Are You Serious About Your Quest to Find Happiness?

April 7th, 2009

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I once saw a documentary about the Ayatollah Khomeini.

In the course of the one hour documentary things I noticed about the Ayatollah were:

He did not smile once
He did not laugh once.
He was unmarried

He landed in Iran where a large crowd greeted their new religious and political leader. He looked at them and still looked miserable. I do not trust a political or religious leader who never smiles.

Now, contrast this with Barack Obama who:

smiles a lot
laughs
has a happy marriage
looks happy

It is not possible to find happiness unless you have a sense of humor.

Is there a link between humor and a successful relationship? If you want a long-lasting and loving relationship, do you look for someone with a sense of humor?

Recent research says that women link a sense of humor in a man with intelligence.

“Over the course of history, women actively look for signs that their man is intelligent, and I believe the ability to actively judge the situation and pull off a joke and make you laugh is an intelligent feat,” said Kristofor McCarty, a researcher at Northumbria University in Newcastle, England and author of the study.

She added: “A quick browse of lonely-hearts ads will confirm that women look for a good sense of humour in a potential partner - our research may explain why this is the case.

The findings provide evidence that women use humour as an indication of a guy’s intelligence. Intelligence is a very attractive quality as a clever man should be more able to provide resources for his offspring. But guys be warned: not just any gag will do. We discovered that the humour must be genuinely funny for the man to be judged as more intelligent.”

The anthropologist Helen Fisher says: “People who have a good sense of humor may be likely to lighten up very bad situations and therefore reduce the stress response and simply enable you to get over the hump in bad parts of the relationship,”

If you are a man looking for a long term relationship then make sure that you have a sense of humor.

Some of other benefits of laughter are:

reduce stress
lower blood pressure
elevate mood
boost immune system
improve brain functioning
protect the heart
connect you to others
foster instant relaxation
make you feel good.

As part of your self development strategy make sure that you do not take yourself too seriously. Lighten up, laugh at yourself, tell yourself a good joke.

A doctor says to his patient, “I have bad news and worse news”.

“Oh dear, what’s the bad news?” asks the patient.

The doctor replies, “You only have 24 hours to live.”

“That’s terrible”, said the patient. “How can the news possibly be worse?”

The doctor replies, “I’ve been trying to contact you since yesterday.”