Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation® Blog - Let in the Laughter 4804

Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation® Blog - Let in the Laughter

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How laughter helps with healing and promotes happiness in the health care setting

We’ve all heard the saying, “Laughter is the best medicine.” While there’s no conclusive evidence that laughter can heal you, experts agree that laughing doesn’t have adverse effects either. Many people believe laughing is powerful.

But that makes you wonder, why don’t we laugh more? And why aren’t we using the power of laughter with our patients?

Research suggests that children laugh about 400 times a day, while adults average 15. While a health care setting may not always be the appropriate place to crack a joke, lightening the mood may be just what’s needed for you and your patients.

How Laughter Helps
The effects of laughter are hard to measure. Most of what we know is based on self-reported physical and mental health. A review of early research found that laughter and a sense of humor:
  • Contributes to higher perceived quality of life
  • Improves self-esteem
  • Leads to lower levels of loneliness and depression
  • Reduces stress and dulls the impact of stressful or traumatic events

Laughter can also benefit patients and caregivers in different ways:

Benefits of laughter for patients
More research is needed to prove laughter’s therapeutic capabilities. But the American Medical Association reports that humor and laughter have been shown to positively affect heart health, the immune system, pain tolerance, inflammation, and stress markers.

A 2020 survey of nearly 200 patients with cancer reported that more than 61% of participants frequently use humor to cope with the cancer. Nearly 80% also find that it decreases their anxiety and 86% feel it’s important for health care providers to use appropriate humor. Approximately 4% listed “sense of humor” as the most important quality they look for in their interactions with providers.

Benefits of laughter for nurses
We know that the satisfaction of caring for others isn’t always enough to keep a job fun and engaging. But humor and laughter may be a career-saving form of self-care.

Humor can be a coping mechanism. Sharing laughter with others can also help build relationships — an important factor for nurses needing to connect with their patients. After all, most humans recognize laughter — it’s a universal language.

But laughter can be helpful even if you aren’t sharing your laughter with others. A 2022 study measured the effects of 8 sessions (over 4 weeks, twice a week) of laughter yoga for nurses. When compared with nurses who did not complete the laughter yoga program, participants had less symptoms of burnout, specifically:
  • Decreased levels of exhaustion
  • Increased life satisfaction
  • Higher personal accomplishment levels
  • Lower levels of depersonalization (detachment)
  • Significantly decreased levels of perceived stress

Tips for Adding Laughter to Your Day
When you think about a typical workday, ask yourself, “How many times did you have a good laugh or make others laugh?” If the answer isn’t “a lot,” you might want to work on that.

Here are some ways to increase your laughter:
  • Begin with a smile: Plaster on a smile to start your day, when you greet a patient, and every time you enter a room. When you smile at someone, it not only makes you feel good, but it encourages them to smile back, causing a ripple effect. Even a fake smile can increase your happiness and put you in the mood to laugh.
  • Introduce humor with your coworkers: Lighten the mood at work by asking work friends to share a funny story or make a humor board to post funny cartoons, jokes, and pictures.
  • Make yourself laugh: Researchers say the therapeutic effects of laughter happen in response to both spontaneous laughter (chuckling at something you see or hear) and self-induced laughter (making yourself laugh). In fact, forcing yourself to laugh has a more positive effect on anxiety and depression compared to spontaneously laughing at something funny.
  • Try laughter yoga: According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, some studies report that laughter yoga may improve depression, increase life satisfaction, enhance the health of nursing students, increase heart rate variability, and improve Parkinson’s disease symptoms.

Adding more laughter to your day is the goal, but keep these guidelines in mind to ensure your laughter is appropriate to a health care setting:
  • Avoid sarcasm: It can be misunderstood and negatively affect your relationship with patients.
  • Keep it simple: If you’re hoping to encourage laughter from a patient, introduce humor that is easy to understand and keep jokes simple and short.
  • Laugh with others, not at them: Discriminating jokes have no place in a health care setting.
  • Err on the side of caution: Keep jokes that are not family-friendly to yourself. If you are unsure, don’t share.
  • Read the room: Humor is inappropriate in serious discussions or life-threatening situations.

Next time you’re stressed at work, or a patient doesn’t seem motivated, think about a child laughing 400 times a day. Then get to work by letting in more laughter.


How do you let the laughter in? Share with us in our discussion below.

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Blog Quality of Life 08/01/2024 9:32am CDT

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Quality of Life
81 Posts 8
Your life is full and your work is often stressful. This domain focuses on the elements that improve the quality of your life: including resiliency and preventing burnout, restoring joy, and achieving a positive work/life balance.

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