What Silly Action Reduces Pain?

Stub your toe walking down the street, torque your knee during basketball practice, dance a little too vigorously and strain a muscle, wake up with your lower back bothering you, start to feel a stress headache or a migraine coming on, and the pain begins.

The more you think about the pain you are feeling, the worse it gets. Soon, it’s all you think about. Annoying, relentless pain. Reach for Ibuprofen and try to ignore it. Maybe it will go away. But probably it won’t, and it will alter how you function for as long as you have pain. Because when pain comes, it dominates all your thoughts.

Stress does the same thing. You have a bad day at work or school, the plumber left you waiting past his “arrive” time, someone yelled at you for something that wasn’t your responsibility, the flight was cancelled and now you will miss your meeting, and traffic was horrendous. Your stomach hurts, and you can’t think. You need an Advil. And maybe a Scotch.

This is life. It’s normal. It’s common. What isn’t normal is thinking about humor for pain or stress relief. Try smiling. Of course it’s fake and you don’t feel like it. Who ever does? Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it. If you persist, if you force yourself to smile, to think of something amusing, there is tons of anecdotal evidence to support the theory that humor, especially laughing, helps reduce pain and lower stress. Don’t believe me? Try it for yourself. Let me know. 

Laughing produces endorphins, a kind of opioid that fights pain and makes us feel good. So we create our own painkiller, any time we need it. It may not make your pain go away, but the evidence suggests that it can lessen it, and reduce stress.

Two other actions, singing and dancing, also produce endorphins, lower pain threshold, and produce a feel-good remedy. If you sing, dance, and laugh at the same time, you will feel utterly silly while distracting yourself from pain or stress, thereby reducing both. Dumb, but then so is pain and stress. 

That’s Aging Intelligently