Why it Feels So Good: Humor Activates Pleasure Centers in the Brain
This last section does not concern a specific disease condition, but is an important part of the "second wave" of research on the health benefits of humor.
Given the many ways in which humor and laughter do contribute to health and wellness, we are very fortunate that most of us find that "it just feels good" to have a good belly laugh - especially when everything is going wrong on your shift. The feel-good aspects of humor make it a lot easier to get these benefits into our everyday lives. But have you ever wondered why it feels so good to laugh?
Once we "get" a joke or find a light side of something a patient (or doctor or fellow nurse) has just done or said, we immediately experience amusement - an emotional rush that is best characterized as joy or exhilaration - and we feel both pleasure and the urge to laugh. This urge to laugh seems to be both a built-in means of releasing tension and an important communication tool that developed during our early evolution; but still, why do we get such pleasure from humor? Why does that emotional rush occur?
The research on this issue is still limited, but by early 2009, a half dozen studies had shown that the rewarding or pleasurable feeling that goes along with the appreciation of humor is a result of the activation of known (subcortical) reward or pleasure centers in the brain - actually a network of brain regions, not a localized center.171 This network is located in (phyologenetically) older regions of the brain and involves several distinct, but interconnected, dopamine-enriched structures, including the nucleus accumbens and amygdala (the amygdala plays a key role in emotion in general). This network is generally referred to as the "mesolimbic dopaminergic reward system" because it utilizes known dopamine-based reward or pleasure pathways. One particular area within this reward system - the nucleus accumbens - appears to be especially important for the pleasure experienced in humor. This is the same area of the brain that lights up (is activated) in response to cocaine and methamphetamine, as well as other sources of "psychological reward."172 This area mediates the euphoria or "high" induced by these drugs; and it is the activation of this reward/pleasure center that is responsible for the natural high we experience as a result of humor and a good belly laugh. When the nucleus acumbens is directly stimulated electrically, smiling occurs and people report feelings of euphoria.173
The first study documenting the connection between humor and this reward system further found that the degree of activation of the nucleus accumbens was directly related to the funniness of the cartoons presented. The funnier the cartoons, the greater the level of pleasure experienced.174 Similarly, degree of activation of the (left) amygdala was positively related to the rated funniness of nonverbal cartoons.175
So now we know why humor makes us feel so good. This also helps explain humor's amazing power to pull us out of a negative emotional state and substitute a more positive emotion in its place (see Humor and Nursing II: Using Humor to Cope with the Challenges of Nursing for a discussion of this research). And it goes a long way in explaining how humor helps us cope. Activation of this reward system creates a positive shift of mood and attitude which enables us to take active steps to deal with the problem causing stress at the moment. It helps produce the optimistic attitude that leads us to believe that we can overcome and survive the problem. When your patients are coping with the heavy stress associated with their illness or injury, the value of this built-in source of pleasure as a counter-weight to the negative emotions associated with that stress is clear.
As with most of the research discussed in this course, we don't know how much of the feel-good side of humor (resulting from activation of pleasure centers in the brain) is really due to the mental and emotional experience of humor vs. the act of laughing itself. You cannot obtain good neuroimaging data if your subjects are allowed to have a real let-go belly laugh as you monitor their brain activity, since the "laughing head" would be moving around too much. But we know from our own experience that it just certainly feels good to have a real belly laugh.
In my keynotes to both corporate and healthcare groups, I always do a "laughter exercise" which is built into a fun routine and culminates in 20-30 seconds of non-stop belly laughter. When I ask people right afterwards what they notice about changes in body states or feelings relative to before the laughter, someone almost always says that they just feel "good" or "better." And people who participate in the hundreds of laughter clubs around the world that get together to laugh "for no reason" similarly say that it just feels good to laugh with friends (and strangers too, although most people feel more comfortable doing this kind of laughter among friends).
It was noted 30 years ago that simply getting your body to engage in the behaviors associated with a given emotion is enough to cause you to experience that emotion, and that this includes the experience of positive feelings in response to forced laughter.176 In fact, even simply imagining oneself laughing - without actually laughing - increases feelings of happiness.177
Jaak Panksepp has argued that there is a very good reason for why this should occur: "My reading of the evidence is that the mechanisms of raw emotional feelings are very closely linked to the emotional-instinctual action systems of the brain. If so, the feeling of mirth might be closely linked to brain systems that generate the full and sincere pattern of laughter within the brain." In his view, the social joy and good feelings that come from shared play and laughter occur in other species (including rats), as well. He has obtained data showing that this same mesolimbic dopaminergic pleasure system is activated in response to the tickling of rats,178 suggesting that the pleasure we get from humor and laughter is mediated by neurological reward/pleasure systems that evolved long ago.
