Drop Dead Healthy

by A. J. Jacobs

  For the newbies, Eingorn gives a quick intro to laughter clubs. The movement was started by an Indian physician named Madan Kataria in the mid-1990s. It soon spread all over the world, with a reported six thousand clubs in sixty countries. (A poster in the corner shows a record-breaking ten thousand people in Copenhagen chuckling in a plaza on World Laughter Day, the first Sunday in May.)

  We don’t tell jokes, says Eingorn, because humor is subjective. We just laugh.

  “We like to say, ‘Fake it till you make it.’ Force yourself to laugh in the beginning, and you’ll eventually start laughing in earnest.”

  The health benefits are huge, he says. Laughter lowers the level of the stress hormone cortisol. It boosts immunity and reduces pain. A University of Maryland study found that big laughers had a 40 percent lower rate of heart disease than nonlaughers. (Though, to be fair, that could be because heart disease doesn’t put one in the jolliest mood.) And it’s even good exercise. A Vanderbilt researcher found that fifteen minutes of laughing burns forty calories.

  I didn’t want to bring it up, but Eingorn was slightly overstating the case. Some studies have shown that laughter does indeed lower stress levels. But what about fake laughter? No one has any rigorous studies on that.

  Enough warm-up. Time for the laughter yoga. There isn’t so much yoga, actually. Just a handful of stretches.

  Instead, the experience is like a cocktail party, where you mill around the room, exchanging witty repartee with the other guests. The only difference is that there are no cocktails and no witty repartee. Just the laughter.

  And to keep it interesting, you laugh in different ways. We go through about ten different laughs over the course of the hour. In no particular order, there was:

  • the “oops, I dropped a vase” laughter. Here, we mime fumbling a vase, then shrug our shoulders and laugh.

  • the “I’m late” laugh. We point to our invisible watches and shrug our shoulders and give a carefree laugh.

  • the explosive laughter.

  • the snort-filled laughter.

  • the “no-no-no” laugh. In this one, we wag a finger and remonstrate with our fellow laugher for an imaginary transgression.

  • the laugh of retribution. “Sometimes in life you feel like a heroic statue. And sometimes you feel like a pigeon who is looking for statues to take a dump on. So we’re going to be the pigeon.” Here, we flap our arms, say “bok, bok, bok,” momentarily squat down, then laugh.

  I am faking it, not making it. I force myself to emit laughing sounds so I won’t look like a grump. But I am mostly experiencing a blend of emotions: fascination that this throaty exhalation of air has evolved into a signal for joy, mixed with embarrassment that I’m making such a spectacle of myself, even if others are making the same spectacle. And occasionally I feel jealous at other people’s laughing skills. This one guy—the psychoanalyst with the ironed oxford shirt—has a wonderful basso profundo laugh. One of the Steves—the one in chinos—is a full-body shaker.

  “Good laughing,” everyone tells them.

  Most people’s laughs fade slowly at the end of each two-minute exercise, but the redhead with tights can turn it off suddenly, like someone had tripped over her power cord. Her discipline makes me nervous.

  “Ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha!” we chant as we do at the end of every round.

  During the next exercise, we laugh while miming pouring water into an empty cup. I am laughing face-to-face with a sixtyish woman in purple sweatpants, when she leans in and says, “You look more like you’re yawning than laughing.” At least I think that’s what she said. There’s a lot of background noise. But I think she is criticizing my laugh, which does not seem in keeping with the laughter club ethos.

  I purse my lips, annoyed. I don’t like her technique either, frankly. Way too shticky for me. Lots of eyebrow work and jazz hands.

  “Ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha.”

  “Woody Allen said that ‘I’m thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose,’” says Eingorn.

  No one laughs, not even in this room. I feel bad for Eingorn, so I muster a cackle.

  Eingorn reiterates the importance of positive emotions: “As Norman Cousins said, we all know that negative feelings make you sick. If you’re depressed, you can have a heart attack. Or you can die of a broken heart.” Alex mimes a heart coming out of his chest and splattering on the floor. We laugh.

  And now the sumo laugh. We all put our hands on our thighs and stomp around the room, giggling. At this point, I have a thought. What if an actual four-hundred-pound sumo wrestler came into the room, diapered and oiled, and started tossing all of us against the walls? It’s not a particularly funny thought in retrospect. It’s a little violent, in fact. But at the time, it must have broken the tension for me. Because I chuckle for real.

  A young adult novelist catches me chuckling, and she starts laughing. And I start laughing harder. And we look at each other. And then I am really laughing. A bladder-straining bout of laughter, the kind I’d get in high school assembly during, say, the singing of a Thanksgiving song, and which I tried to contain by thinking of my grandparents’ funerals and my own eventual decomposing corpse. But here I don’t need to contain it.

  Ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha!

  Eingorn wraps the class up: “The goal of the laughter movement is world peace. I know it’s corny. But we believe that if you’re laughing you can’t be angry. And if everyone laughed, they’d stop being so angry. So let’s take a moment of silence to say a prayer or a meditation and just think about world peace.” I close my eyes. Someone titters, which I figure is okay.

  I walk home, flushed, a bit elated, like I just had two Amstel Lights, but also relieved not to have to laugh on command.

  Julie arrives home the same time as me. She’d taken a friend to a play called The Scottsboro Boys for the friend’s fortieth birthday.

  “How was the show?” I ask.

  “I really liked it,” she says.

  “Yeah, I heard it got good notices,” I say.

  Good notices? Who talks like that anymore? I sound like I’m in a Damon Runyon story. I wonder to myself where that phrase came from.

  Julie, God bless her, isn’t going to let this slide.

  “Yes, it got good notices,” she says, laughing. “The press agents were very happy.”

  Now I’m laughing, too. It’s not an explosive laugh or a sumo laugh, but it’s a good laugh. She doesn’t let it drop, mentioning the Stork Club, Walter Winchell, and J. J. Hunsecker. Julie beats the joke right into the ground. For that, I love her. No one can make me laugh like Julie can, not even Eingorn.

  Magical Thinking

  There’s a great quote I once read, but I can’t figure out who said it, despite intensive Googling. It’s from a celebrity who was asked as he got off a plane, “How was your flight?” To which he replied: “Terrible. I’m exhausted from keeping the damn plane in the air with my worrying.”

  That’s how I feel a lot of the time. I’m a master of magical thinking.

  My general feeling is: If I fret long and hard enough about X, then X will not occur. If I don’t fret, if I go about happily reading my American Way and chuckling at the Nicolas Cage movie, I’ll be punished for my insouciance. As will everyone on the flight. In this horrible perversion of the Puritan work ethic, it’s my duty to fret.

  To properly engage in magical thinking, I find you have to think of every possible ghastly scenario. That’s the only way you outsmart fate.

  This ritual can be tremendously time-consuming. The other night, Julie went to a movie with her mom. Three hours later, she still wasn’t home. Three hours and twenty minutes—nothing. I called her cell phone. No answer. I checked the movie length. Just an hour and twenty minutes.

  I had my work cut out for me.

  Maybe she was killed.

  Maybe she had an ischemic stroke.

  Maybe there was a bioterror attack at the theater.

  You have to be thoroug
h and cover even the most unlikely of scenarios.

  Maybe she met another guy. Probably an old boyfriend—she went on a lot of blind dates back in the day.

  Choked on the Twizzlers.

  Fell on the third rail on the C-line.

  I searched the Internet for New York crime stories. Nothing about Julie or a nerve gas explosion at the Loews cineplex.

  Finally, three hours and forty minutes later, I hear the latch on the door click. I’m flooded with relief. But also a sense of victory that I got her home safely. Thank God I outwitted fate yet again.

  Turns out the movie’s star—Juliette Lewis—showed up unexpectedly at the end of the movie to do a Q&A with the audience. Some kind of buzz-marketing campaign. That was the big delay.

  I know my worries were illogical and unhealthy. Stinkin’ thinking, as the professionals say. But my brain adores anxiety and clings to it hard.

  A couple of weeks ago, I got some help from a reader named Bella from Portland. She e-mailed me that she’d read an article I wrote in Esquire magazine about outsourcing my life. I’d hired a team of people in Bangalore, India, to answer my phones and return my e-mails.

  She wrote: “I was wondering if I could outsource some of my worry to you. You see, I am a high school senior, and I am working on applying to college. I’ve been stressed about where I will or will not get in, and how much financial aid I will receive. I ask because you said it was very comforting to have someone to worry for you. I thought it might calm me down to have someone worry my worries. Now, I have no money to pay you for my worries, but maybe we could make an exchange. I could worry about something for you, and you could worry about college for me. I’m a very good worrier! Almost too good . . .”

  She’d worry for me? That’s a great idea. I e-mailed her that she had a deal.

  The next day I worried for her about the admissions guy at Vassar, one of the schools to which she applied. What if he had a bad chicken salad sandwich before reading her application? What if he had a fight with his wife? These things are so arbitrary.

  She e-mailed me that she was worrying about the looming deadline for my health book.

  “Today I worried about the length of February, in terms of how many days you have. But then I remembered that March and January both have an extra day, which makes up for February’s lack, so that calmed me down a bit.”

  It’s an absurd exercise. But you know what? Also highly effective. Every time I’d start to stress out about my deadline, I’d remind myself that Bella was on the case. Bella agreed it was working for her, too.

  It’s got all the upsides of worry but without the soul-sucking emotional toll. I can’t recommend the worry exchange enough. Julie asked if I was worried whether Bella was cheating and not worrying on my behalf. So I might have to get someone to worry about that.

  The Hair of the Dog

  There’s a law in New York that adults are forbidden to enter a playground unless they’re accompanied by a child. A grown man can’t just walk in by himself and loiter around the monkey bars.

  Fortunately for me, there’s no such statute about dog parks. You don’t need a dog to hang out at dog parks. So I’ve been lurking around this dog run every day. It’s a couple of blocks from our apartment, is about half the size of a soccer field, and has at least several dogs chasing each other in circles, regardless of the weather. I’m hanging out there because petting dogs is healthy. Several studies show it lowers your blood pressure and stress levels.

  I spot an elderly man, maybe in his midseventies, sitting on the bench, his Yankees cap tucked low, his caramel-colored Airedale terrier bouncing and sniffing at his feet. I approach.

  “You mind if I pet him?” I ask.

  The man shrugs.

  “Who’s a good boy?” I say, scratching the dog’s head.

  “His name’s Logan,” says the man.

  “Hi, Logan!”

  I smooth the fur on his back.

  “You know, petting dogs is good for your heart,” I say. “Lowers our blood pressure.”

  “Huh,” says the man. “I’ve had him for three years, and last year I had open-heart surgery and they put in five stents.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  I’m not sure what else to say, so I keep patting Logan’s back.

  “So you’re saying I didn’t pet him enough?” he asks.

  I look up. The man’s not smiling.

  “Well, imagine if you hadn’t pet him at all. Maybe you would have had ten stents put in.”

  “Hmm. Maybe.”

  I couldn’t tell if the man is playfully sparring or unplayfully angry. Was he about to sic Logan on my throat? I felt it was time to move on.

  The evidence is solid that pets are good for humans’ health. A study by the Mayo Medical Center found that dog owners had significantly lower cholesterol. A study by the Minnesota Stroke Institute said that people who owned cats were 30 percent less likely to suffer a heart attack (though 40 percent more likely engage in scrapbooking).

  There are a lot of possible reasons: Touching lowers stress by raising levels of oxytocin. You’re more active if you have a pet, especially if you have to schlep outside every morning to walk the dog. You meet other pet owners, and form social ties, which are crucial to well-being. Plus there are the benefits of an emotional bond with the animal itself.

  As with everything good, pet ownership has its downsides, of course. A 2009 paper published by the Centers for Disease Control warned that sleeping with pets can spread pneumonia, cat scratch fever, meningitis, chagas, and even the bubonic plague.

  After the Logan fiasco, I tapered off my visits to the dog park. I can’t always be leeching off other people. My family needs its own pet. The problem is, Julie has allergies, so cats and dogs aren’t going to work.

  Instead, we decide on a fur-free pet. I asked Jasper what he wanted: A chameleon, he said. He liked the whole idea of a pet that changed colors. It’s sort of like a slow-moving TV screen, I figure.

  We ended up getting a beginner, not-quite-technically-a-chameleon chameleon. It’s called an anole lizard. It only has two colors in its palette: green and brown. Jasper named him Brownie, with Greenie as a seldom-used middle name.

  Brownie doesn’t have a huge personality. He eats crickets and takes naps. There’s not going to be an Owen Wilson/Jennifer Aniston movie called Brownie and Me.

  But I think it’s worth it. I love the look on Jasper’s face when Brownie scampers up his neck and into his hair. It’s a wonderful mix of joy, tenderness, and disgust. The Germans probably have a word for it, but I don’t know it.

  A Relaxing Massage

  I often find myself whistling the Monty Python song, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

  It’s the tune sung by Eric Idle at the end of Life of Brian. He’s on a crucifix alongside twenty other accused criminals, and he warbles: “When you’re chewing on life’s gristle/Don’t grumble, give a whistle . . . Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

  All the stress-busting books keep telling me essentially the same thing: Look on the bright side. “Reframe,” that’s the word they use. Yes, you’re on the slow line at the grocery. But think of all the times you’ve been on the fast line and never noticed it.

  Reframing has its limits, and being subjected to the death penalty is one of them. But still, when you’re not being executed, it also has its uses.

  I was in the airport going to Sioux Falls on a business trip. I walked through the metal detector with no beeps or flashing lights. But still, the beer-gutted, sideburned TSA guy said, “I need to check you.”

  Ugh.

  “Can you put your arms out?”

  Annoyed, I refused to look him in the face. I was not going to give him that pleasure. I stared over his shoulder and pursed my lips. He patted me on the shoulders. Then the sides of my body.

  I was a supernova of negative energy. But for what? Halfway through my pat-down, it occurred to me: I’m spending a lot of
my brain’s bandwidth being annoyed. Is it so bad to have this guy touch me? Is he hurting me? He’s just doing his job. In fact, doesn’t the research show that human touch is healthy? It helps fight depression and high blood pressure.

  What if I thought of this as a free massage? It’s kind of relaxing when he’s patting my shoulders.

  Get the TSA officer some coconut massage oil and a citrus-scented candle, and I’d have to pay him a hundred dollars.

  At the end, the guy gave me a friendly pat on the back. A signal that I’m good to go.

  “Thanks,” I said. My government-mandated shiatsu may not have lowered my blood pressure, but it probably didn’t raise it either.

  Memento Mori

  The ultimate reframe, I suppose, is to remind yourself that you’re going to die one day soon, so stop being a petty little bastard. Renaissance painters excelled at these memento mori, and planted little skulls in the corners of their portraits as symbols of our fleeting mortality.

  I’ve been a fan of the memento mori concept for a long time. A couple of years ago, I decided to get a memento mori screen saver for my laptop. I downloaded an image of a white bony skull, the kind you see in a Hamlet production. Whenever I opened my computer, there it was, staring at me with its eye sockets. I found it jarring, a buzz kill. Why should imminent death be so gruesome? So I got a more chipper skull. I plucked an image off the Internet of a multicolored, sweetly smiling cartoonlike skull that was probably painted by a Bolinas resident.

  The new skull has done a good job over the years of calming me. At least until recently. It now has started to backfire.

  Take my latest inconsequential crisis. I did an Esquire interview with this beautiful Colombian actress named Sofia Vergara, who plays the heavily accented, stiletto-heeled young wife on Modern Family. We had coffee, we chatted pleasantly. That’s not the stressful part. During the interview, she went on a rant about how weird Hollywood women look after they’ve had too much plastic surgery. She called Madonna’s cheekbones “crazy.” It seemed funny, and in character, so I put it in the article.