Humor in Health Education:
An Idea Whose Time has Come?
by
Paul McGhee, PhD
A managed care consultant dies and goes to Heaven, and she can't believe her good fortune in being there, given the life she's led. But St. Peter checks the records and says, "There's no mistake, you're supposed to be here. See, it says right here that you are scheduled for Heaven . . . and you're authorized for 3 days."
Nurses and other healthcare professionals have always known that humor helps them get through the tough days, sustaining their ability to provide quality care or service in the midst of a heavy work load and unrelenting change. And there is mounting evidence that laughter really is good medicine. Humor and laughter have direct physical health benefits, and also provide a powerful tool in coping with stress.
Keeping your sense of humor on the job is just as important for health educators as for other health professionals. As health educators, you have your own daily stressors, and face serious obstacles to having your educational messages reach and have impact on your target populations.
In my keynote address at this year's HENOD Conference, I'll discuss the many ways in which your sense of humor can boost your effectiveness as a health educator. The main emphasis will be on how humor helps you cope with the stress on your job (and elsewhere in your life). You are under constant pressure to keep up with the latest research in your field, are always short of time, and must constantly try to work effectively with limited budgets. It takes a lot of personal and emotional resilience to work effectively in these conditions day after day. Learning to improve your sense of humor is one of the most powerful tools you'll find for boosting your resilience.
How Humor Helps You Cope
Laughter reduces muscle tension. This muscle relaxation, and the easing of psychological tension that accompanies it, is the main goal of all stress management techniques, and clearly accounts for much of the stress-reducing power of humor.
Humor also provides a sense of control over the source of stress, and helps keep problems in perspective. When you can poke fun at your stressors, you remove some of their emotional power over you. Humor and laughter also boost your energy level and help fight burnout.
Humor provides a means of "letting go" of anger and anxiety. Your sense of humor allows you to take control over your mood, substituting a positive emotion for the negative ones you often feel. This capacity of humor to manage your frame of mind plays a key role in being able to work effectively under difficult circumstances.
Creating Effective Educational Messages
These days, you have to compete with many other demands for people's attention to get your educational message across. Even if your target audience is very interested in what you have to say, you have to earn their attention. When humor that is salient to your key points is built into your written or oral communications, it grabs and sustains attention, giving you the opportunity you need to get your key points across.
Attention-getting and attention-sustaining tools are especially important with both very young (e.g., teenagers) and older (senior citizens) target groups. So you want to be on the look-out for cartoons or funny anecdotes that relate to the ideas you want to be remembered. If you have any doubts about the impact of humor on learning and retention, just think about the use of humor in TV ads you've seen in recent years.
The Physical Health Benefits
We have known for years that stress weakens the immune system. But recent research has shown that the immunosuppressive effects of stress are lower among individuals with good humor skills. Experimental studies have even demonstrated that humor and laughter produce significant increases in both salivary and blood serum IgA, IgM and IgG, numbers of natural killer cells and helper T cells, and activity of natural killer cells and T lymphocytes.
Humor, then, provides a significant boost to the immune system, helping promote health and healing. This boost is especially valuable among children and the elderly (the immune system generally weakens with age). But it also provides an added measure of protection to us all when we're under stress.
Other studies have shown that humor and laughter reduce the level of stress hormones in the blood and reduce pain for many patients.
Humor also improves the quality of life. There's no evidence that it adds years to your life, but it certainly adds life to your years. Remember, s/he who laughs lasts.
Paul McGhee, PhD, is a full-time professional speaker, and is president of The Laughter Remedy in Wilmington, DE. He has published 11 books on humor, and is internationally known for his own humor research. He will discuss the above issues in an entertaining (but substantive) keynote at this year's HENOD Conference March 21. For more details on the health benefits of humor, see his web site at www.LaughterRemedy.com.
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