If you're a nurse and you want to get a patient to take deep breaths after surgery to boost respirations and prevent postoperative complications, walk in wearing Groucho Marx glasses, suggests Candy Waters, R.N., M.S.N., visiting lecturer at Indiana University Kokomo's School of Nursing .
To keep yourself and your health care colleagues from blowing their tops when patients refuse to follow sound medical advice, humor also helps, says Waters. Nurses find it especially hard to walk away from conflict, she said, “because they generally like to control their surroundings. While being overwhelmed is the usual response in times of stress, a dose of laughter helps to change your perspective, so that everyone can survive and even thrive.”
Workers often joke about recurring job frustrations. The fact that nurses deal with serious matters such as death and illness doesn't change their need for stress-reducing humor, Waters said. She learned this in years of working as an intensive care, long-term, and end-of life nurse, as well as a nursing educator. She even wrote her master's degree research project on therapeutic uses of humor in nursing.
“Laughter takes the power of the bad situation away. Sharing funny thoughts with your co-workers becomes both a mechanism for distancing yourself from the problem, while drawing you and colleagues together as a team,” she said.
Waters presented these ideas at the 20th annual conference of the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor (AATH) in February, her second appearance before an AATH audience. Promoting the belief that appreciation of life's absurdity and incongruity can promote health and coping, the conference drew hundreds of nurses, physicians, psychologists, attorneys, clergy, and other professionals. “I'm halfway to my doctorate (in health care law), and I was one of the lesser-educated people there,” Waters emphasized. Holocaust survivors and cancer patients are also major activists in AATH, according to Waters. “They say they wouldn't have survived the really awful things they've gone through without humor.”
Her AATH talk, “Wouldn't It be Easier Just to Get Mad??!!,” looked at responding with humor when others “get on your last nerve.” To keep your cool in uncomfortable situations, Water said, have some absurd thoughts ready in a mental file. One of her favorite mantras is “Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup. It reminds Waters that, “It takes two people to fight. If you don't let someone draw you in, there's no fight.”
She also surrounds herself with things that make her laugh—foam clown noses, cartoon clippings, and gadgets like her “Boxing Nun” puppet. “When students are struggling, they stop by my office to play with my toys and read the signs. It changes their outlook.”
Waters makes a point of finding cartoons to display during classroom lectures. This not only breaks the tension for her students (“They have so much hard stuff to learn.” ), she believes that it will help them learn. “Research shows that putting humor in a topic makes it relevant and will solidify that memory as a good one.”
Not all humor is successful, Waters stressed. She suggested “accepting other people's attempts at humor as long as they are not hurtful. Therapeutic humor is gentle and inclusive. It's laughing with people, not at people.”
Chuckles can be good for your physical health, too, Waters said. “Laughter improves the immune system, blood pressure, circulation. It relieves the stress that can make you sick. Laughter can be addictive but it has no side effects, except the occasional fluid loss.”
This spring, Waters has spoken on therapeutic humor as a stress management tool to IU Kokomo's nursing alumni reunion and to a group of Illinois caregivers, who work with Alzheimer's patients. She is developing an undergraduate research project comparing patients' and nurses' perceptions of the use of humor at the hospital bedside.
