Laughter is the best medicine. And we can mass produce it.

​Last week, a friend sent me this stuffed onion. I can safely say no one has ever sent me a stuffed vegetable before. I reached out to thank her. I offered gratitude - gratitude maybe not well disguised as a question - "why on earth did you send me an onion?"

She said it's a reminder to giggle.

I told her I don't giggle much these days. I said, "giggling isn't something you can remind yourself to do. Seems it's more complicated than that."

My friend knew I was spending time with my boys this weekend. She said, "be on the lookout for giggle moments this weekend. Try to notice them."

Try to notice them? Giggling is something that happens after life gets happy, right? Not the other way around.

Turns out, it actually CAN happen the other way around.

I purposely chose two comedy movies to watch this weekend. Two I knew would make the boys laugh. It worked - the boys laughed all the way through both of them. As they did, I found myself laughing right along with them.

My youngest - my 12 year old Ian - I always have a hard time knowing if he's laughing or if he's "laughing."

We'd get to a funny part in the movie and I'd get to wondering if he was going to laugh himself right into convulsions. With Ian, though, you never know if it's the movie being funny or if it's Ian being Ian. The boy can just decide it's time to giggle for no apparent reason and suddenly lose himself in a quite controllable fit of laughter.

The thing I noticed about those fits of laughter this weekend - when he does that, every single time, everyone around him starts laughing too.

There's been a lot of research done on laughter. It's been found that laughter can:

⏹Boost immunity
⏹Lower stress hormones
⏹Ease anxiety and tension
⏹Relieve stress
⏹Improve mood
⏹Strengthen relationships
⏹Attract others to us
⏹Enhance teamwork
⏹Help defuse conflict

So it turns out, laughter actually can add years to our lives.

And as I discovered this weekend, laughter actually IS something we can remind ourselves to do. When Ian is in one of his manufactured giggle fits - his body doesn't know if that's because something truly funny just happened in his world, or if Ian just decided to start laughing at his world.

I've shared that my song for this year is "Say I Won't". One of the lines in that song is:

While I've been waiting to live
My life's been waiting on me

I think one of the things life is waiting on me to do is giggle. While I've been waiting on life to make me giggle, life's been waiting on me to giggle.

I now have an onion to remind me to do just that. (Although, aren't onions supposed to make you cry? - maybe an article for another day.....) 🤣