THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON LAUGHTER-Martine Byer

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON LAUGHTER: TRIGGER SHIFTERS

                                                                                                  witbuzz

My friend decided to go on a diet to lose ten pounds. She calls to tell me how she is walking along a city street lined with bakeries and food markets passing them without indulging her usual habit of grabbing an afternoon sweet. She is feeling pleased. A moment after we hang up, she looks at a phone message and  two minutes later she  stands in a deli with a Crumbs cupcake hanging off her lip. “ What the hell triggered this?’ She wants to know.

The word trigger has come to mean that moment when a person experiences some anxiety and almost without realizing it, often ends up  in an activity that they will regret. The dieter overeats, the person who vows to budget is handing their credit card to a cashier, someone who said they would never yell at their kid, is screaming, drinkers drink, everyone has a drug of choice to alter painful tensions. We’ve all been there but how can we not go there again ? What can trigger a person to tame their triggers ?

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As a psychotherapist, I talk about trouble spots with people, well, all the time.  We go over the same ground, harvesting pain like investigators at an archeological dig. Many times the energy of the trouble calms down and heals when it is shared and named.  When tough feelings arise, there are strategies to learn like taking three deep breaths to give the activated person a moment to think and open a space to make a different choice. There are physical reminders; beads to roll between fingers or squeezing a meridian point like the one between your thumb and pointer finger which gives the good part of the brain a quick signal to relax. I refer to all these methods as ‘trigger shifters’ and  laughing is the quickest, most fun ‘trigger shifter’ of all.

            I have actually begun to custom make comic ‘TRIGGER SHIFTERS' with my clients. It started happening quite naturally. A 28 year old client looking for love often becomes really wound up when she doesn’t hear from ‘him’. She finds herself distracted at her high power job, glancing her mobile phone screen every few minutes. She worries that maybe she did something wrong and yes, this is very much about the insecurity she felt with a judgmental mother who ruled by,’ my way or the highway’ so rejection was always looming over her. We keep applying insight on the wound and it gets better but my client is often seized by desperate feelings triggering.  I bring up Stanley Kowalski , outside his wife’s door, screaming for his  Stella in Tennessee Williams’,

 “A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE”.

My client laughs seeing herself anguished and undone waiting by her phone. “That is the exact feeling, I’m like Stanley.” Between sessions, I suggest when her intense feelings arise, that she imagine that moment in the play A week later, she enters my office and says, “STELLAAA !"and we both laugh. She tells me that she spent the week laughing at the Stanley in her head and shifted away from the agony.  Stella now becomes the smile of recognition for our mutual understanding of what she experiences. I have always loved that play.

           Laughter does good things; it signals the brain toward a new neural pathway that shuts off bad feeling, it unhooks an activated autonomic nervous system so that the jazzed up chemicals of anxiety do not release, it frees the mind and body from fear. It lifts a dark moment and de-stresses the stress.

Silly signals a way out.

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            One of my very depressed female clients wakes each morning and the moment consciousness arrives, so do her anxiety scenarios; the bills, the friend who is angry with her, all combinations of  unhappiness awaken.  She loves animal antics and we come up with a way to use that love to lift her moods. Now without missing a beat, she gets out of bed, goes to a comedy animal site on the web and checks in on the daily video. The triggering anxiety is cut off at the pass. By laughing at a cat whining at it’s owner for waking him up or an elephant in love with a dog, her body releases soothing chemicals. This is her new prescription. This practice of starting the day with a laugh and using her  body’s natural chemicals to lift her spirit has led to her reduction of  anxiety medication. She has learned to refuse the morning demons and to say yes to greeting the world with a laugh. As she continues this practice, she is finding that sometimes she has the ability to bring up the silly videos in her mind’s eye in the morning and throughout the day.  She is imprinting a new mechanism in her brain and developing the emotional muscle to retrieve it as needed.

                                                      BuzzFeed

            Another client stuck in bed with a long physical illness, was becoming depressed from the confinement. During phone sessions, we came up with a way for him to combat spiraling into a depression. He ordered in Groucho Marx movies, a series he had always wanted to see. When he recovered, he seemed to focus less on being grouchy from illness and  more on Groucho; ‘the tusks are loose-a’ makes the depression loose-a. Someone once said, “Groucho was sad because he didn’t have a Groucho." Even Groucho needed a ‘trigger shifter.’

                                                                 IMDB

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         Something funny can change everything in an instant as it loosens difficulty’s grip. Everyone could use a good laugh and a laugh at the right moment is extremely good for us. It’s the best medicine and it doesn’t require a spoonful of sugar to make it go down because laughter is sweet enough all on it’s own.