[HOW HUMOR HELPS US THINK] The biggest inoculation against our mental problems is a sense of humor. The intensity of the feelings when the movie Jaws came out reached ludicrous levels. There were companies which sold diving equipment and did $30 million one year, then$100,000 the next because people wouldn’t go in the ocean. It didn’t suddenly become more dangerous, it’s just people weren’t taking diving lessons because they saw this movie. Oddly enough, people who weren’t anywhere near the ocean were thinking about it, scaring the crap out of themselves, and not swimming in pools at night. People were not going into creeks and reservoirs with no sharks in them, because when they saw water, their adrenaline response to the movie linked water with sharks. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is not just a response to reality, it’s not just that you were in a war zone or a car accident; when people hear about horrific things and see it on the news, they go in and imagine being in it, they don’t play it life-size in their brain, they play it larger than life. If they build really strong responses to it internally, those strong responses have a tendency to do it more, to exaggerate more. When you’re told about something or you see it on TV or you see it in the movies or you have it happen in real life, the more adrenaline, the more shocking that something is. Some of the guys who came back from the Vietnam War were literally re living the experiences they had; some of them they actually had, and some of them weren’t real. They had trouble telling the things that really happened over there from the ones that didn’t, which they imagined could have. Because the experiences were both so intense, so overwhelming, and these guys spent so much time in situations of danger, their adrenaline levels ran higher than they should. We’re designed to experience stress about once a month, which means our nervous system isn’t prepared for modern life. When our cellphone goes off or we’re late for something, we run much more adrenaline through our system than it’s designed for. You can customize yourself, but if you don’t counter-balance that with humor, you’re in trouble. That’s why it’s the tool I use to get everybody through it. When I talk to a guy years after Vietnam and he’s having nightmares about it and talking to everybody about it, going to support groups where they re-live it together, it doesn’t get him to get to the point where his brain is going, “This is over.” He keeps these things big and intense, and when he comes back, life doesn’t feel real to him because it’s not as intense. People like him don’t come back and turn up the pictures of enjoyment. When things are in the past, you have to shrink them down and push them away; it’s mechanically what you do in your brain, it reduces the level of these things. I have to get people to laugh about it first; endorphins and oxytocin are what is needed. All the neurotransmitters that are released when you look at something, when you see yourself in a situation, when you see yourself walking around in the middle of the night in a suburb of California – which is perfectly safe – feeling like you’re still in Vietnam. If you can’t look at that and laugh a little bit, you’re in deep trouble. When psychologists try to get people to re-live this stuff, they’re not really helping because the problem is the person is already re-living it. And sometimes they make it worse than when they were actually there, which raises the adrenaline that is connected with those past pictures. Instead of getting people to look forward to good things, they’re looking back, they’re running away from bad things. Our nervous system is designed to make things familiar and it will make anything familiar if you allow it. When you’re making things familiar that make you feel bad, worrying too much and stressing out, you have to be able to stop yourself from freaking out about things that aren’t really happening now; you have to learn to laugh at it. And this can’t be an intellectual endeavor, this has to be a physiological one. Part of the way I deal with people and get them to start thinking is I mechanically have them make things smaller and see themselves doing it. I ask them, “So how long do you plan to do this?” They always tell me, “I’m not doing it on purpose,” and I go, “Therein lies the problem.” They come right out and say it to me, “I’m not doing this on purpose.” Okay, so who is? The minute they giggle at that, they go, “Well, I just do it.” Just means only, it means you’re not doing something else.
