Welcome back readers! Since FUSE is happening in exactly a month from today, let’s honor a past TEDxOhioStateUniversity main event: Human Narrative. Specifically, let’s discuss the one thing you’ll achieve at every TEDxOhioState main event, Happiness. During the 2015 main event, Ida Abdalkhani began the conversation of the biological processes that occur when one laughs, whether it were a purposeful laugh or a fake one.
One of two of humanity struggle to stay happy, and about 83% of us are constantly worried about our responsibility whether it were work or school. Abdalkhani’s main objective is to discuss ways to stay happy other than the usual ways we are aware of today. Usually the antidote to remaining happy is to change our mindset, or to manifest a positive perspective on life. Those ways are correct, but the path to either of those answers are hard to pave. Ida constructs the path changing our narrative to a positive perspective on life through fake laughter.
We all know the effects laughter has on our body. It gets our blood moving faster leaving our faces more flushed than we would like. We become so weak because all our body is doing is concentrating on the present rather than the worries we may have for the future. That’s the beautiful thing about laughter; it’s emancipatory. We are freed from the struggles of daily life, and we are given a moment to concentrate on the present. We laugh and our minds are cleared just for a glimpse until we are thrusted back into reality. Laughter is beautiful, but we programmed to laugh due to some form of a stimulus. We laugh when someone cracks a joke, we laugh if something embarrassing happens to our friends; we laugh at something, and rarely at nothing. Abdulkhani’s 5 minute guide to happiness is through laughing at nothing.
We’ve all heard the phrase “fake it till you make it,” usually the instances we abide by that phrase are usually in situations that cause us stress. We fake it till we make it when we land an internship and we have no idea what we’re doing. Ida deconstructs the negative connotation of the phrase, and flips it to a positive connotation. Fake laugh until the beautiful aftertaste of laughter comes into fruition. Fake the laughter until you make it to it’s positive effects.
Abdulkhani’s fake it till you make it stance on happiness isn’t something new. The fake it till you make it stance on laughter stems from laughter yoga which originated around 1995 in India. Ida learned during her first session of laughter yoga that the body doesn’t differentiate between a real laugh versus a fake laugh. Therefore, we can still stimulate the positive neurotransmitters running through our body without having to be a part of a funny situation. We can emancipate ourselves from the stressors of life without trying to find comedy in our lives.
Ida’s talk was engaging with the audience. Instead of telling the audience her guide to happiness, she had them practice fake laughter themselves. She introduced the process to fake laughter which is to inhale deeply and fake laugh from the pit of the stomach-up. Then she had them laugh at a situation that isn’t comedic such as getting a too-expensive phone bill. Abdulkhani’s engaging exercises primes the audience to gain a skill much needed for happiness: find happiness in even the darkest of places.
We can’t control the outcomes of our lives; we try, but most of the times our trials will eventually lead to the inevitable situation we never wanted to happen. We wish we could change that, but unfortunately we were only given so many powers on this earth. The one power we were given is our reaction; that's something we can control. We all deserve to feel happy, but often ‘deserving’ is a difficult feeling to grasp. Therefore, if we begin to rewire the way we react to something, if we laugh at something that is meant to tear us down, then we are one step closer to believing that we deserve to be happy.
I’m going to be honest, I watched Ida Abdulkhani’s Happier in 5 Minutes this past week, and I wish I had watched it sooner. I wish harder that I was one of those audience members gathered together to watch and engage with Ida’s discussion on happiness. Hopefully, you also wish you were one of the audience members as well. As Ida explained, we can’t change the outcomes of our decisions, but we can can change the way we react to them. So react differently this time, buy your TEDxOhioStateUniversity: FUSE ticket and be apart of something magnificent like Ida’s talk.
Hope to see you at FUSE!
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