Using Certain Types of Humor Affects Quality of Life Among Heart Disease Patients
According to the Centers for Disease Control, 49% of Americans have at least one risk factor for heart disease, whether it is high blood pressure, high LDL cholesterol, or smoking. Each year, about 610,000 Americans die from it. Living with heart disease can involve large financial, emotional, and social difficulties that physicians cannot always solve. So people living with heart disease often turn to others around them for more immediate help.
One recent study published in the journal Health Communication shows that people living with cardiovascular disease felt like they had more help around them when they also had a good sense of humor. However, people who used that sense of humor to distance themselves from others or to manage talk about difficult topics tended be less satisfied with the relationship they had with the person who cared for them the most, and they also tended to feel like their lives were less controllable and more dreary. When people had lower levels of satisfaction in their relationship with the person who gave them the most support, they also tended to report having lower levels physical, social, and psychological health.
“The lesson this research teaches us,” says Dr. Stephen Yoshimura, one of the authors of the report, “is not that we should use more humor in all cases, but that we should use humor when it will help improve our relationships with people who care about us.” The trick, of course, is knowing when, where, and how humor will do that. “We typically don’t get much training in when and how to be funny,” says Dr. Yoshimura, “so it’s important to watch for signs that humor is making someone uncomfortable or is not being perceived as funny. Using humor to put people down, or to purposefully try to cheer someone up when they are trying to help you though a difficult time might not always be the best thing to do because it can cause the people trying to help you to feel like their help is not particularly important.”