As a child, adults often tell us not to cry, to not experience our emotions, to ignore our sadness. Culturally speaking, we are taught to avoid all unpleasant emotions. At any cost.
It’s sort of funny how we teach our children not to cry and later in life are surprised we raised unhappy teenagers and adults.
In fact, it’s quite simple: when there is no dark, we have no idea what light is. When there is no black, we haven’t got a clue about white.
When someone asks me “What defines your happiness?”, then for me – besides thinking positive thoughts – it’s also studying and learning new things. At times my focus point of study is neuromarketing. Last year it was epigenetics.
Those 2 disciplines both have the primal brain as their object of study. Neuromarketing got my interest from a business point of view, where epigenetics triggers me on a personal level.
Epigenetics is a new discipline that studies the influence of our environment and our behaviour on the activation of genes. It shows that anything we do, eat, drink or think can make us stronger or weaker.
The first time I heard about the health benefits of laughing was at a health seminar. The story went like this:
A man heard from his doctor that further treatment of his cancer was of no use and that his life prospects were about 3 months. He had a lot of money and no heirs, so he decided to spend his last days as pleasant as possible.
He took up residence in a penthouse of a hotel with full board and access to the Humor Channel and watched funny movies and stand up comedians all day long.