Books Archives - Christel Maritz

“If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Do you know why everyone isn’t in a mental hospital? Because there isn’t enough room. Philosophers have long observed a dearth of happiness among humanity. Henry David Thoreau said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” John Stuart Mill observed, “Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind.”

Abd ar-Rahman III, who reigned as the most powerful prince of Iberia for half a century, had this to say about happiness:

I have now reigned about fifty years in victory or peace, beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot. They amounted to fourteen.

According to the most recent statistics, one out of every six adults will have depression at some time in their life¹. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report that antidepressants are the third most commonly prescribed drugs in the United States.² Where the natural world has failed to provide for our happiness needs, we have turned to man-made chemical assistance. However, humor offers an alternative means of attaining happiness, or at least relief from our misery, for far less money and with fewer side effects than antidepressants.

Depression is caused by neurochemical reactions within the brain. Whether the original source of those neurochemical reactions is a traumatic event, long-term poverty, job loss, the break-up of a relationship or any other painful event(s), the illness itself takes form as a result of interactions that occur within and between different brain structures and neurotransmitters.

It is therefore reasonable to expect that depression can potentially be reversed using the sufferer’s own self-induced neurochemical reactions. And humor can be a means of inducing those reactions.

Neuroscientist Elisabeth Perreau-Linck of the University of Montreal carried out a study in which she confirmed that we are capable of altering our own brain chemistry. Perreau-Linck had professional actors self-induce a state of happiness or sadness and used a PET scan to measure the serotonin synthesis capacity (SSC) of their brains. SSC is an indicator of how efficiently the brain makes serotonin from its chemical precursor, tryptophan. The cortex and deeper brain regions showed significant differences in SSC activity for those actors who self-induced happiness and those who self-induced sadness.

“We found that healthy individuals are capable of consciously and voluntarily modulating SSC by transiently altering their emotional state,” said Perreau-Linck. “In essence, people have the capacity to affect the electrochemical dynamics of their brains by changing the nature of their mind process. This is a kind of ‘positive emotion therapy’ that anyone can use to modify chemical functioning of the brain.”³

Perreau-Linck’s findings support the use of humor to intentionally alter our own brain chemistry and combat depression. It is within our power to control how we respond to the inevitable adversity and struggles we encounter in life. Although some pain and suffering is unavoidable, we do not have to endlessly dwell on it and languish in it and make a home there.

The ability to overcome and rise above our suffering, even while deep in its midst, is within all of us. But doing so requires understanding that we are constantly being affected by what we give our attention to in ways that are completely outside our conscious awareness.

Making a deliberate effort to shift attention from the sad to the humorous could alter your brain chemistry and all of the subsequent unconscious effects your environment has upon you. Exposing yourself to humor by watching funny movies, going to comedy shows or reading humorous books could retrain your brain.

Reading any of the following books is a great way to begin using humor to deflate sadness, gain new perspective and self-induce more healthy neurochemical reactions in your brain — all with no ill side effects:

My Depression: A Picture Book, by Elizabeth Swados

Laughter Therapy: How to Laugh About Everything in Your Life That Isn’t Really Funny, by Annette Goodheart, M.F.T., Ph.D.

Driving on the Wrong Side of the Road: Humorous Views on Love, Lust & Lawn Care, by Diana Estill

When You Are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris

How Can You NOT Laugh at a Time Like This?: Reclaim Your Health with Humor, Creativity and Grit, by Carla Ulbrich

Footnotes:

Mental health conditions: Depression and anxiety [fact sheet]. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/campaign/tips/diseases/depression-anxiety.html
NCHS Dataline. (2012). Public Health Reports, 127(2). Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3268810/
E. Perreau-Linck, et al., “Serotonin Metabolism During Self-Induced Sadness and Happiness in Professional Actors,” program 669.3 presented at the 34th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, San Diego, Calif., October 23-27, 2004.

Can Humor Alter Your Brain Chemistry?
Can Humor Alter Your Brain Chemistry?
Disorders
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None of us ever set out to live a life with chronic pain and illness, but it happens. There comes that moment when you are sitting in yet another doctor’s office going over your symptoms for the third time that week, and the physician is simultaneously squinting his eyes, trying to make sense of your laundry list of complaints while scribbling something in your file — when you realize that your story might not ever have a Cinderella ending.

You panic. You may throw things (when you get home). Niagara Falls begins to erupt from your eyes. And then gradually, over time and much heartache, you embrace Plan B.

My Plan B was immersing myself into the wisdom of Toni Bernhard’s writing on the topic of chronic illness. In my opinion, there’s no one who understands the frustrations of being unfairly stymied in your life by an illness as well as Bernhard, but who offers a hopeful perspective without charging you with a bunch of actions that promises a “cure” like so many other self-help books do. Bernhard, a former law professor and dean of students at the University of California-Davis, caught a viral infection in May of 2001 on a trip to Paris and has been mostly housebound — often bedbound — since.

I read her first book, How To Be Sick, at a critical time in my recovery a year-and-a-half ago when I decided to start living around my symptoms instead of fighting against them on an hourly basis. Her insights have led me to peace, and helped me to embrace my illness in a way that has substantially reduced my suffering. Now, she has just published a new book, How to Live Well With Chronic Pain and Illness. Like her first book, it’s packed full of helpful advice, including skills to help with every day, how to communicate with family and friends, managing toxic thoughts and emotions, and dealing with isolation and loneliness.

Here are just a few favorite insights of mine that she offers in her book to help you live better with chronic pain and illness.

1. Be Kind to Yourself

One of my favorite chapters in Bernhard’s book is called “Letting Go: A Not-To-Do List for the Chronically Ill,” in which she compiles a fantastic list of eight things not to do:

Do not spend your precious energy worrying about how others view your medical condition.
Do not treat discouraging and disheartening thoughts or emotions as permanent fixtures in your mind.
Do not ignore your body’s pleas to say “no” to an activity.
Do not undertake a treatment just to please whoever is pressuring you to try it.
Do not be angry when people in your life don’t respond as you’d like.
Do not get hooked into believing you always have to “think positively.”
Do not put your pre-illness life on a pedestal.
Do not call yourself names or otherwise speak unkindly to yourself when you break one of your not-to-do rules.

They are all ways of learning how to be kind to yourself, which Bernhard would say is the most important lesson of all. “Self-compassion always comes first,” she writes. “If you think that treating yourself with compassion is too self-absorbed, remind yourself of the Buddha’s words: ‘If you search the whole world over, you will find no one who is dearer than yourself.’” We so often associate the word “kindness” with our actions to others, but it’s equally important to treat ourselves with respect and compassion.

2. Ask for Help

We’ve been taught that asking for help is a sign of weakness. In our culture, independence is valued over dependence. Learning how to ask for help takes practice for many of us. It’s a skill. Bernhard outlines some steps to hone this skill, and she reminds us that asking for help can actually be an act of kindness toward others. She writes, “Allowing them to help when you’re struggling with your health makes them feel LESS HELPLESS in the face of the new challenge in your life. It can mean a lot to someone to be able to aid a friend or family member who is struggling with his or her health.”

3. Learn How to Say “No”

This lesson has been one of the most difficult ones for me as a stage-four people-pleaser. Whenever I summoned up the courage to say “no” as a young girl, I endured silent treatments and other fun stuff. Going into my second decade with a chronic illness, however, I have no choice but to utter the two-letter word with regularity. That is, if I want to reduce my symptoms as much as possible. In responding to other people, Bernhard relies on Buddha’s teaching on skillful speech — we should speak only when what we have to say is true, kind, and helpful.

So when someone asks her to do something, she asks herself, “Would saying ‘no’ as opposed to ‘yes’ be true to myself? Would saying ‘no’ as opposed to ‘yes’ be kind and helpful to myself?” Think about this the next time you are asked to do something: Will your response be true to yourself, reflect your values, and EASE your suffering, as opposed to intensifying it? Or are you responding out of social pressure and a pattern of people-pleasing? Bernhard says it gets easier to say “no” as you begin to do it more often.

4. Don’t Feed the Want Monster

“Our desire to satisfy the Want Monster can feel so intense that we can talk ourselves into believing that getting what we want is necessary to our very ability to be happy,” writes Bernhard. For a long time, my deepest desire was to regain the good health that I enjoyed in my 20s. I could eat pizza and ice cream without suffering painful consequences. I enjoyed hosting parties with my husband. I didn’t have to keep a mood journal and assign each day a number between 0 (no death thoughts) and 5 (worrisome suicidal ideations), along with the day in my menstrual cycle, medications and supplements taken, and food and beverages consumed.

These two lines in Bernhard’s book enlightened me on how much energy I was wasting on trying to get back to my 27-year-old self: “The type of happiness that comes from satisfying the Want Monster is short-lived — because nothing is permanent … This conviction that the key to happiness is satisfying our desires sets us up for a big dose of disappointment and dissatisfaction with our lives.” After falling into that trap herself, she now realizes that the happiness that she wants comes from being content with her life as it is — and that is very attainable. She writes:

This happiness comes from making peace with the stark realities of life — that it’s a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant experiences, easy times and hard times, getting what I want and not getting what I want. It’s that way for everyone, and has always been. This happiness comes from opening my heart and mind to engage each day fully, even though I know it may be a day in which the Want Monster goes hungry.

5. Practice Mindfulness

“Mindfulness is the practice of turning your attention with care to the experience of the moment,” Bernhard explains. Her chapters teach us how to apply mindfulness to our illness — that is, how to pay attention to our physical and mental discomfort in a way that brings us to peace with our lives as they are at the moment. This can be done inside or outside the practice of formal meditation. It is about responding skillfully to emotions that can hijack our mind and identifying stressful thought patterns that can so often trigger physical reactions in the body. With practice, we can learn to catch the stories we tell ourselves that work against our well-being and mindfully let them go. Bernhard writes:

It took several years of chronic illness for me to recognize that I was causing myself undue mental suffering by spinning stressful stories about my physical discomfort and then accepting them as true without question simply because I had thought them. Mindfulness practice was the principle too that helped me realize was I was doing.

Join the Living with Chronic Illness group on ProjectBeyondBlue.com, the new depression community.

Originally posted on Sanity Break at Everyday Health.
5 Ways to Live Well with Chronic Pain
5 Ways to Live Well with Chronic Pain
Disorders
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