How to Bring Laughter into your Life

Tips from Loretta LaRoche

At the top of her profession at age 68, Loretta LaRoche admits she began her current career quite late in life by most standards. Last year she won the National Humor Treasure Award from the Humor Project and has been invited to speak with many fascinating individuals, including former president Bill Clinton. She has reached millions with her unique model for enhancing health. “I’m having a ball, and I want this audience to know that it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” On the Mass General advisory council for anxiety and depression, LaRoche is also featured as a stress management expert on www.LLuminari.com and www.Eons.com. Visit her on her website at www.LorettaLaRoche.com.

“We should be learning how to be more optimistic form the first grade on”, says LaRoche, who has a contagious sense of humor. “Humor to me is a way of being in the world; it’s trying to access more smiles or seeing more things in the world that you can giggle at”, she says.

LaRoche, who finds humor in almost anything, often has her audiences screaming with laughter. “Why make a situation worse?” she asks. “Considering how old some of us are, we haven’t got a lot of time left.”

Take a typical frustration like waiting in line. LaRoche advises seeing the whole thing as your own situation comedy, thinking “we’ll probably never get out of here; they’ll have to send in a SWAT team to extricate us from this building.” You can even enlist those around you lighten up, by bringing humor to the situation. LaRoche admits that she can’t make everyone a comedian, nor does she want to.

“But as you begin to change how you think, you can begin to have a better sense of humor. You have to switch gears; you have to say I think I’m going to practice being joyful.”

To this end, LaRoche has written six books, including recent titles Kick Up Your Heels Before You’re Too Short to Wear Them and Life is Short – Wear Your Party Pants, both published by Hay House, Inc.

LaRoche also recommends journaling as a way to find joy in the world, and has even created a Joy Journal, a personal diary filled with some of her ideas, thoughts, and quotes to help get you started. If you find it difficult to find joy in your life, here are some of LaRoche’s recommendations for starting your own joy journal by thinking of writing about some of the following subjects:

·         People who have made a positive difference in your life and therefore caused you to be more appreciative of everything around you.

·         A time when you laughed so hard you thought you’d fall over.

·         A time you had so much love in your heart that you thought it would burst.

·         Your favorite physical activities from childhood – swimming, jumping rope, roller skating. List them and think about ways you – like Ellen – might do them again.

·         Those people you laugh with the most, and the special ingredient that makes time with them joyful.