Yesterday I spoke to a man with chronic pain who claimed that by far the best ‘pain medication’ was to recall times when he’d been convulsed with laughter. He found this often worked better than ‘pain pills’. I didn’t roll my eyes at this, as you might have expected, as I’m quite well aware that laughter really is a ‘tonic’. A good belly laugh can suppress pain, boost immune response, lower blood pressure and enhance a sense of intimacy and shared understanding with those around – to name but a few of the benefits of laughter.

Humor, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Well, so to speak!
 We often find the unexpected funny – as long as we don’t feel threatened by the jolt it gives us. Many jokes rely on this for their effect – they mislead our expectations and then suddenly face us with a totally different outcome. This jolt has other uses. A short sharp humor shock can actually help us become better learners and problem solvers as we burst into laughter. This is because it loosens up our everyday mind – which tends to travel along pretty comfortable, predictable tracks. The jolt stimulates the brain to make new connections and get creative. It gets us out of ‘automatic thinking’ and into an altogether looser, freer, livelier-feeling mode of awareness. That’s why you should really take laughter seriously.

Should we be able to laugh at everything, though? Some people find it a bit hard to swallow that you might sometimes get a better understanding of even quite serious matters if you inject humor into them. Isn’t this just trivializing important things, disrespecting the real seriousness of what is at issue? But while no one should laugh at another’s misfortune, for example, helping that other to laugh at their own misfortune here and there, now and then, can – when done sensitively – actually do them a real psychological favor. It can genuinely lighten their burden.

And some sorts of seriousness really could do with a jolt of humor. People who take themselves too seriously (I’m sure you know a few) become pompous and overbearing. You can’t reason them out of it – but a joke might help them see their own ridiculousness. This was often said to be the real role of the medieval court jester – they had special dispensation to remind the sovereign that that they were only human after all by pricking their pomposity with humor. This was too risky for ordinary people to do – they might get their heads chopped off!

Anyway, I asked this guy what were the memories he went back to that were so hilarious they could suppress the pain. And he looked me straight in the eye and said: “No shortage! I worked in banking for thirty years!”

Ho ho.

Mark

When you are happy will this be a constant state? Will you be happy regardless of what happens to others in the world? Will you be grinning ear to ear 24/7 (NB British people do not take kindly to obvious protracted displays of other people’s happiness!;)

We often assume that we will be happy once we have got what we want. Yet we know that spoilt over-indulged people are often unhappy as they are not given the opportunity to experience the satisfactions of personal struggle over adversity leading to success (see my self discipline and mental health article) Reward without effort doesn’t produce sustainable happiness and contentment as Roger Elliott so brilliantly demonstrates in hiking to happiness

Happiness and your basic needs

Living happily is a by-product of living in a certain way; just as physical fitness is a by-product of walking the dog. Happiness doesn’t just mean everything going right the whole time-some golden future era where suddenly all difficulties are dissolved. It really means living in such a way that for most of the time your basic emotional and physical needs are met.

The trouble is so many people are too black or white about what they think will make them happy (or unhappy). ‘If I could only get married or win the lottery or get that dream job’. Putting all ones eggs in one basket and depending on just one future dreamed of circumstance to make you happy is too simplistic. Being able to manage your emotions makes you generally happier. When you have emotional intelligence you are able to meet your needs (and control your greeds) from different sources as well as being able to enjoy the fruits of your inner life rather than having to depend on externally provided satisfactions all the time.

Many studies show that marriage makes people happier. This article seems to counter that idea. But if a marriage can work as a solid springboard or foundation from which you and your partner can more easily get the basic needs met from life then it will certainly aid happiness.

When people say ‘happy’ maybe they really mean: Emotionally intelligent, able to recognize and get ones basic needs met, humourous and flexible in adversity and realistic enough to know that happiness fluctuates and that it is not just something that happens to us but a by product also of what we put into life.

Mark

Suddenly I started to pick up speed, went further than I intended, time whizzed by and I did my best time since I began training a few weeks ago.

Interested to know what happened? Well I just changed the thoughts that were stopping me getting through a wee tough running patch. The problem and the solution lay within processes called anchoring and pattern matching, we teach the principles behind them on our online hypnosis training and in great detail on the Hypnotherapy Diploma. They are governing principles in all human psychology and behaviour.

So when I was running and felt the discomfort, for a moment my attention was naturally focused on the pain, then I started to remember how I had gone through the same difficulties when I trained for the half marathon last year. But thankfully I also recalled how I had overcome those barriers and smashed through them as I got fitter. What seemed like miserable aching miles soon became like a walk in the park.

I recalled last year how my mate Caroline (who used to live in Kenya) told me of how men of all ages from the Kipsigi tribe would run around their farm on Christmas day after lunch…all 8.000 acres….just for fun!!!! I used to run imagining how those guys must have felt, what they looked like and how they would have ran with the great ease and grace that Caroline described.

My mind focused on this every time that I went running last year and it created a pattern for me, my association with running became something fun, time to be able to enjoy nature and I saw no boundaries to how much I could improve.

So when the going got a little hard today; those hypnotizing negative thoughts that would have made it impossible for me to continue where ousted out by the strong positive hypnotic association that I had created last year. Phew!!!!

Here is a summary about anchoring from the glossary in the Hypnotherapy Course student manual…..

Anchoring: the means by which an emotional learning becomes linked or associated to an experience producing a predictable response whenever that experience or part of it repeats in future. Because of the way the emotional mind works (see pattern matching) the intensity of the emotion will determine how often the learning needs to occur before it ‘sticks’. For example, if someone has a highly frightening experience coupled with the smell of oranges then in future the smell of oranges may well produce the fear or phobic response. If someone has a very minor emotional experience, perhaps mild discomfort, whilst smelling oranges then this experience may have to repeat many times before the unconscious association becomes part of the person’s unconscious emotional repertoire. We can see that phobias and sexual fetishes are both produced by anchoring or ‘learned pattern matching’. Because pattern matching is for basic survival then it is often sloppy and we can see how high arousal can attach to anything that happens to be around at the time of the arousal. Anchoring occurs all the time and certainly in all kinds of therapeutic situations often without the therapist being aware of it or using it as part of the therapy. Once you have hypnotised someone the first time it is almost always easier to hypnotise them again because they become anchored into going into trance with you and your voice. Anchoring needs to be used knowingly by the therapist as it is a fundamental aspect of the way we work. Part of curing a phobia is to ‘unhook’ the anchor from the emotion.

Mark and I are preparing to teach our students how to use the ‘fast rewind’ technique to unhook those anchored emotions from a stimuli, I will let you know how we do this later in the week.

I have worked with Roger and Mark for seven years now and much of my work over the past three years has been to focus on how our students can absorb their new skills in a fun, creative and easy way; in the process I have seen the best ways this can be achieved. Over the next few months I will let you know some of the gems that have helped us achieve this.

One of the most noticable diamonds are our team of mentors; who mentor about five students each through the course and for three months after they qualify. Watching them with the students last weekend you would have thought that they had known them for ages as they guided the students through the exercises and nattered to them in the breaks.

I suppose it is a little bit like the old apprentice scheme whose dimise we witnessed through the Thatchers years; I thoroughly lament its passing as so much confidence to do new things and embed learning is achieved by working with someone who is more experienced and highly skilled than you. Those young men and women who worked as apprentices in various trades would always had someone on hand to chat to for advice or reassurance.

There is a quote that goes something like ….much talent has gone to the graves of men for the want of a little courage…………..And friendly encouragement is just one thing that a good mentor can provide. As well as being a sounding board for your ideas, someone to go over the techniques after the weekends all in a friendly and relaxed manner, an old idea that enriches the learning experience of all the students.

Jill