This Funny Movie Exercise takes a couple of hours (the length of the movie you choose) and it’s very easy! Simply play the movie and allow yourself to laugh. There is a lot of research about the benefits of laughter. From chronic pain to beating cancer, from depression to anxiety and so much more. Laughter doesn’t cure, but it does ease a thousand ills.
The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.
– James Oppenheim
Funny Movie Exercise Instructions
- Watch a funny movie, such as the Marx Brothers and Pink Panther movies, or or a comedian act
- Be sure to laugh out loud – Start with a giggle if you need to and be sure to work yourself up to allowing a true Laugh Out Loud moment
Credits
Marx Brothers and Pink Panther movies are recommended as a result of this great article summarizing the history of laughter research: Saving Your Life May Be a Laughing Matter. A few choice quotes from this article include:
- Dr. Lee Berk recently put catheters into the veins of 10 medical students there and took periodic blood samples while they watched a videotape of a man smashing watermelons with a mallet. [Gallagher, a comedian]. They laughed heartily, and as they did, their cortisol, dopamine and epinephrine levels decreased, and spontaneous blastogenesis–reproduction–of white blood cells increased.
- “It works,” said [Norman] Cousins, the former Saturday Review editor who fought bouts of disease with hoots of laughter and wrote about it in “The Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient” and “The Healing Heart.”