An essay on laughter, play, and the slow rediscovery of what gets squeezed out of adult life

This essay is a revisit of an old 2013 post on the same theme. The earlier version was a list of benefits. This version is a longer reflection on what gets lost when we stop playing, and what becomes possible when we begin again.

“Of all the gifts bestowed by nature on human beings, hearty laughter must be close to the top.” — Norman Cousins

“A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” — Proverbs 17:22

Laugh out loud. Play. Be silly. Joke around. Have fun. These are some of the words I think of when I watch children play. Years ago I wrote a blog post about laughter and the lightness of children’s play, and the question that has stayed with me since is the one I asked then. Where does that spirit go?

Some days I see a child make ordinary life into a moment of joy and I am reminded of the answer. The spirit does not actually leave. It gets buried under the weight of what we begin to think is more important — the deadlines, the responsibilities, the bills, the lists of things we have not yet done, the conviction that adulthood is not the time for silliness. The playful spirit does not die. It gets covered over. And what changes is not the spirit itself but our capacity to access it.

One afternoon recently, walking through the neighborhood, I saw a small girl turning an ordinary sidewalk into an entire world. She was with her grandfather and her mother. She tagged her grandfather. She spun toward her mother. She skipped, twirled, and laughed at her own laughter. She made a destination out of nothing, simply because she was moving through the world the way children move — with imagination treating every step as material for delight. Her family was laughing along with her. Other adults on the sidewalk were smiling without quite realizing they had begun to smile.

I watched her for a moment longer than was strictly polite. She was, in some ways, more accomplished at being alive than most of the adults around her. She was not earning her joy. She was not waiting until her tasks were complete. She was not making sure she deserved to enjoy herself. She was just enjoying herself, fully and uncomplicatedly, in the most ordinary moment possible.

And I wondered again. Where does that go? When does it get traded for the somber-faced productivity that most of us mistake for being a competent adult?

Laughter as medicine

There is older literature on this question that has held up beautifully across the decades. Norman Cousins, the journalist who used humor to recover from a serious illness in the 1970s, wrote in his book Anatomy of an Illness about the specific finding that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter gave him at least two hours of pain-free sleep. He pursued this discovery deliberately. He watched Marx Brothers films. He read humor. He treated laughter as a clinical intervention, and his recovery surprised the physicians who had not expected it.

Cousins’s work was anecdotal but it pointed the way for more rigorous research that followed. Laughter does measurable things. It releases endorphins. It reduces stress hormones like cortisol. It improves immune function. It increases blood flow. It helps regulate emotions. It strengthens relationships. It diffuses tension in conflict.

Albert Einstein, of all people, understood this. He kept extensive notebooks. Some were filled with mathematical equations. Others, less famously, were filled with jokes. He took breaks to laugh. He understood — perhaps because his mind was working so hard in such serious territory — that the brain works better when it is allowed to breathe. The same insight, less articulated, has been carried by every culture that has held space for ritual humor, for the trickster figure, for the holy fool, for the necessity of comic relief in tragedy.

And it is not only humans. Marina Davila-Ross, a researcher at the University of Portsmouth in England, has shown that chimpanzees use laughter to strengthen social bonds. The vocalizations chimps make during play — short, rhythmic sounds — are not random. They serve the same function laughter serves in human social groups: they signal safety, they invite continued connection, they create the social glue that holds bonds together over time. Laughter is not a uniquely human invention. It is something we inherited from a long line of primates who used it for the same reasons we use it now.

What laughter is doing in the nervous system

Contemporary research on the nervous system, particularly the work of Stephen Porges on polyvagal theory, gives us another way to understand what laughter is doing in the body. Porges describes a part of the autonomic nervous system that handles social engagement — the felt sense of being safe in connection with other people. He calls this the ventral vagal system. When it is active, the body is open. Breath is easy. The face is animated. Eye contact is comfortable. The voice has prosody. And the body is available for the spontaneous responses, including laughter, that mark genuine human connection.

When this system is not active — when the nervous system is in a state of threat activation or chronic shutdown — laughter does not come easily. People in chronic stress states often report that they cannot remember the last time they really laughed. They produce polite social laughter on cue. The deep belly laughter, the involuntary kind that takes the body over, is absent. The system that produces it is not online.

This is one of the clinical observations I have made repeatedly in my work as a therapist over the years. The absence of laughter in an adult’s life is often not a personality trait. It is a symptom. It is the body’s report that the social engagement system has been offline for a long time. And the restoration of laughter, when it happens, is often one of the most reliable signs that nervous system regulation is genuinely returning. Clients who have not laughed in years begin, sometimes shyly, to find themselves laughing again. The first time it happens they often look surprised. The body has remembered something it had forgotten.

What the research has not quite captured

The research on laughter tends to focus on what laughter does — the benefits, the mechanisms, the measurable outcomes. What it does not always capture is what laughter is. Laughter is, in its deepest sense, the sound a body makes when it is willing to be moved by the world without trying to control the response. It is the body saying yes to being delighted. It is the body trusting that the moment is safe enough to let the diaphragm shake.

This is why laughter is so closely connected to relationships, to safety, to the felt sense of being seen by another person. We laugh more easily with people we trust. We laugh less easily, or not at all, with people in whose presence we feel exposed or evaluated. Children laugh more than adults because children’s nervous systems are not yet carrying the accumulated armor that adult life teaches us to develop. They are not constantly assessing whether laughter will be received well. They simply laugh.

Adults who have spent decades in environments that did not welcome their joy — critical families, demanding workplaces, relationships in which lightness was treated as immaturity — often arrive at midlife genuinely uncertain how to play. The instinct has not been killed. It has been carefully suppressed for so long that activating it feels foreign. The same person who laughed easily at five may find at fifty that laughter requires conscious permission and even then arrives reluctantly. The body remembers how to laugh. The system that gives the body permission has been overruled for too long.

How to begin again

If you recognize yourself in this description — and many adults in my practice do — the work is gentle and slow. You cannot force laughter. You cannot make it arrive by deciding it should. What you can do is make small moves that put your nervous system in environments where laughter becomes available again.

Spend time with people who laugh. Not people who tell jokes, necessarily. People who laugh easily, who find ordinary moments funny, who can be in the kitchen together and crack up about something neither of you can quite explain afterward. The body learns from other bodies. Your social engagement system was built, originally, through the eye contact and shared smiles of the people who held you as an infant. It can be re-tuned, in adulthood, through the eye contact and shared smiles of the people you choose to be around now.

Watch something funny on purpose. Not as a self-improvement project. Just because you want to laugh and you have given yourself permission to want it. The current era has good options that the original 2013 version of this post could not have anticipated. Bridesmaids. Ted Lasso, which is gentle and warm and tends to produce both laughter and tears, sometimes in the same scene. Schitt’s Creek, which became a touchstone for many adults during the pandemic precisely because it modeled a kind of family warmth and absurdity that many people had been missing. Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Stand-up specials from comics whose voices feel like company. The classic films from the original 2013 list — A Thousand Clowns, Patch Adams — are still there for those who want them. Add what speaks to your particular humor.

Notice the absurd. Adult life is, when you look at it without the filter of seriousness, often genuinely ridiculous. The way we line up obediently for things. The earnestness with which we sometimes respond to small inconveniences. The peculiar ways our bodies behave when we are not paying attention. Comedians make their living by pointing at exactly this. You can do it for free in your own day. The amount of comedy in ordinary life is roughly infinite for anyone who learns to look.

Be silly with someone safe. Not in service of being funny. In service of remembering what it feels like to not be performing competence for a moment. The grandparents who play horse with their grandchildren. The partners who do voices for the cat. The friends who break into spontaneous dance moves in the kitchen for reasons neither can later explain. These are not childish behaviors. They are the behaviors of nervous systems that have remembered how to engage with each other in the absence of evaluation.

And laugh at yourself. Not the cutting self-deprecation that is actually self-attack disguised as humor. The real version. The genuine recognition that you, like every other human, do absurd things and that those things are sometimes funny. Tripping over nothing. Walking into a room and forgetting why. Saying the wrong word at the wrong moment. These are part of being a body in a world. The willingness to laugh at them is the willingness to be human without requiring yourself to be flawless.

A gentle reminder

Some days the laughter will not come. The work will be heavier. The body will be tired. The losses will be too close. This is also true and also human. Forcing laughter on a day when grief is what is present is not the work. The work is making room for whatever is true, and on days when laughter is true, letting it have its full place in your body without apology.

If you have been doing hard inner work — therapy, processing trauma, working through grief, navigating significant change — you may have found that the seriousness of the work has temporarily covered over your access to play. This is common and it is not permanent. The work is not opposed to laughter. They are companions. Some of the deepest moments in my own clinical practice have involved laughter — clients who reach a hard truth and then begin to laugh at the absurdity of having carried it for so long without naming it. The laughter does not diminish the truth. It honors it.

Joy and seriousness are not opposites. They are different colors in the same range. You do not have to wait until your life is fully repaired to laugh. You can laugh in the middle of the repair. The laughter is part of how the repair happens.

Final thought

If a child can turn a sidewalk into a moment of joy, you can turn five minutes of your day into something lighter. You do not have to earn this. You do not have to deserve it more than you do.

Find one thing today that makes you laugh out loud. Not a polite social laugh. The real kind. The kind your body remembers from before you learned to suppress it. The diaphragm shaking. The breath catching. The sense afterward of having been, briefly, fully alive.

Your nervous system will thank you. And the part of you that has been waiting, since you were a child, to be allowed to play again, will notice that you have come back for it.

Further reading: Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness. Marina Davila-Ross’s research on primate laughter at the University of Portsmouth. Stephen Porges, The Polyvagal Theory. For the clinical companion piece on laughter and the social engagement system, see thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.