Part II

Psychoneuroimmunology and Humor

The exciting new work being done on humor and health is part of a broader research movement in the health sciences focusing on the impact of the mind on the body. In fact, an entirely new area of medical research has developed in the past decade, with the unwieldy name of "psychoneuroimmunology."  Every year, more and more studies demonstrate that your thoughts, moods, emotions, and belief system have a fundamental impact on some of the body's basic health and healing mechanisms.⁵⁹ One expert in the area, Dr. Ron Anderson, noted in Bill Moyers' book Healing and the Mind that "There is no question that your body and mind tied together help you fight infection."

Whether or not you get sick depends on your body's ability to fight off infection and disease. In 1980 (prior to the discovery of the AIDS virus), the departing editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Franz Ingelfinger, estimated that 85% of all human illnesses are curable by the body's own healing system.  We've known for a long time that good nutrition, exercise, adequate sleep, avoidance of harmful drugs, and sanitary personal habits aide the body's ability to do this.  We now know that building a positive focus in your life is equally important.

The body's healing system responds favorably to positive attitudes, thoughts, moods, and emotions (e.g., to love, hope, optimism, caring, intimacy, joy, laughter, and humor), and negatively to negative ones (hate, hopelessness, pessimism, indifference, anxiety, depression, loneliness, etc.). So you want to organize your life to maintain as positive a focus as possible.

This doesn't mean you should avoid negative emotions.  You need to find ways to express whatever emotions you feel. Candace Pert, former Chief of the Section of Brain Biochemistry of the Clinical Neuroscience Branch at the National Institute of Mental Health, studies health influences at the neurochemical level. She noted recently that "repressing emotions can only be causative of disease."⁶⁰ Failure to find effective ways to express negative emotions causes you to "stew in your own juices" day after day, and this chronic immersion in negativity is what appears to produce harmful influences on health.

Surprisingly, negative emotions appear to have an enhancing effect on the immune system in the short run.⁶¹ So short-term negative emotional states do not pose a health threat.  The threat comes when you get caught up in negativity as a habitual style.  You need techniques that keep you from wallowing in resistance-lowering negativity. The longer negative states persist in your mind/body, the greater the likelihood that they will lead to some negative influence on your health.  Love is probably the most powerful tool for overcoming negativity.  Humor, in my view, comes a close second. 

The mechanisms by which your mind promotes health and healing aren't yet fully understood (see the following section), but your body certainly knows what to do .  All you have to do is set up the right conditions for the mechanisms to operate.

While the focus here is on humor, any effective coping skill will help sustain health and well-being. One study showed that people who cope less well with life's stresses were three times more likely to contract the flu during a flu epidemic.⁶² This is not surprising, since poor copers have depressed levels of natural killer cell activity, while those judged to be coping well show higher levels of natural killer cell activity.⁶³

It's tempting to think that good coping skills are essential only for the big stressors in life. However, the way you handle minor daily hassles has been shown to be a better predictor of illness than the way you respond to less frequent major stressors.⁶⁴

Emotion: The Key to the Mind's Influence on Health

Candace Pert noted in Bill Moyers' Healing and the Mind television series that emotions--registered and stored in the body in the form of chemical messages--are the best candidates for the key to the health connection between mind and body. It is through the emotions you experience in connection with your thoughts and daily attitudes--actually, through the neurochemical changes that accompany these emotions--that your mind acquires the power to influence whether you get sick or remain well.

The key, according to Pert, is found in complex molecules called neuropeptides. "A peptide is made up of amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein. There are twenty-three different amino acids.  Peptides are amino acids strung together very much like pearls strung along in a necklace."⁶⁵ Peptides are found throughout the body, including the brain and immune system. The brain contains about 60 different neuropeptides, including endorphins.  These neuropeptides are the means by which all cells in the body communicate with each other. This includes brain-to-brain messages, brain-to-body messages, body-to-body messages, and body-to-brain messages.

Individual cells, including brain cells, immune cells, and other body cells, have receptor sites that receive neuropeptides. The kinds of neuropeptides available to cells are constantly changing, reflecting variations in your emotions throughout the day.  The exact combinations of neuropeptides released during different emotional states has not yet been determined.

The kind and number of emotion-linked neuropeptides available at receptor sites of cells influence your probability of staying well or getting sick. "Viruses use these same receptors to enter into a cell, and depending on how much of the . . . natural peptide for that receptor is around, the virus will have an easier or harder time getting into the cell. So our emotional state will affect whether we'll get sick from the same loading dose of a virus."⁶⁶

This kind of conclusion from a researcher at the cutting edge of research on the mind/body connection should give you all the motivation you need to make the effort to improve your sense of humor. More humor and laughter in your life helps assure that these chemical messages are working for you, not against you.

"The chemicals that are running our body and our brain are the same chemicals that are involved in emotion.  And that says to me that . . . we'd better pay more attention to emotions with respect to health."

(Candace Pert)

It was noted earlier that preliminary research suggests that humor/laughter stimulates the production of helper T-cells, the cells attacked by the AIDS virus. If humor were to help the body battle AIDS (there is presently no evidence that it does--or does not), it probably wouldn't be as a mere result of the production of more helper T-cells, since there would be every reason to expect these new cells to also be invaded by the virus. Rather, it would probably be due to the neuropeptides produced by the positive emotional state that goes along with humor and laughter.

Along these lines, Pert has noted, "The AIDS virus uses a receptor that is normally used by a neuropeptide. So whether an AIDS virus will be able to enter a cell or not depends on how much of this natural peptide is around, which . . . would be a function of what state of emotional expression the organism is in."⁶⁷

"This I believe to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought."

(Lin Yutang)

Research on the immune system supports this view.  For example, negative emotion has been found to be associated with reduced salivary IgA response to a novel antigen,⁶⁸ lower serum antibody responses to Hepatitis B vaccine,⁶⁹ reduced proliferation of lymphocytes,⁷⁰ and reduced natural killer cell activity.⁷¹ Positive emotional states have similarly been linked to heightened immune response, both for IgA ⁷² and natural killer cell activity.⁷³

The research on the effect of other emotions on health will not be exhaustively reviewed here, but some of the major studies will be presented to show you that there is no longer any doubt that your daily mood or frame of mind makes a significant contribution to your health--especially when it persists day after day, year after year. Anything you can do to sustain a more positive, upbeat frame of mind in dealing with the daily hassles and problems in your life contributes to your physical health at the same time that it helps you cope with stress and be more effective on the job. Your sense of humor is one of the most powerful tools you have to make certain that your daily mood and emotional state support good health.

Negative Health Influences

Survival

On the negative side, researchers have known for a long time that your emotional state influences your odds of survival--at least under certain conditions.  Several studies have shown that, among older people, the death rate for both men and women increases sharply following the death of their spouse.⁷⁴ The greater the level of depression experienced, the greater the impact on the surviving spouse's health.

All of us have down days where we feel blue or depressed.  The point at which this becomes a risk factor is when it persists.  One study showed that among a group of adults given a test for depression, those who died of cancer 17 years later were twice as likely to have had high depression scores (17 years earlier) than those who developed no cancer at all.⁷⁵ Another study showed that patients with AIDS Related Complex who had weaker beliefs that they could do things to influence the course of the disease were less successful in fighting off AIDS.⁷⁶ These studies suggest that, at least in some circumstances, persistent negative emotion can put you at greater risk of death.

Among patients with heart disease, those with a pessimistic outlook about their ability to recover enough to eventually resume their daily routine were more than twice as likely as optimists to have died one year later, even when severity of condition was taken into account.⁷⁷ Another follow-up study of patients recovering from heart attacks showed that those who scored high on tests of sadness and depression were eight times as likely as more optimistic patients to die within the next 18 months.⁷⁸ Risk of death was tripled both among those who tended to hold in their anger and those judged to be very anxious.

The researcher who conducted the latter study sees the importance of helping heart patients reduce their pessimistic outlooks and negative emotions, but concluded that "we don't know how to change negative emotions."  By the time you finish reading this book, you will know how to do so--by improving your skills at finding and creating humor, especially in the midst of negative life circumstances.

"We're all in this together--by ourselves."

(Lily Tomlin)