did you laugh yesterday? How about in the last week? How about in the last month? And let me ask you this. Would you like to have laughed more? Would your life have been better had you laughed more? Would you be happier had you laughed more? Or not? It's a pretty easy question, isn't it? It's an easy answer. Yeah, I'd be happier if I laughed more. No matter how much you get of it, more of it is probably better. Very few people laugh too much. Very few people have too much joy in their life, too many smiles in their life. as intense as the world is today and requires our attention and our seriousness and our focus and our lives do as well.

3:53But what if we get out of this entire thing and we didn't laugh enough? I don't want to get to the end of my life, and I don't think you do either, and go, I wish I would have laughed more. I wish I had more moments of joy and bliss and that belly laughing feeling. There's some gap between a smile and a belly laugh, but I know I want everything in between. And here's really a few things you should think about. Why does it matter? Well, there's a lot of benefits to laughing. It's true. Laughter is a very strong medicine. First thing it does, it brings people together. You have a great dinner with people where you're laughing.

4:24That table, that group is more bonded. You have a business where people laugh. Take a look at that in your business life. How much laughter is there? Like laughter. You want to bond your team? Laugh together. By the way, it creates a physical and emotional change in your body. I'm going to talk about this a lot today, like the benefits of laughing. It boosts your mood. It diminishes pain. It protects you actually from the damaging effects of stress and cortisol levels. I'm going to talk about that. Nothing works faster or more dependently to bring your mind and body back together than a good laugh.

4:58And so it's great for you. It's great with a burden in your life. It can give you some hope. It connects you. and it also in a lot of cases can help you release frustration, release stress, release anger. It also can help you forgive people. And so, you know, if you think about it, when you were a child, you probably laughed all the time. But as adults, life just gets more serious. And in many cases, we don't even look for the places to laugh anymore. We miss them when they're there. And a lot of times, like I said, it's just like looking right at ourself. Laughter is really good for your health.

5:34It relaxes your body. A good laugh actually releases physical tension and stress, and it can last up to about an hour after you laugh. Imagine that. You laugh, it relaxes your body, and that effect can stay in your body for over an hour. It also triggers the release of endorphins, which is your body's kind of natural chemical to help you feel well, and it can actually increase your overall sense of well-being. It also, by the way, you know, I'm focused on my heart. A lot of you know that I've got, you know, working on heart health. There's data that says that, you know, and it may be anecdotal.

6:06It may not be significant, but it actually says it can protect the heart, that it improves the function of the blood vessels, blood flow. There's data that actually suggest if you laugh a lot, you're less likely to have a heart attack. Isn't that crazy? Also, I mean, it's not a lot, but it can help you burn a few calories. There's actually a study that said laughing 10 to 15 minutes a day can burn up to 40 calories. Heck, that's half a donut, right? So you might be able to lose weight by laughing. I'm not saying it's like golden training or walking or running or lifting heavy weights, but it can actually lighten the load in your life as well, and it'll make you less confrontational.

6:42And in my case, I think I think clearer when I'm laughing. And the data suggests that you may live longer. The actor Carl Reiner, he passed away at 98 years old, and he said he actually scheduled an hour a day that he made himself have to laugh. Seriously. He actually scheduled it and made sure he watched a comedy special or read jokes or did something in his life that made him laugh every single day. There's actually a study in Norway that found that people with a strong sense of humor outlived those who don't laugh as much. And by the way, the difference was actually very noticing with people in cancer, battling cancer.

7:18So I'm not suggesting that any of these things are adding up to the maximum change. but they're drops in the bucket of life's joy, of life's healing, of life's bliss, of your functionality, of your achievement. I could tell you this when I played sports. The teams that I played on where we laughed as a group, we were the most functioning teams. We were the most bonded teams. It's something that in business that of all the things, core values, culture, setting an example as a leader, having a big vision, all those things matter. How about laughter? How much laughing is going on in your business?

7:52Because that's what bonds people. That's what connects them. That's what gets people to express themselves fully. That's where the best ideas can come from. And so let's talk about some of the benefits of laughing and then just like a little bit of a focus on it and some things that I do. Mental benefits, social benefits of laughter. There's some physical benefits. There's data that says it can boost your immunity. It lowers stress hormones. It decreases pain, relaxes your muscles. Like I said, might even help slow down heart disease. definitely amazing for mental health stop right there if you are someone right now who's struggling with your mental health i can guarantee you that one of the symptoms of it anyway is that you're not laughing enough that you don't smile enough and you say well yeah ed like that's the whole thing but part of it might be that if you could get yourself in an environment where you actually do what carl reiner did where you scheduled something that was actually a project to laugh every day, a structure.

8:50You think about it. If laughter is important, and I think you and I would agree that after I've listed all of these different things, it probably is. Everything else in your life that you want to do, you set up a habit for it. You set up a strategy for it. And as I've looked at my life, there are times where I unknowingly had set up habits and behaviors that caused me to laugh more. The actual structures in my life, like you have a structure to get physically healthy, don't you? You probably have a structure for your mental health. You have a structure for your business. You have a structure for your phone calls, a structure for your money or systems you might want to call them.

9:26But if laughter is really that important in life and you're going through it, just hoping the spur of the moment allows that to take place. What if you did have habits that caused it up more often? What if you had structures or systems? And so in my case, I had built some, I just kind of got away from them. And so all these different benefits come in your life, right, from laughing more. I'm going to tell you something else I think that happens. I think that laughter just doesn't get you out of sadness and pain, which, by the way, what has to be present for you to be sad or in some sort of mental pain?

9:59No laughter. It's almost impossible to feel pain, to feel conflict, to feel stress in the presence of laughter. And so it's a big deal. And it's amazing to me that in my entire career of teaching people or helping people and myself live a better life that I don't talk enough about this topic, that there's not very many podcasts on it. There are podcasts, however, that make you laugh. And they're some of the most popular podcasts in the world. Don't you think there's probably a correlation? Because the marketplace fills needs. And so there's a huge need to laugh. And that's why so many podcasts, I believe, are led by comedians.

10:40because there's this massive need in this culture we have of grinding and achieving and contributing. They say, man, I just need to laugh a little bit more. And so that's why I think so many podcasters that are successful are in that space. And by the way, the other thing laughter is it's contagious. Just hearing someone else laugh really good primes your brain and readies you to smile and to get in on the fun. And so being around people who make you laugh and who laugh, I got to tell you something interesting. I looked at my friend circle and I got to tell you, most of my closest friends are really funny people.

11:13And I think I brought them into my life because I knew intuitively I needed them because in all candor, my natural default personality is a pretty serious person. Maybe you relate to that. I don't know. But I'm a pretty serious person. Life is important to me. It's serious to me. the way I was raised as a little boy there wasn't a ton of laughter in my home and so I think I default to kind of be pretty serious person and so as a consequence if I had just surrounded myself with very serious people you know I think I'd have had a much more stressful life I think I've been productive and achieved a lot in my life because of the people I placed around me what we say here your friend circle show me the five people around you and I'll show you what your life's going to look like.

12:02And normally in personal development, we say that these people need to be, you know, supporting your dreams and pushing you and they do need to do those things, but you better have a few in there that just make you laugh. And if you do keep them close to you. And the other thing, funny thing is like laughter is contagious. A few of my friends actually, they're not that funny, but they think they're funny. They laugh so hard at themselves that when they laugh really, really hard, you laugh with them. I watch them tell some of them, to these ridiculously old jokes that I've heard forever, that they don't know are old jokes, and everyone around them thinks they're hilarious because they think they're funny.

12:40And that laughter they have causes me to laugh. So there's so many benefits to doing it. The question is like, what are the structures we need in place? Are there any other benefits? I'll give you a couple more benefits, and I'll give you a couple structures. A couple things it does, just to add to what I've been covering earlier. You know what it does? It's a perspective shifter. It gives you perspective. It allows you to see things, you know, from above them and sort of the hilarity of human existence to some extent, how seriously we take all these different things. And it kind of creates like a psychological distance between you and the problem or you and your life.

13:16Sometimes you can get so absorbed in the day-to-day of life that you forget to have perspective. You forget to laugh at things. You forget that most of this stuff really doesn't matter. Most of the things we worry about in our own lives don't matter. Things in the world, those matter. But in our own lives, we take things so seriously. Ask yourself a question. Have you been taking yourself a little too seriously? Have you been taking everything a little too seriously? and would there be any benefit right now in your own life? I'm not talking about world issues. That's completely different. Those are serious and somber issues many times.

13:56I'm talking about our own lives every day. Could you find a moment to laugh a little bit, to give the gift of laughter to someone else, to surround yourself with a little bit of it, to draw a little bit closer to other human beings in your life? Distance comes from being so serious all the time. You know recently as i'm recording this the roast of tom brady happened it's become like the number one watched Special ever on netflix within the first few weeks And I think the reason for that is it was just you know whether you liked it or not Whether it was too dirty for you or you didn't think it was appropriate or you haven't even seen it and by the way It's mainly adult humor, so it's not something kids should see but Why was that so popular?

14:38Because our culture wants to laugh more and it was like kind of old school comedy. So everybody's saying, the marketplace is saying between podcasts, Netflix, these other things, we need to be laughing more. By the way, there's some research that says it's the best medicine of all. There's a new study published in the Plus One that's found that spontaneous laughter can significantly reduce the stress hormone cortisol. Now, does it reduce it like other things do? I don't know, but I do know this. The study and the data says when you laugh, The way the human body responds to stress, it's physical or psychological.

15:13It anticipates a threat. And so when you're laughing, your body's not anticipating any threat. Cortisol levels are stable. Just to give you an example, the authors of this study found out that if you laugh somewhere between 9 to 60 minutes, it induces a significant reduction in cortisol of up to 36%. Think about that for a minute. Laughing for nine minutes up to an hour in your day reduces your cortisol levels by 36%. And by the way, there's no impact on the duration. In other words, as long as you get more than nine minutes of laughter up to 60 minutes, those cortisol levels drop big time. So it's worth doing for yourself physically.

15:53The other thing about spontaneous laughter, they say that genuine laughter is like an intuitive thing and that brainwaves that are specific to laughter can even begin developing before brainwaves for speech. Just think about this with children. If that's true, the brainwaves, the pathways that develop for laughter develop before speech in human beings. That's how important they are. Somehow God knew in his infinite wisdom when he designed us that laughter was that important that he actually started to develop those pathways, the data tells us, before even our ability to speak. So it's beneficial for so many different things.

16:30It's medicinal in every single way. Then the question becomes, so what can we do to create structure? So one of the things most of you know, I've had a lot of stand-up comedians on my show. Let me give you a few things that I think that you could begin to do. Number one, add a podcast to your rotation where you're laughing. Find one. I'm serious, find one. I love that you listen to my show and I want it to be your number one show. But probably if you listen to my show, you listen to a bunch of other very serious things, grab somebody who makes you laugh on a regular basis. So like for me, I love Bill Burr.

17:03I love Sebastian Maniscalco. I like Two Bears, One Cave. I laugh on these shows. I've also had many comedians on my podcast. One of the gifts I give myself is I love to go to comedy shows. It's something that I give myself the gift of. Number one, I study them as speakers. but number two, it gives me the gift of laughter. Number two, I watch things on Netflix, on streaming channels that make me laugh regularly. I've watched about every standup special that's ever been on Netflix. I'm just telling you, I watch them. And I'm studying them as speakers, but even if I only laugh one or two times in the hour, it's worth it to me.

17:43It just takes me out of my life, takes me out of how serious I am. I listen to the podcast, number three. The other thing I do is I have surrounded myself with people who make me laugh. And then I'm going to give you something that sounds crazy. I actually induce laughter. So I've been doing this the last few weeks. I just start laughing. Like I actually do. It's like simulated laughter. Like I just start going, and I know you think I'm nuts, but I start laughing and it just happened again. Then I like simultaneously start laughing. And then if there's anybody else around me who thinks I'm nuts, they start laughing.

18:15But I got to tell you something like just a simulated laughter. When I'm alone, do it 99 % of the time. By the way, in the beginning, do it always alone. But when you just start, I'm actually laughing now. When you actually do simulated laughter, I don't know how it works. It turns something on in you where like you all of a sudden, a couple seconds later, I don't know what's happening now. It is happening again. You start laughing and giggling. And one of the things that I have found with very serious people, I have to tell you, on my show and in my personal relationships. The number one thing I hear from people is they go, Ed, I love when you laugh.

18:52I love when you laugh. And the reason is, is I'm so serious. So if you're this very serious person, you have no idea how multi-dimensional you become as a friend, as a leader, as a person, when you laugh more. And so if you're a business leader and you're not laughing at yourself, poking fun at yourself, if you're a mom or a dad and there's not enough joy or laughter in your home. Start to create it. It's okay that it's artificial in the beginning. It's even okay if it's simulated. But do things. Like one thing I've added to our game, I'm playing this couple games right now where it's basically just stuff that makes you crack up laughing.

19:29And I also have this one friend, I've been calling him, I'm going, dude, give it to me. Make me laugh, brother. And I just want to induce any way I possibly can to laugh. And then what I do now at the end of my day when I do my gratitude journaling, I ask myself a new question. Where did I laugh today? What was funny about my day today? And even mistakes I make now, oftentimes I'll laugh at them and they lose their power and impact over hurting my self-confidence. If you have a self-confidence problem, you probably have a laughter problem. You don't laugh at yourself enough. You're taking yourself way, way too seriously.

20:08And believe it or not, sometimes a lack of self-confidence is actually the inverse of it is an ego problem. You're so you focused. You're so worried about what everybody thinks about you and what you are or aren't doing as opposed to what you're giving. And of all the things you could give somebody else, a smile is at the top of the list. And so there's some range between a smile and belly laughter, but just smiling. And so when I brush my teeth the last 30 days, when I'm done, I actually stop. I do, I spit my water out and I smile at myself. I give myself a smile. And you know what's really, I don't like how I look when I smile.

20:46Even right now, I don't. I don't like, as you get older, every crinkle or wrinkle in my face shows up more when I smile. But I have to tell you something, when I smile back at myself, it's a gift. And I've realized when I smile at other people more, they smile back at me oftentimes. And I've given them a gift in my life. So if you're about contributing and teaching people and giving them, how about giving them a smile? How about giving them the gift of laughter? And if you're not like a stand-up comedian type or you don't think you have a great sense of humor, I can tell you that I think a smile goes a really long way at getting someone else to smile.

21:20And so all of these things I've stacked up in my life as things that I do, and I'm actually now taking an inventory. And here's the last thing. I've set a goal. I set a goal that when I was first starting to do this journaling and gratitude at the end of the day, I had full days where I hadn't laughed. I had full days where I hadn't smiled. And I have to tell you something. I said, you know what? I got a goal to get in shape. I got a goal to make money. I got a goal for my family. I've got a goal to what I want to contribute. I got a goal for what I want to give away. How do I not have a laughter goal?

21:53Where performance is measured, performance improves. And I didn't have ever 53 years of all the goals I've ever written out, of all the things I've ever measured and calibrated, of all the things I've ever wanted to achieve, I never wrote down laughing. I never wrote down joy. And so no wonder there's been a shortage of it. No wonder. And so in your own life, how about a goal of 10 minutes a day, an hour a day of smiling, of laughing? And if it has to be simulated in the beginning, great. But you know what? There's lots of books you can read, things you can listen to, stuff you can watch, like I've listed earlier, people you could surround yourself with.

22:34Right. And just looking for the funny is my last thing. I just look for the funny. So like my little dogs who I love, they're so damn funny when I let them be. I got a video on my phone right now. I took last night of Rose. She's sleeping on her back with both legs up, just completely frozen. And like, there's a difference between thinking that's cute, which it is and so funny to me. And so there's funniness. I was at a stoplight the other day and whether you believe in this stuff or not, it doesn't matter. But there was a dude next to me at a stoplight and he had a mask on in his car by himself right now still.

23:16And I just looked and I just thought, what is this dude doing? What is he doing? He's alone in the car. Maybe he had a reason for it and even if he did it doesn't matter because I thought it was damn funny. I was caddying in a golf tournament for my son the other day and I just started to look at some of the golf swings of the amateurs that were on the range and without me I just it's just funny like because my swing's ugly too but like man this dude's taking this game way too seriously. He has no chance to score a good round with that golf swing yet man he was pissed when he missed how I watched this dude.

23:53He had this horrible golf swing. And he kept missing shots and slamming his club. I'm like, dude, what do you expect with that swing? Like, you're going to hit bad shots. It's hilarious to me with somebody who's got no golf swing that they get mad when they hit a bad shot. Like, it shocks them somehow. It was just funny. And what's just happened to me, just maybe 10%, maybe 20%, I'm seeing what I'm looking for. And I've never looked for the funny in my life. I've looked for the beautiful. I've looked for the success. That reticular activating system in your brain that I talk all the time about, in conclusion, will find funny things if you're looking for them.

24:32Remember, I always talk about this. The reticular activating system in your brain is the thing that finds what's most important to you or proves you right. And so it's how I've become successful in business. It's how I've been able to find the great people in my life because I've got my reticular activating system looking for it. So I just basically made a shift and said, I'm going to start looking for the funny things in my day. Not exclusively, but more. And you know what? My RAS, now that I'm making it a habit, is finding funny stuff that was always there that I missed. I feel so bad for myself and the people around me that it took me 53 years until this week that I'm recording this to get that I can take all of the stuff I've used to be successful to get the emotions I want.