Leaning in to Laughter

Every Tuesday afternoon I do a volunteer stint at Cancer Research in Twickenham. Come Tuesday I'm glad to get into a real room with people. I've already learned a sequence of eleven button presses at the till to cash a ten pound note and acquired a new diligence at sorting out women's clothes.

I love it.

Anna is the woman who steams. She's great. She cleans the clothes, has been working there for years, and has a special relationship with the hoover type thing that steams them.

Anna and I joke. And given that some of the other staff have English as a second language and don't share the idiomatic and comedic history of Mighty Blighty, we enjoy a cultural connection and at times nationalistic love of finding out where the laughter is to be had.

Now, ever since I learned to survive at school by masking my insecurity behind a clown persona, I've been blessed with the gift of creating laughter. Teaching drama had a lot to do with it, as I spent more quality time laughing with the kids and students than I did attending department meetings. I'm not sure exactly how it happens nowadays, but it usually begins with a gentle provocation of the person I'm speaking to, a searching out of their enthusiasm for irony and self-effacement, a launch of the imagination, and then an improvisation, flirting and sparring with the person and the energy that's created.

It's a letting go of everything that's sacred in the moment.

Mucking around with Anna is just pure joy. Last week she kindly bought in some wagon wheels for us in the shop..

"I hate Wagon Wheels" I say. And I say it with just enough gravity that it lands quite strongly.

There's a moment. Anna's breath stops momentarily. She looks at me, slightly disarmed.

Have I gone too far?

I smile my broadest and we banter on. I leaned into the trust we’d been cultivating. I took a risk. Anna allows her curiosity about our connection to override the discomfort she momentarily feels. After a few seconds we can play again. The feeling is good.

We know that the brain, to help us survive, preferentially looks for, reacts to, stores, and then recalls negative information over positive information. This helped our hunter gatherer ancestors to survive. This is what science calls a “negativity bias". We all have it.

So when we experience the good, in order to imbue our nervous system with it, and to counteract if you like, our tendency for negativity, we need to learn to dwell in our positive experiences, those that give us life-affirming sensation and joy.

Being curious can often bring a smile. And that's the time to practice. Feel it. Make it last. Breathe in all that funniness. Laugh more. Enjoy the sensations it gives you, they've giving the brain information that will alter its plasticity and re-shape itself. If you do this enough, you'll become that 'bringer of joy' that others love to be with.

Laughter is infectious. Every person you meet wants to do it. And given an opening, they'll want to do it with you.