Laughter helps to raise your endorphins, lower your stress level, and may even give a boost to your immune system. Plus it feels much better than being an Eeyore.
Key topics:
✔️ If you can laugh, you can start to heal.
✔️ Taking yourself super seriously all the time will not lead to throngs of clients beating down your door.
✔️ Life is tough enough. Especially in the midst of this pandemic, we don't need to look for reasons to feel sad.
✔️ If your other practices have grown stale, try adding in a laughter journal.
Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/
Laughter helps to raise your endorphins, lower your stress level, and may even give a boost to your immune system. Plus it feels much better than being an Eeyore.
Key topics:
✔️ If you can laugh, you can start to heal.
✔️ Taking yourself super seriously all the time will not lead to throngs of clients beating down your door.
✔️ Life is tough enough. Especially in the midst of this pandemic, we don't need to look for reasons to feel sad.
✔️ If your other practices have grown stale, try adding in a laughter journal.
Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/
Hello, hello and welcome to today's episode of the Causey Consulting Podcast. I'm your host Sara Causey and I'm also the owner of Causey Consulting, which you can find online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. Today I want to talk about the healing power of laughter. And I'm sure you've heard the phrase before that laughter is the best medicine. More and more, science is catching up to that old phrase. Laughter helps to boost your endorphins. decrease your stress hormones, and it can even boost your immune system. Plus, it really just feels good. If you have a choice between sitting around, down in the dumps, acting like you're thinking that everything in life is just bad will was me Why bother? versus being upbeat and finding something in the day that you can laugh about? It feels 1000 times better. Now, some of you already know that I like to keep a laughter journal. Now, I have been also supplementing that with some gratitude practices. But after a while, I can find myself getting a little bit stale. You know, I'm always thankful for my farm. I'm always thankful for my animals. I'm always thankful for friends and family, for good clients, for the money I need to pay my bills and give to charity. So after a little while, you know, you can find yourself almost getting into a routine. Not that there isn't always something new and fresh to be grateful for but sometimes we can just get on autopilot with our meditations and our rituals if we're not careful. So I like to have a little journal that I call laughs of the day and it never fails. As far as putting me in a good mood and every single day I find something to put in there either. If it has been a really great a crummy day where I'm like, man, did anything go right today? Did I make anybody happy that did anything go to plan, I can always find something to write down in that laughter journal. To give you a sort of crazy example, one of my best friends is also an avid animal lover. I was trying to tell him, you know, there's this little kind of short movie that was made probably back in the 70s. I don't know-- I'm sure I'm misspeaking, but I remember it from when I was a kid. So like, there's this there's this movie called Nestor The Christmas Donkey. And even though it has like this sort of uplifting message at the end, it's horrendously depressing. So I'm telling my friend I'm like, Don't ever watch it. Like last holiday season. It was on while I was hanging out at the house and I'm like, man, I haven't seen that. So I was a little kid I, I kind of sort of remember it. So I sat and I watched it and I was like, Oh my god, "Suicide is Painless" should be the freakin theme song for Nestor the Christmas Donkey. This is this is incredibly depressing. There's death, and like animal abuse and all kinds of horrible things that happen in this cartoon. So I'm trying our animated picture, whatever you want to call it. And as I'm trying to tell my friend who also really loves animals, like you don't ever need to watch this if you ever see it on you don't need to watch it because you you will cry when I was choking back tears and I'm not as I think most of you know, I'm not a big crier. I'm not with these people are just boo who's at the drop of a hat. He is actually my friends probably more sensitive than I am telling him like, they need to put this movie on the registry of films never to show again, like how there's a registry of films that are like kept in perpetuity in like somewhere in one of the Nordic countries. There's this building where they keep seeds so that in the event of an apocalypse, we could start the food chain over again. We do the same thing preserving films, films that are deemed to be like these wonderful contributions to culture or to our understanding of the world. They preserve those films for the rest of humanity, I guess in case Hollywood ever, like is is attacked by zombies and they eat celluloid film or whatever. Like there's a way for those films to always be kept. And like they need to put Nestor the Christmas Donkey in a bin where it's never shown to people ever again-- it's that depressing. And anyway, as I'm telling him the story about how depressing it is how it ought to be rated X nobody under the age of like 35 should ever watch it because it's that depressing. And the more I'm trying to explain to him why you should never watch this film and how profoundly sad it is, I can't believe parents would show this to their children. It's just really, like, incredibly sad. How did it kids watch this make it How did we survive all this? The more I'm trying to tell him the funnier it became until finally like I was cry-laughing. I had gotten away from how sad it was about this poor donkey and his ordeal to become the Christmas donkey that I was just laughing and and and tears were coming out of my eyes try to tell my friend like, here's all the reasons why you should never watch this movie because it's such a terrific downer. And it just, I couldn't stop it. It just finally became like a laugh attack. And there is something really healing about that if you can take something that maybe in the past you've been upset about. If you can take some kind of hurt not I'm not suggesting that every pain or every moment of grief that we're going to encounter in our life is something that we can turn on its head and make into a comedic moment. But in those situations where we can, the more that we can take the power away from selling Someone who's heard us or some situation that we felt like was unfair. Honestly, the faster that we can move on from it, the better that we can heal from it if we can find a way to laugh about it. One day, not long after I had started my cattle herd, I was standing there in the barn, they were all gathered around at feeding time. And I'm having this very, like, tender moment, looking at my animals going I you know, I'm, I feel so incredibly blessed. I'm so glad that I have this land. I have this farm I have these animals like this. This really represents the achievement of a goal that I've had for a long time, and it just feels good. So I'm standing there getting a little misty, I just, you know, breathing in this feeling of satisfaction, feeling very grateful. whispering a little prayer to God. And all of a sudden I'm standing there and it's like sniff-sniff. Well one of them had ripped a green gas cloud. It stung in my lungs, it stung in my nose going down. I think that they may have had some turnips at that time. Because I had put in this patch I read that that cows really like turnips and so I'd put in this turnip and oat patch for them and woof! It could have peeled the walls. It smelled like gas and kerosene. It was really quite something. So it did shut me out in this, you know, almost maudlin moment that I was having and "Oh this is so great, I'm so glad. Thank you Lord" and like "OMG. It smells like we're under a nuclear attack due to bovine gas." I mean, it's moments like those that we honestly remember not so much because I was standing there shedding a tear going, Oh, Isn't this great? But because you know one of them or maybe several of them at the same time started letting turnip toots and I thought it was gonna peel the paint off the sides of the barn. Life is tough enough already, if we don't take these moments of laughter and if we take ourselves too seriously. I believe it's important to have a good, slick, professional website and to have a good professional headshot. Not something that your best friend took with a really nice iPhone or something worse yet, you know, you're like standing at Planet Fitness, trying to take a gym mirror selfie, don't do that. Please, please just don't do that. You know, it's important to have these accoutrements that are professional, and that show that you are qualified to do whatever it is that you do. But it's not about being so serious all the time. That you you get an inflated head, you get a sense of self importance that you're just oh, I just, I could never laugh. I could never record a video without looking perfect. What a miserable life that might be! The more that we can relax into things, the easier they get anyway. So if you find that in any of your rituals or routines that things are getting a little stale and you're looking for a way to shake it up a bit, just insert that practice into your gratitude journal, your prayers, what however it is that you start and end your day. If you can think of something that really cracked you up and made you laugh, the universe will give you more of those opportunities, you really will find more opportunities and chances for joy and mirth to come into your life. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it. If you haven't already, take a quick second to subscribe to this podcast and leave a review for us on iTunes. Bye for now. Transcribed by https://otter.ai