Laughing Your Way to a Better Life: The Science of Practiced Enthusiasm

Hi friend,

Here's something nobody tells you about positivity.

It's not a personality trait. It's a practice.

You think you're either born cheerful or you're not. You see upbeat people and assume they got lucky with their brain chemistry while you're over here doom-scrolling at 1am wondering why you can't stick to a gym routine.

But what if your mental state wasn't something you were given, but something you built? What if enthusiasm wasn't a gift, but a skill? And what if that skill was the single most underrated performance tool available to you right now?

Let me show you what the research actually says.

In 1964, a journalist named Norman Cousins was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis - a degenerative disease that was destroying the connective tissue in his spine. Doctors gave him a 1-in-500 chance of recovery.

Most people would spiral. Cousins did the opposite.

He checked himself out of the hospital, moved into a hotel room, and started watching Marx Brothers films and episodes of Candid Camera back to back. His logic was simple: if negative emotions could contribute to disease, then positive emotions might help undo it.

What he found changed everything we know about positive mental attitude.

Ten minutes of deep, genuine belly laughter gave him two hours of pain-free sleep. Nothing else worked that well. Not even morphine.

His condition improved steadily. He regained movement in his limbs. He lived another 26 years. He documented the whole experience in his 1979 book Anatomy of an Illness, which became a bestseller and helped launch an entirely new field of science: psychoneuroimmunology - the study of how your mental state affects your immune system.

Now, Cousins wasn't claiming laughter cures everything. He was making a much more important point: what you feel changes what your body can do.

And the science has backed him up ever since.

Professor Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford ran a landmark series of experiments in 2012, both in controlled labs and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, testing whether laughter genuinely raises your pain threshold.

TLDR: It does. Significantly.

The key finding? It wasn't just about being in a good mood. It was the physical act of laughing that triggered the release of endorphins, the body's natural painkillers. Social laughter, the kind you share with other people, was even more powerful than laughing alone.

Dunbar's work suggested that laughter may play a much bigger role in human bonding than we previously thought. It's not a trivial response. It's a biological mechanism for connection and resilience.

A 2019 randomised controlled study at the University of Texas found that 30 minutes of comedy significantly stabilised pain tolerance compared to watching a documentary. Pain tolerance dropped noticeably after the documentary but held steady after the comedy.

So when your grandma said laughter is the best medicine, she wasn't just being sweet. She was ahead of the science.

Here's where it gets really interesting, and where it challenges something most of us believe.

We tend to think the formula goes like this: discipline first, then happiness follows. Work hard, suffer now, feel good later. Earn the right to feel positive.

A 2025 study from the National University of Singapore just flipped that on its head. Researchers Shuna Khoo and Lile Jia ran two longitudinal studies (one on an Asian sample, one American) and found something striking: well-being predicted future self-control, but self-control did not predict future well-being.

Read that again.

Feeling good precedes discipline. Not the other way around.

The researchers noted that struggling with self-control might not indicate a weakness in willpower at all, it could be a sign that your well-being is depleted. Feeling good helps build the psychological capital that supports self-control.

This connects directly to a famous Stanford study by Veronika Job, Carol Dweck, and Gregory Walton, who found that your beliefs about willpower determine how much of it you actually have. People who believed willpower was renewable showed no depletion after hard tasks. People who believed it was limited ran out fast.

The implication is enormous. If enthusiasm and positive emotion make willpower feel unlimited, then cultivating your mood isn't soft. It's strategic.

Professor Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina developed one of positive psychology's most important frameworks, the Broaden-and-Build Theory.

Here's the simple version.

Negative emotions narrow your focus. Fear makes you fight or flee. Anger makes you attack. These are survival responses, useful in the moment, but restrictive.

Positive emotions do the opposite. Joy sparks the urge to play. Interest sparks the urge to explore. Contentment sparks the urge to savour. These broadened states don't just feel nice, they help you discover new ideas, build new skills, form new relationships, and develop resources you can draw on later.

Over time, these resources compound. You become more creative, more resilient, more connected. You build a wider foundation for everything else in your life.

Positive emotions aren't a reward you earn at the finish line. They're the fuel you need at the starting blocks.

Zig Ziglar, who grew up as the tenth of twelve children, lost his father at age five, and had his first book rejected by over 30 publishers, treated enthusiasm the same way you'd treat brushing your teeth. Daily. Non-negotiable. He called it a "daily check-up from the neck up."

His argument was that motivation doesn't last, and neither does bathing, which is why both need to happen every day.

He wasn't being glib. He was pointing at something the science now supports: positivity degrades without maintenance. You can't stockpile it. You have to renew it.

The Royal Marines understand this better than anyone. One of their four pillars of what they call the "Commando Spirit" is Cheerfulness in the Face of Adversity. Their official ethos documentation describes humour as fundamental to how the Corps operates, something that allows them not just to endure hardship, but to genuinely get something from it.

The cheerfulness doesn't come from pretending everything is fine. It comes from the collective decision to press forward with humour intact. That's not toxic positivity. That's practiced resilience.

You've probably watched a hundred videos about discipline, morning routines, and cold plunges. You've consumed the content. You know the theory. And you're still stuck.

Here's what the research is telling you: maybe the problem isn't that you lack willpower. Maybe the problem is you've been running on empty and wondering why you can't sprint.

The University of Warwick found that happy people are roughly 12% more productive. So here's the practical takeaway. Before you optimise another routine or add another habit, ask yourself: Am I actually enjoying any of this?

Watch something that makes you laugh. Properly laugh. Call someone who makes you feel alive. Go outside and move. Not because a podcast told you to, but because it genuinely feels good.

Your body responds to joy. Your brain broadens under positive emotion. Your willpower replenishes when your well-being is topped up.

Stop treating happiness as the destination. Start treating it as the vehicle.

If this helped you see things differently, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you haven't already, sign up to the Working Things Out newsletter. Every week I take the best research from psychology, performance science, and real-world experience — and turn it into something you can actually use. No fluff. No hype. Just clarity and action.

You don't need another video. You need a clear next step. That's what we do here.

Energy and time are truly subjective. I spent two hours on a brain-numbing admin task this week and it drained every last drop from me. Then I sat down to write this newsletter and the words poured out like I'd tapped into something bottomless.

Maybe the key to a truly fulfilled life isn't about managing your time better. Maybe it's about maximising the things that give you energy.

See You at the Top by Zig Ziglar. This is a five-times-a-year read for me. Not exaggerating. Zig has a way of injecting enthusiasm and get-up-and-go from beyond the grave directly into my veins. If you've never picked it up, start there. If you have, pick it up again. Some books don't lose their edge. This is one of them.