We were on a bus the other day. The driver started giggling. Over the microphone we heard the reason… “sorry, our driver was on auto pilot and turned toward the airport. Do not worry, she will turn us around and get us back on the right road at the next intersection.” That captured my attention. The tour guide and the driver had a chuckle and made a joke as she navigated the bus all the way around the next roundabout.
I loved the fact that when the driver made a wrong turn, the tour guide and driver just took it in their stride and got back on track.
I don’t know if you’ve had seasons of stress in your life; but what I’ve noticed is that when we get stressed, we lose our laugh. I know a man who went for a holiday recently and his aim during his rest was to “get his joy back”.
I don’t know how your self-talk goes, but may I encourage you when things don’t go to plan: hold it lightly and just get back on track. We all make mistakes. You are not unique in something going off course, it happens to us all. All that is required is for you to make a turn and get back on track.
Laughter has the benefit of improving your head space even when you don’t feel like laughing, it improves your stress levels and improves your social interactions.
I was interested reading The Health Benefits of Laughter that you can actually fake laughing and it will have a positive effect on the body. By choosing to respond with laughter when something ridiculous happens, you start to train yourself to respond with laughter as if you really found the event funny.
Last year I was driving in Europe. They drive on the opposite side of the road from us in New Zealand. It was a challenge to be spatially aware of the car on my right instead of my left. We headed into a very narrow street and the passenger in the car with me was very nervous. As we reminisced about that day, my passenger just kept saying that it was “too soon”. It wasn’t funny yet. I brought it up again recently and one year on, we were finally both able to laugh about it.
Something that seems negative now may make a brilliant story later. Can you bypass the emotion of the moment and train yourself to respond like you might a year or more down the road?
Have you been with a person who is taking something very seriously while everyone else thinks that the situation is entertaining? I can picture that very serious someone saying a sarcastic “Ha, ha.” Well, apparently, that is a step in the right direction.
When you laugh, you release chemicals in your brain that make you feel good. There are studies about reductions in pain levels, reductions in stress levels and improvements in immunity simply from engaging in the humble laugh.
I wonder about the pain aspect. When you are living with pain, laughter can be quick to exit the building. I have been through periods of my life where I was living with chronic pain and I must say that I didn’t find things particularly funny during those periods. Stress levels tended to increase and everything became a burden. Could deliberately searching out a laugh have helped me through that period? I don’t know, maybe it could have.
So, take stock. How do you respond when something takes you off guard. Do you laugh? Could you laugh? Could you train yourself to respond by looking for the funny side of the drama?
The other aspect of laughing is that it creates a social connection. When we go through something with someone else, we have a reason to share the story and laugh together into the future. It has taken me a whole year of occasionally bringing up the narrow street day with my passenger to get a laugh. Now we have a shared memory that we can laugh about for years to come.
When we work through a difficult time, the memory doesn’t necessarily go away, just the pain associated with the memory. Are there things that used to stress you that you could laugh about now? Practice laughing. Put on your favourite movie or listen to music that you find uplifting. Tell a funny story with a friend.
Is laughing a step too far? Perhaps you could start with a smile. Smile at a person in the street or in the store. Smile with a friend. Look out the window and choose to smile at the day.
Think back on ‘that’ event. Can you smile? One day that event is going to make a great story! One day that event might even be the thing that enables you to help someone else in a way that no one else could. It is part of your story. Can you frame it in a way that you can use it for good?
One measure of physical fitness is how quickly you can return to your usual heart rate: how quickly you can recover.
Sometimes our first response to a situation is frustration or judgement or self-depreciation. But let’s not get stuck there. How quickly can you recover? How soon can you process the event and manage a smile? How quickly can you have a chuckle about what happened?
That’s what I loved about the moment in the bus the other day: the driver’s first response was to chuckle at herself.
Laughter has the benefit of improving your head space even when you don’t feel like laughing, improving your stress levels and improving your social interactions. What else could it improve?
So, step back and ponder – when was the last time that you had a laugh? Is this something that you do often, or have you lost your joy?
Perhaps it is something that you could begin to search out like the man I mentioned or perhaps you could take a leaf out of our driver’s book and laugh at the next silly mistake that you make.
I look forward to hearing stories full of laughter as you recall some of the silly moments that you wish never happened and healing stories that tell of the ways that those hard things helped others.
*Now, I’d like to point out that women can be wonderful drivers! I happen to mention two stories today because they suit my purpose, not because I intend to paint a picture of female driving patterns!
