(tinkling music)
(energetic music)
Speaker, author, neurohumorist,
I know what you're thinking,
"Another neurohumorist. Oh, Lord!"
If I could show you how to build a healthier brain,
and I could show you how to strengthen your relationships,
and I could show you how to improve your business,
to increase your sales,
to make your leadership more significant,
and to overall just be happier, would you be interested?
Yes. Great.
And if I could show you how to do that
without breaking the bank, without breaking a sweat,
without eating kale,
and just having fun,
would you be willing to make a commitment
to make one small change in your life
every day over the next 30 days?
Would you be willing to do that?
Yes.
All right, then let's get started.
Yes, I love, love, love talking about this topic.
And let's see if we have...
Let's try the next slide.
I know, but it's not working.
"I knew that!"
Just recently, I was driving to an engagement
and my driver said,
"Oh, I understand you're one of the speakers.
What are you gonna be speaking about?"
And I said, "I'm gonna be speaking about humor."
And in all sincerity, he said,
"Did you know humor is good for you?"
Really! Why don't you...?"
And he went on and on.
He started telling me all about
the wonderful kinds of things about humor,
and I was thinking to myself,
"Why is it that almost everybody in here, in the world,
knows that humor is good for them,
but so often, we use it when it happens by chance,
but we don't use it by choice?"
And the difference between those
who get an occasional benefit
and those who can do the things that I talked about,
changing your brain, changing your business,
changing yourselves, changing your life,
changing your relationships,
changing your emotional wellbeing,
the difference is that people who do it purposefully,
intentionally, consistently, these are the people
who can experience those benefits.
There's lots of different ways we could address this
in the amount of time I have.
Dr. Heidi Hanna and many of the other speakers
could tell you, we really would love to be up here
for about six hours,
because there still wouldn't be enough time
to tell you all that we wanna talk about.
But I'm gonna put this particular presentation
in a framework that I think
most of you would be able to relate to.
Not too long ago, I was in Maine
having my first lobster roll,
and while I was seated waiting for them
to bring my dish to me,
I noticed this fishbowl up on the counter.
And when I looked a little closer,
I realized it was a blender with a fish in it,
which is why it's called Mr. Chips.
Now, to somebody who's a healthcare professional,
we like body fluids, death, and dismemberment humor,
so I thought this was really very funny.
But the other thing that I thought about this
in terms of most of us is,
how many of you have ever felt like you're in that fishbowl,
just waiting for somebody to hit that button?
Just waiting for somebody to hit that button?
And when we are experiencing this,
whether it's subtly or whether it's in our face,
certain things are happening in our brains
and in our bodies.
And we've studied through psycho neuroimmunology,
one of the terms that's been thrown around here earlier,
and we know that stress affects
every single body system in a negative way.
If you have too much stress, distress. A little is good.
But stress and the brain...
This is my lovely granddaughter, Ayla.
Stress and the brain, the way that stress behaves
is that first, it stimulates our autonomic nervous system.
And I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail
because I don't have a lot of time.
But this, in addition, creates additional changes
because the autonomic nervous system,
which is from the adrenal glands
and it produces certain chemicals and hormones,
but one of the things it produces is cortisol.
And according to an article that was in "Psychology Today",
cortisol, Public Enemy #1.
It is the underpinning of almost all
of the negative diseases that we are here for today.
Inflammatory diseases, autoimmune diseases, diabetes,
heart disease, Alzheimer's, all of these kinds of things,
the cortisol just fans the flames of making these worse.
So the good news is that humor is the antithesis
to almost every negative response
that we experience in the brain.
Our friend and colleague, Dr. Lee Burke,
once said that "If we could take what we know now
about laughter and bottle it,
it would require FDA approval."
I get so excited, I just wanna jump outta my skin,
because the research is growing and growing.
We are pioneers in a field
that is showing us the power of humor.
How many of you in here know a person with diabetes
or is a pre-diabetic?
Right now in the US, one in 10,
by 2050, propose to be one in three.
How many of you know of someone
who has heart disease of some kind?
How many of you have ever experienced
a short-term memory issue?
(audience laughing)
I forgot.
I can't remember.
How many of you in here have ever experienced
a short-term memory issue?
(audience laughing)
Just issue after issue after...
We find that humor is power.
Now I want you to think back, as a little exercise,
when the last time was that you had a really good laugh?
And I'm seeing a few blank faces here.
So we're gonna do some research.
This is a research-based symposium.
And so what I'm gonna ask you to do
is take a giant leap of faith,
and if you are physically able,
on the count of three, I want you to face me
and put the shape of a smile on your face.
Then I will give you one last set of instructions.
You may groan loudly, sit down,
and we will discuss the findings of our research.
If you're not able to stand,
feel free to do this from a seated position.
All right, on the count of three.
One, two, three, stand,
and take a deep breath and let it out.
And now put the shape of a smile on your face.
For the purpose of our research, I need to see teeth.
Don't care if they're yours.
(audience laughing)
Just wanna see a smile.
And the last set of instructions
is to turn and make eye contact
with the victim who is standing close by.
(audience laughing)
Now you can take a deep breath, sit down, and groan.
(audience laughing and chattering)
I love doing this exercise for two reasons.
One is if one of you just has to duck out before I'm done,
and I hope that's not the case,
but I wanted to make sure that every single person in here
walks away with at least one skill.
The next time you go back to your office tomorrow
and you feel like if one more person
puts one more thing on your desk
and you have to just strangle them,
I want you to face your doorway, entryway, or hallway,
and just do this...
(audience laughing)
Because the next person that walks in
and sees you looking like this is gonna know
now is not the time to bother you.
The second reason is you are now healthier than you were
when you started this presentation
from when you came in this morning.
Different things happened in your body.
You went from a fake smile
to the majority of you went to an actual real smile.
And for many of you who are the advanced group,
you began to laugh.
I didn't even ask you to smile, but you were laughing.
Now, interestingly enough, with humor,
there are components, different components in the brain.
Humor is made up of a cognitive component
in the prefrontal cortex.
It's made up of an emotional component,
which is mirth in the limbic system.
And then there's the physiological component, laughter,
which actually starts in the base of the brain
and then spreads all over your body.
So your entire brain is engaged.
Some of the research that has come out has been so exciting,
and I just wanna list a few,
but for instance,
some of the studies on persons with diabetes.
Again, a very, very difficult disease to manage
for some people.
And they did a study,
and it's been replicated on several occasions,
that persons with diabetes and pre-diabetics
were asked to watch funny videos.
They also had a control group of people
who did not have diabetes or were not pre-diabetics.
The findings were that the control group,
it really didn't change anything in terms of blood glucose
or other related issues of diabetes.
But for those who were diabetics or pre-diabetics,
there was a measurable,
significantly statistically significant decrease
in their blood glucose,
and in their renin and angiotensin.
These are hormones and proteins
that will damage kidneys over a period of time.
And so this is really, really very good news
for persons with this disease.
And even better, and to our surprise,
we found out at the epigenetics level,
that we were seeing changes at the level of the DNA.
If we're going to change the face of global health
and we're looking at diabetes going to one in three people,
we gotta think outside of the box, people.
What if we could implement something like this?
Dr. Michael Miller,
another friend and colleague from Baltimore,
did studies on people with cardiovascular disease.
And what he found was that people
who purposefully and intentionally used humor
had an increase in the elasticity
of their endothelial lining of their blood vessels.
For those of you who are not healthcare professionals,
that means their blood vessels got stretchier
and it lowered their blood pressure.
Cortisol causes inflammation throughout our bodies,
whether we notice it or not, not necessarily painful,
but in our blood vessels, when they become inflamed,
what is our body's response?
But to lay down plaque.
By decreasing cortisol,
which is one of the effects of humor and laughter,
we can decrease that inflammation,
and we can decrease the need for the body
to lay down plaque.
But he thinks that this is a wonderful, wonderful future
for people who are suffering
or facing cardiovascular disease.
In a study that's been done but not yet published,
but presented by another colleague of ours,
they studied people who were over 50,
but I'm going to generalize a little bit,
but they found that when they intentionally
and purposely watched humor,
their short-term memory improved.
And in another study,
when they did brain imaging and they did control groups,
one group who just watched a lecture,
another group who watched "Saving Private Ryan",
there's a relaxing movie for you,
and then another group that got to self-select
something funny to them,
because what might be funny to me might not be funny to you,
but they got to self-select humor.
And here is one of the things
that I think is the coolest thing I've heard all year,
and that is that when they did brain imaging,
they found that there was gamma waves
across the entire brain.
Gamma waves like we see in people
who practice intentional purposeful meditation
over years and years and years.
We don't even know what to do with this information yet.
But man, wouldn't it be cool if you could laugh
and experience those gamma waves into better health,
like that that we know to be true with meditation?
Applied and therapeutic humor
is very much where meditation was I think 20, 25 years ago,
when we talked about meditation
and people rolled their eyes so hard
you could hear their head ring, and they were like,
"Oh, but that's what the people in California do.
That's those, you know, nuts and flakes and weird people."
But what we're finding now is that this is so powerful
and this is just, just the tip of the iceberg.
I love this quote by Viktor Frankl.
And if you have not yet read "Man's Search for Meaning",
it should be on your list
of top 100 books to read in your life.
But I think what he said here
was one of the most powerful things I've ever heard,
"Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
And in that space lies our freedom
and our power to choose our response.
And in our response lies our growth and our happiness."
Stimulus, response,
stimulus, response,
stimulus, response, stimulus, response, in that space.
So often we think, "Well, I don't have a choice.
Somebody cut me off and of course I'm just gonna go 'Bam!'
on the horn, because that's how I'm wired."
But there's a space and you have a choice.
And I'm not saying that humor is the only thing
that you should put in that space,
but now once you leave this room today,
you will know too much, that you can no longer just say,
"I'm at the mercy of other people.
I'm at the mercy of my circumstances."
Because you have a choice.
And one of those choices
between stimulus and response is humor.
Powerful stuff.
Hebb's Law, and we've talked about this already,
neurons that fire together, wire together.
So often, our brains...
We've already been wired to have that negative response.
The anxiety goes up, the fear goes up,
the muscles get tight,
and we just have this exhibited throughout our bodies,
all sorts of bad things going on chemically,
emotionally, socially, psychologically.
But we can rewire our brains if we're intentional,
and use humor not by chance, but by choice.
Now, a lot of people go, "But you don't understand,
there's nothing funny happening in my life.
There's nothing funny happening where I work.
There's no humor around."
And let me tell you this, if this is your belief,
then this is your truth.
If you believe there's no humor in your life,
you're gonna be right.
But if you believe,
"Well, maybe, maybe I'm missing something," you'll be right.
Five strategies. I'm gonna give you five strategies.
Now, pick one.
I don't expect you to do all of these
because you would not be able to do them consistently.
But I'm gonna give you five strategies
and I want you to think, 'cause you guys told me earlier,
if I could show you how to make these changes,
that you would be willing
to make one small change consistently.
So let's start with manipulating your mindset.
How can you reframe your pain?
Sometimes, it's just by posing a question to yourself,
or a statement.
I loved it when a social worker told me
his way of reframing things was to ask himself,
"Has this changed the Earth's rotation?"
If it hadn't, he felt it would be safe to let it go.
Sometimes, it's to catastrophize.
Have you ever heard that word?
Make it worse, and worse, and worse, until it's so absurd,
that you can look at the original premise and go,
"Okay, not that bad. Not that bad."
Asking yourself, "How could this be worse?"
And then ask it again mirthfully,
and again, and again and again.
To listen for different things that people say.
Listen for different things that you will hear.
If you raise your awareness,
you will hear things that other people are missing.
Once when I was working here in Colorado,
there was a person there who represented the Colorado...
Actually, it was Denver's Visitors and Convention Center.
And they said there was somebody
who wanted to come visit Denver,
but before they came to Colorado,
they wanted to know what time of year
do your deer turn into elk?
(audience laughing)
You don't have to make this stuff up.
So often when I share things, people go, "Is that true?"
Heidi Hanna and others can tell you,
I never have to make up stuff
because this kind of stuff just happens,
but I'm listening for it.
You never have to be funny.
Sometimes people go, "But I'm not a funny person.
I'm not a funny person."
If you can make someone else laugh, awesome.
That is a skill.
And I could teach every single one of you how to be funny,
but it might not serve you.
I know a lot of people who are funny,
who have no sense of humor.
I know a lot of people who are funny, who are very depressed
and/or like Robin Williams, dead.
I don't care if you're funny. I want you to see funny.
An exercise that I teach a lot of my audiences
is yellow car.
It was an exercise that I learned
from this wonderfully hysterical podcast.
If you ever have the opportunity
to listen to the BBC radio show,
it's called "Cabin Pressure"
starring Benedict Cumberbatch, be still my heart.
And one of the people on there said,
"Let's play yellow car."
Well, how do you play?
Well, every time we're in a car together
and we see a yellow car,
the person that sees it shouts, "Yellow car!"
Well, how do you keep score? Well, you don't keep score.
Well, how do you win? Well, you don't win.
Well, how's the game over? The game's never over.
You're always playing yellow car.
And so I thought, "Well, I'm gonna teach this,"
and we were gonna videotape this for an exercise that I did,
and we started driving around
and my husband was videotaping me.
And we drove around and it's like, "Oh! No yellow cars."
And the next day we went out, "Well, there's one parked."
"Well, there's another one, parked."
And you know, after a while,
the next day it was like, "Well, there's one."
And then a couple days later, "Well, there's a couple."
And by the end of the week, it was like,
"Oh, look San Diego was getting more yellow cars."
By the end of the month, I wanted to claw my eyes out.
I cannot stop seeing yellow cars,
because I rewired my brain.
Neurons that fire together, wire together.
I just had someone from a presentation that I did in Austin
two days ago, she texted me and she said,
"I can't stop seeing yellow cars."
But once you raise your awareness,
you will see things like this.
Pull? Are you kidding me?
No, there's no handles. You can't do that.
This was in a a restaurant the other day,
that I attended in San Diego.
This is a garage with a sense of humor.
It's just a few blocks from where I live.
The top of it said, "Knock, knock."
And I was like, "What's that?"
But then the garage door lifted
and underneath it said, "Who's there?"
I was like, "Whoo!"
(audience laughing)
"Notice, this is a drug free workspace."
(audience laughing)
I don't think so.
I love this.
"I am: Republican, Democrat, having a glass of wine."
Number two, manipulate your environment.
What can you do to increase the likelihood?
Surround yourself with things that will increase.
On my smartphone, I have podcasts, I have videos,
I have funny pictures, I have memes,
I have things TVO'ed at home,
I have things that I can go to, I have books.
Anything that I can do to surround myself
so that I can purposely, 20 minutes every single day,
get some kind of humor, whether I'm on a plane, on a stage,
or wherever I may be.
So increase the likelihood in your environment.
Find an accountability partner.
Find someone that you can share with.
I'm fortunate enough to have an accountability partner
with a wonderful sense of humor.
Dr. Hanna and I
were putting on a 24 hour longest day seminar
for people who were caregivers of Alzheimer's.
I didn't realize that the screen capture
caught me in the background
doing a choke hold to something she was saying.
However, here's the thing:
We have a commitment,
and every single day we send each other humor.
And what I found was not only the gift for me,
when I send her something,
when I'm not feeling in a great mood,
looking for humor to send to her changes my mindset.
And when I send it to her, it makes me feel good.
Two dopamine hits, and now I have a larger repertoire
of material to send to somebody else.
Three dopamine hits. So find an accountability partner.
Four, schedule humor breaks.
Schedule humor breaks.
I make sure that every single day I do this.
And now with smartphones, it's even easier.
I'm pretty sure you can do this if you don't have an iPhone,
but for those of you that have iPhones,
you can schedule in your alarms.
And I think the rest of you can figure this out.
For instance, in my alarm, I can pick a time,
and then where it says label, instead of just saying alarm,
I write schedule a humor break, and that goes off.
So my day looks something like this.
I have all sorts of alarms
to just give me mental cues to lift my mood.
But if you look at 8:30 in the morning
on this particular day, it's practice a humor strategy.
So I don't miss a day.
So schedule a break.
Five, become a student of humor.
There are so many resources out there,
and on the webpage that I have created just for you,
we have additional resources.
It's karynbuxman.com/ida.
So if you go to that, lots of resources.
Number one that we love
is the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor.
They have a three year immersion program.
"Beyond Funny" is another program that Heidi and I created.
It's a nonprofit,
but lots and lots of resources for you out there.
What strategies will work for you?
I want you to think about one,
what is one that you can pick to do consistently?
My friend and colleague, Mark Leblanc says,
"Consistency trumps commitment - every time."
So I want you to either tweet, or text,
or email me or your accountability partner,
what's one commitment you're willing to make
every day over the next 30 days?
If you tweet it, put in #30DayHumor, #BrainIDEAS,
and we'll follow and support one another.
Humor is power.
I know with every single fiber of my being,
it can change our brains, it can change our lives,
it can change our world.
How many of you're familiar with the movie "Spider-Man"?
There's a scene mean where Peter Parker, AKA Spider-Man,
his uncle's talking to him and he says,
"With great power comes great responsibility," right?
So I ask you to join me in my mission
to improve world health, global business,
world peace through laughter, and heal the humor impaired.
Thank you. (energetic music)