Do you know what magical action has the power to boost your mood, bolster your immune system, banish stress, lessen pain, and foster connection? If you guessed “laughter,” you’re on target. Research consistently shows that laughter truly is one of life’s best medicines, yet our stress-filled lives tend to leave little space for self-care and the healing power that laughing brings. And especially if you tend toward perfectionism or depression, getting a good dose of laughter might be the furthest thing from your mind and even non-existent on your to-do list. But there are simple steps each one of us can take to foster more laughter–and reduce stress–each day. Join me and stress expert Professor Pete Alexander for a mindful exploration into the uplifting power of laughter. Topics discussed include mental health, physical health, perfectionism, stress, parenting, attachment, insecure attachment, secure attachment, diabetes, heart health, hospitalization, inflammation, cortisol, endorphins, neurochemicals, laughter yoga, yoga, EMDR, MER therapy, toxic perfectionism, stress relief, stress relief activities, work, burnout, mindset, play, joy, immune system, self-care, fulfillment, happiness, and balance.

Please note that this episode may contain sensitive material; listener discretion is advised.

Emergency Assistance Note: If you or someone you know needs immediate support, please call your emergency services. In the US, 24/7 help is available by calling “911” or “988” (Suicide and Crisis Hotline). Support/informational links are in the show notes.

Books by Dr. Carla Manly:

Joy From Fear: Create the Life of Your Dreams by Making Fear Your Friend

Date Smart: Transform Your Relationships and Love Fearlessly

Aging Joyfully: A Woman’s Guide to Optimal Health, Relationships, and Fulfillment for Her 50s and Beyond

The Joy of Imperfect Love: The Art of Creating Healthy, Securely Attached Relationships

Oracle decks by Dr. Carla Manly:

Etsy

Amazon

Connect with Dr. Carla Manly:

Website: https://www.drcarlamanly.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drcarlamanly/

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/drcarlamanly/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drcarlamanly

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carla-marie-manly-8682362b/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dr_carlamanly_imperfect_love

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dr_carla_manly

Books by Professor Pete Alexander:

Lighten Your Day: Fast, Easy and Effective Stress Relief for When Sh*t Happens –

Internet Marketing Tips for Busy Executives: Simple Ways to Improve Your Internet Presence

Connect with Professor Pete Alexander:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stressexpert/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petealexander/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHHO6IiWyn56aURq585fxVA

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The Joyful Life of Laughing More and Stressing Less with Professor Pete Alexander

Top Tips for Reducing Stress and Toxic Perfectionism

Do you know what magical action has the power to boost your mood, bolster your immune system, banish stress, lessen pain, and foster connection? If you guessed laughter, you’re on target. Research consistently shows that laughter truly is one of life’s best medicines. Yet our stress-filled lives tend to leave little space for self-care and the healing power that laughter brings. If you tend toward perfectionism or depression, getting a good dose of laughter might be the furthest thing from your mind and maybe nonexistent on your to-do list, but there are simple steps each one of us can take to foster more laughter and reduce stress each day.

Join me and stress expert, Professor Pete Alexander, for a mindful exploration into the uplifting power of laughter. Today, we’ll focus on this listener’s real-life question. “I’m a high achiever and a perfectionist just like both my parents. Even growing up, A’s were never good enough. If I got an A-minus, I was a disappointment. I’m nearly 40 and can’t shake the need to compete with myself and others. I’m stressed 24/7 and don’t sleep well. Would therapy help?” With that question as the focus of today’s episode, I’m Dr. Carla Marie Manly, and this is Imperfect Love. Please note that as this episode may contain sensitive information, listener discretion is advised. If you need support, please see the special links in the show notes.

Today, I’m joined by a very special guest. Professor Pete Alexander will be sharing his expertise as a professor, bestselling author, and TEDx speaker who specializes in stress reduction and toxic perfectionism. Welcome to the show, Professor Pete. How are you?

I’m fantastic, Dr. Carla. Thank you so much for having me on your show. I appreciate your audience’s time as well.

Thank you so much. Before we launch into the topic of the day, could you share with our audience a little bit about what makes you, you?

In addition to the professional bio that you put there, some of the other things that make me me are that I’m a proud parent of three wonderful kids. I also love to be out in nature and do wonderful hikes. I don’t want to say an amateur, but I am also a performing comedian because I am part of a couple of improv troops. I get to bring laughter to my community, not just with laughter yoga but also on stage, they’re getting people to laugh through improv comedy.

That’s beautiful. You are a yoga laughter leader, and you have recently been promoted to a yoga laughter ambassador.

I was. I’m very proud of that. I was promoted because I persevered through when we had to deal with COVID back several years ago and a lot of the laughter yoga classes and clubs disappeared for a while. I was able to persevere through that and keep mine going. Part of the recognition for that was getting promoted as a laughter ambassador. It’s something I’m very proud of. Bringing laughter to the community is something that has been a true joy for me. It’s something that I couldn’t have dreamed of doing ten years ago.

Exploring Laughter Yoga and its Benefits

That sounds cool. I’m very curious because I am a yogi. I take yoga. I’m a teacher and I take it quite seriously, which is my personality. I tend to take things seriously. I am learning to be more playful in many ways in my life. Laughter yoga is not something I have ever been exposed to. I think my own yoga practice could probably benefit from me being a little lighter with myself. Could you explain a little bit about what laughter yoga is? It seems very far from what I’m familiar with.

A lot of people haven’t heard about it, but it has been around since 1995. It was started by a doctor, Madan Kataria, a cardiologist in India. What he discovered was that doing laughter and regular laughter, if you think about it, when we do a hearty laughter, we tend to breathe deeply after we do that laughter. That’s where yoga comes in because it’s yogic breathing. Whenever I mention to people about laughter yoga, they immediately think, “I need to bring a yoga mat.” No. If you want to lie on the floor while we’re doing these things, absolutely.

Typically, what we’re doing is sitting and standing. What do we do in laughter yoga? Our bodies are very intelligent. When we laugh for let’s say 5 to 6 seconds, our bodies release positive endorphins. Those positive endorphins give us these wonderful health benefits, most commonly would be stress reduction, but a whole bunch of other things that include reducing our high blood pressure. It could be our mood in general. There are 36 clinical studies from all over the world that indicate the power of laughter in healing us.

This is the crazy thing though. As smart as our bodies are, they don’t know the difference between a real and a simulated laugh. It only knows that we’re laughing. In laughter yoga, what we’re doing is simulated activities. Because we’re in person and looking at each other, you know how laughter is contagious, very quickly a simulated laugh turns into a real laugh. Even if we’re just doing let’s say forced laughter, because we do it for 5 to 6 seconds or more, automatically, those positive endorphins start getting released.

It’s amazing when people come to the class. I’ve had some people who have attended who you could see that they didn’t want to be there. They were brought there by somebody else. By the end of the class, they are feeling so much better. It’s because if we can let go of what happens when as adults, we have all these responsibilities. We have to have a reason to laugh. There has to be a funny video. There has to be a joke, whatever it happens to be. That’s not necessary because when we were kids, we laughed at pretty much anything.

The average person laughed 100 times a day on average when they were a child. That includes a real laugh, a chuckle, a smile, a giggle, whatever it happens to be. As adults, if we get to laugh or giggle or chuckle five times a day, that’s a lot. What we’re trying to do is reconnect with that inner child inside of us and laugh just to laugh for no reason at all.

That statistic, from 100 down to 5, no wonder many adults are stressed, depressed, and anxious. It is that healing power of laughter if we can remember to embrace a child-like energy to look for moments of joy in those glimmers. I know my dog is an endless source of laughter for me. He makes me laugh. I was talking about it the other day. He brought in his feet with all these muddy footprints all over the floor. My husband was a little bit cross, and I was giggling, “Honey, we have to lean into it. It is pretty funny.” You lean into life’s difficult, absurd, or mucky situations with laughter because we can’t change sometimes what’s happening, but we can change our response to it.

I love the fact that you brought up your dog because our pets are a wonderful way for us to be reminded about living in the present. That’s what the animals do. They live in the present. They don’t let themselves get stressed about the past or the future. It’s only about the present. If we’re trying to laugh off stuff, what’s fun about that is we’re laughing because we’re laughing in the present, whatever the goofy thing is that we’re thinking about at that moment. It does help us stay more present rather than a quick little vacation or a pause in whatever worries we have that are bothering us.

Perfectionism: Understanding its Impact and Origins

It doesn’t mean our worries and challenges will go away. It is simply that laughter helps us be more resilient and get those doses of feel-good neurochemicals that boost the mood, help reduce stress, and help reduce the cortisol in the system. That’s why you feel better? That’s why our immune system is better. As you were speaking, I couldn’t help but think of our listener’s question, talking about school at an early age. It sounds like all A’s and A-minus were not good enough. This resonates with me.

Me too. Big time.

We can see how this is a child before they’re indoctrinated to believe that they have to be perfect or that they have to get that A to be loved or worthy. You watch children and they’re painting or they’re making a pancake out of mud or they’re bringing us breakfast in bed that’s burnt to a crisp. They’re watching for our reactions. Are we meeting it with joy? Are we meeting it with delight? Those muddy footprints on the floor or messy pancakes, are those a reflection of them having done something wrong? We take in these messages.

I’m not blaming or shaming parents. Parenting is tough. We look at it and say, “I can see where this came from. I can see where this perfectionism came from, or this heavy stress, or this inability to engage in child-like behavior and lighten my load a little bit.” We can often see where it has its roots. This listener’s question shows us the roots. It started very early in life. Sometimes we have to come to terms with where we are now and say, “This is how I was raised. It might be part of my natural set point. It might be how my environment was, but I don’t want to be saddled with this burden anymore.”

I am a self-admitted recovering perfectionist and I will always be working with that. It’s much less than it used to be, but when we look at how important that is to be able to notice that so much stress comes from us, that internal pressure to do more, to do it perfectly, to do it to a point where no one else is noticing, whether we’re getting that A-plus or not, but we feel that we must get it even if it doesn’t make a difference. We don’t feel okay until we get that A-plus that we have stamped on our forehead.

What do you think about this? When you and I were talking, you talked before about toxic perfectionism. I was so curious because I don’t know of any other kind of perfectionism. I only see that perfectionism in our relationships, ourselves, and our work. I’m not saying that we don’t want to strive for excellence, but I was curious. Do you ever see a kind of perfectionism that is not toxic?

Overcoming Perfectionism: Practical Strategies and Tools

I do. What I would define as toxic perfectionism is that we’re perfectionists in all aspects of our lives. We don’t give ourselves a break in any aspect of it. You’re not necessarily a toxic perfectionist, at least in my opinion, if you are only focused on it let’s say at work, or maybe with your relationship or something like that. It needs to be worked on but it’s not necessarily toxic in the other aspects of your life. For me, it’s interesting because I tended to skew perfectionism in school and at work. That was where it was like, “I have to get it.”

It’s interesting how moments in time can be like it was yesterday. I remember being in sixth grade when I received a D on my halfway semester grade in Geography. My dad came down on me so hard. He was so mad at me for getting a D. There was so much stuff going on in a dysfunctional family that I could have easily dropped out of school, but I was trying to do stuff. He scared the heck out of me, so I worked hard, and by the end of the semester, I had raised that D up to an A-minus. I came home all excited and what did my dad say? “Why didn’t you get an A.”

Listening to the listener’s question, it’s amazing how I can relate to it when you realize that you are a perfectionist. I had to do a lot of work on myself for this. I don’t know anyone who’s ever fully come out of it where they can’t be perfectionistic around something. It does and it comes in various things. As you were describing, the children looking at their parents for their approval. I’m seeing that with my granddaughter right now with our son. Anything that she does, she’ll look over at him in a way whether she does it right or whether that is what he wants her to do.

It’s interesting to see it from the grandparent’s perspective because it’s almost disassociated. In the past with perfectionism, I was right there in it, but now I’m getting to observe it. That’s a whole different scenario. Thinking about how to overcome that and trying to not be such a perfectionist in everything, being aware of it is the first step. If you’re not aware of it, you can’t do anything about it. What I found that has been very helpful to me is I look and I think, “I’m stressed out about this.” As you mentioned, who does it matter to other than myself? We are our own biggest critics.

What was a big game-changer for me in my perfectionism was to understand that I couldn’t do everything perfectly. There’s no way. I have to give up certain things. There’s no way, and the reason that I was okay with that was because I was making a trade. I could try and do everything perfectly. All these things that were on my work list, on my relationship list, my family obligations, whatever it happens to be, if I try and do all of those things perfectly, guess what? I’m going to fail at most of them. It’s true.

You have to pick your battles within yourself. If there’s one thing that you have to do perfectly for whatever reason you’re thinking of, it’s fine. To do that perfectly, it’s going to take extra time. What is going to come off your plate or what is going to be delegated? You’re going to have to be okay with it being a C work instead of an A work, or a B work instead of an A work. You have to make those decisions.

I know it’s hard because one of the things that we are as perfectionists is we are not going to be able to get everything done. We can’t, so you have to make the choice. Either I can be perfect with some of these things and let these other things go away or not concentrate on them, or I can have all of the things on the list be subpar work because I’m never going to get all of them perfect.

Stress Reduction Techniques: Prioritization and Reframing

I agree wholeheartedly. To reflect back to your first thought, I find it so brilliant that you said the part about being able to step back and be an observer. The minute we learn to step back, to look at ourselves, not to be in it, not to be in the perfectionism or the stress, but to step back like we’re a fly on the wall or a best friend who is silently staying in the corner of the room and be like, “What am I doing here that I can let go of? Can I find something joyful to laugh at in the messy kitchen or in the project that is going a little bit wonky? Maybe I can follow the wonkiness,” but just to step back and observe.

Use that same power of observation to even create a to-do list, and mark which ones am I okay doing to a level 10, and which ones am I okay doing to a level 5. For example, if you’re making breakfast, maybe your breakfast can be a bowl of oatmeal with some almonds in it and that’s a 5. Maybe you want your dinners to be more like an 8 or a 9 because that’s your favorite meal of the day. Maybe this work project can get by with a level 7, but that one needs to be at least a 9.5. When we learn to treat ourselves with this generous attitude, then we can do well at the things that are the most important to us and let go of the things that are a little bit more mundane.

You hit the nail right on the head. It’s prioritizing. It is. What is the most important? I’ve had people who say, “All of it is important.” Okay. If you’re stressing about certain things, one of the ways that you can prioritize what’s on your list is to ask yourself this classic question, “Will this matter five hours from now, five days from now, five months from now, five years from now?” There are certain things that we worry about and that we stress about whether we can get things done. It’s okay, but will it make a difference?

The monkey mind will often say it will matter. It will matter in five minutes, five hours, in ten years. It’ll matter. That’s why I’m a big fan of the technique of stepping back, giving yourself space, going out, get a breath of fresh air. Maybe practice some laughter or talk to a friend, and then come back in and look at it again. It might be a long space of time. You might need more than that.

I want to weave back in this piece of laughter. I think we either have a partner who tends toward laughter, or we are talking about a pet or kiddos who can be stressful, but they can also induce laughter. One of my techniques has been to learn to reframe my perfectionism into this sense of delight at the goofiness of the human mind. Look at it and go, “I am being so goofy about this. Nobody is going to die if there’s a crumb under the table. Everything is going to be okay if I make a punctuation error. It’s not going to be the end of the world. I won’t like it, but it’ll be okay.”

We start realizing that a lot of what we do, I can speak for myself, can be pretty goofy. We learned to look at how perfectionism can make us a little a little wonky at times, but laugh at it and give ourselves grace. I’m a big believer in giving ourselves grace so that we don’t feel that hammer over us that often comes from childhood, trying to be seen, liked, loved, and found worthy. We get to start laughing at how silly that indoctrination was.

Going back to what we were talking about disassociation, this is one of the fun things that I can do. I always recommend it to people if they can do this or if you can visualize this in your mind. Instead of saying fly on the wall, what I say is to imagine yourself in a movie theater. You’re sitting there in whatever your favorite seat is in the theater. The movie is playing and the movie is about you and whatever situation that you’re stressing about, whether it’s with somebody else, whether it’s with yourself and you’re working hard, or maybe you’re worried about a conversation that you’re going to have with somebody.

You look at that movie from the perspective of the theater audience, not physically being in there. I asked the people who can imagine or visualize this to scale that stressful situation on a scale from 1 to 10. They might say 8. I then say, “Imagine yourself sitting in the theater and watching yourself in that same situation. What’s the percentage?” Often it goes down to let’s say 5. I say, “Now, imagine that you are in the projector room in the back of the theater. You look through the projector room and you can see yourself sitting in the chair in the theater, watching yourself up on the theater screen.”

Even more distance.

Exactly. It’s a double disassociation. Now, all of a sudden. The scale of stress has gone down to a 1 or 2. When you can have the stress at a 1 or 2, it’s not affecting you. You can look at the situation from a different perspective. As you said, thinking about the humorous things. You could say, “The person I’m supposed to have a challenging conversation with, I never realized that they were such ugly shirts,” or something off-topic about what you were worried about. It can give you that kind of laughter that enlightens it in addition to disassociating from it. As humans, whenever we’re dealing with a stressful situation, we stress about all aspects of it, everything, including what we can’t control.

I always suggest to people to do a list. Whatever this stressful situation is, what is it that you can’t control? Write those down. In a second list, what is it that you can control? Do the best, you can to go ahead and ignore the things you cannot control because if you cannot control them, you cannot change them. You cannot do anything about it other than stress about them, and guess what? We only have a certain amount of mindset that we can give to all of these activities, so why waste them on the things we cannot change and the things we cannot control? If we can mentally put those aside and then focus on the things we can control or the things we can affect change, our stress will automatically go way down.

Therapy and MER: Pathways to Healing

I agree on that part of using our resources for something. We only have so much energy, so much mental, physical, and emotional power, that if we’re wasting it on stress, it’s truly like leaking gas out of a car.

That’s a good analogy.

We each get 10 gallons of gas every day. Different quality. Some of us have high octane and some, not so much. It’s not right or wrong. If I’m using that energy and putting it into stress or putting it into worrying about something, that’s all energy I’m wasting instead of if I channel that energy into what I can control and what I want to control, which is largely going to be your mindset, your thoughts, your behaviors, and how you’re working with situations.

I love where you’re taking this. I want to loop it back to our listener’s question. I can see this individual probably feeling stressed. It sounds like 40 might be a marker for them. For many people, it’s 30, 40, 50, 60. There are these markers in life that we have in our minds as being vital. Maybe there is a change that’s wanting to happen sooner rather than later. The realization that there are these would be four decades worth of this individual’s neurobiology being hardwired toward perfectionism. They’re asking, “Do I need therapy? What do I need to do?” As a psychotherapist myself, I know that therapy can be a huge benefit. I’m also a believer in other methods of working to shift one’s paradigm. What do you think?

I agree with you.w I think that checking out therapy would be something I would recommend. If you can find the right therapist who can help guide you to where you want to go, that’s golden. One of the things that I would suggest that has been pretty much a game-changer, in addition to therapy, is a program called Mental and Emotional Release. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, Dr. Carla.

Please do explain.

It’s MER for short. It’s a timeline therapy. What happens in the timeline therapy is you’re trying to determine what the root cause is of what is considered the greater problem. In the case of the listener who got the perfectionism, you could say, “The greater problem is I’m a toxic perfectionist.” That might not necessarily be the case. There might be something else that has caused the toxic perfectionism. In mental and emotional release, what you do is go with a practitioner.

The practitioner will guide you through, and this is something that will take typically 4 to 6 hours. It’s an exhausting process, but 4 to 6 hours of going through asking questions, and trying to determine what that problem is, what that greater problem is that is holding the person back, and then trying to wipe that slate clean from the subconscious and unconscious, not the conscious mind. Our conscious mind makes up roughly 5% of our brain. It’s where our control critic is.

Our inner critic takes a bad rap because it’s not there intentionally to hurt us. It’s there to protect us. The problem though is that it tries to protect us from having any kind of failure whatsoever. Again, perfectionism or fear of failure, etc. If we can tap into our subconscious and our unconscious to figure out what is going on, what often happens is that our subconscious or unconscious that’s holding these memories or these perceptions of the world, if it’s not serving us, it wants to get rid of it.

You could say MER is a tunnel to try and get rid of what it wants to get rid of. That’s something that I found. When I had MER done, it was crazy because, after the session, I didn’t remember what the greater problem was, but I had said what it was. I did not remember. It’s funny because I got trained in doing this myself and I remember the people that I did it for. A couple of them said, “What was my greater problem?” I said, “If you don’t remember it, that’s a good thing. Why on Earth would you want to remember what your greater problem is?”

The control freak or our conscious mind wants to know. You have to let it go. If you’ve gotten rid of it, that’s a good thing. Let it go and enjoy. I had it done seven years ago, but I took some huge steps forward after having that done, which was amazing. It was beneficial. It’s a good thing to try it. Let’s say you’re doing therapy and there’s something that you can’t get over, it might be an added benefit to try.

It sounds intriguing. It reminds me a little bit of EMDR therapy but in a different way. I am EMDR certified, so we do go to those. I also see strings of it in certain parts of depth psychology. I have a question for you. What do you tend to find as some of the common themes of the greater problem or the big problem? Is it the worthiness? Is it acceptance? Is it lovability? What are the biggest themes or do you not see themes like that?

The Roots of Perfectionism: Guilt and Shame

I would say all the three that you mentioned there. Each person is different. It’s not as common of a thing where some people feel unworthy, others are worried about whether they can be successful, or whatever it happens to be. What is interesting is one of the most common ones has been something that a person feels guilty about in their past that they either did or didn’t do.

That makes sense.

It is this guilty feeling. Going back to toxic perfectionism, it could be where for whatever reason, they knew that they didn’t do something good and the parent came down on them and they feel guilty about that, and it carries. That could be a big one. Usually, what I’ve seen most commonly is somebody wanting to say something to a loved one that they never did. They either did or didn’t say something to a loved one, then that loved one passes away, or something like that where they have a lot of guilt about it. I remember there was a bully who was very guilty about something he had done to somebody when they were in school. It’s something where you feel guilty about that. Guilt is a very powerful emotion.

Lighten Your Day: A Guide to Stress Relief

Freud would love this conversation, especially if this happens early on in life. I also work with Attachment Theory. We can see that if there’s not a secure attachment on top of all of these natural life stressors, and secure attachment if we have caregivers who are attuned to us, they tend to help us make it through these moments where feel guilty or shamed or something. It makes perfect sense. Maybe the individual who wrote this question, there are some big nuggets around perfectionism as a way to feel loved and worthy. Often, we use guilt as a way to defend against our feelings. It’s not the greatest defense mechanism. It causes a lot of stress. On top of all these other things, could you tell us a little bit about your book?

It’s called LIGHTEN Your Day: Fast, Easy, and Effective Stress Relief. I wrote that book after I had burnout. I hit the wall badly. I got what’s considered stress-induced diabetes back in 2008. Technically, if you talk to a medical doctor, there’s no such thing as stress-induced diabetes, heart disease, etc. That’s correct because stress doesn’t directly cause chronic disease. Stress causes cellular inflammation and it creates the disease if it goes unchecked.

Leave it to the medical community. I’m sorry, any doctors out there, but a stress-filled life causes a host of issues including type 2 diabetes.

Yeah, but if I say, “I got a cellular inflammation diabetes,” you’ll go, “What’s wrong with your phone?” What happened was that I didn’t take it seriously. I wasn’t listening to my body. For another ten years, I ended up burning the candle at both ends until I ended up in the emergency room and an extended stay in the ER, one hour from being comatose because I had a severe case of diabetic ketoacidosis. My body was eating itself alive because of my stress because I was so worried about a project I was working on at work, a toxic perfectionist, etc. After I had that, that was my wake-up call.

I had gone back to the corporate world. I remember this. On my third day in the ICU, I get this text from my micromanager boss. I was in my early ‘50s and had a micromanager boss. His text at about 6:00 AM says, “You have a webinar you need to run at 8:00. What are you going to do about it?” All I had was my phone. I didn’t have my work laptop with me in the ICU. What did I do? I started sitting there and going through and trying to reschedule this webinar.

The nurse who was assigned to me at that time came over and they were checking my blood every hour. Anybody who says they got some sleep in the hospital is lying to you. You do not get sleep. She comes over and checks my blood. My blood sugars were so high when I was first in the ER that the medical glucometers could not read. They just said it’s high. The lab had to manually estimate what my blood sugars were. They estimated it to be ten times higher than normal.

My sugar had come down. It’s still higher than I needed to be, but they had come down to more reasonable levels. At least we could read them. Now all of a sudden, a 90-degree angle shot straight back up. This nurse says to me, a perfect stranger, “Do you realize that’s what puts you in this hospital bed in the first place?” That was the epiphany moment I needed. I thought, “I am trading my health or my career, and that’s a bad trade.”

Very bad trade.

I got out of the hospital a couple of days later. I had spent all that time thinking about it when I quit the job and for the first time in my life, I started focusing on my own health. I started trying all these different stress-relief tools and techniques. Some of them worked, some of them didn’t. What I noticed was that not only did my stress go down. My blood sugar went down. My weight went down and my energy level went way up. It was as if I had discovered the Fountain of Youth. The crazy thing is you see me now and other than a little bit more gray hair, I look younger today than I did back in 2008 when I was first diagnosed with stress-induced diabetes. That’s what stress does to us. It ages us rapidly.

My friends, former co-workers, and family said, “You have to write a book about it., I decided to do that and did the research and everything. LIGHTEN Your Day is a seven-letter acronym that stands for the areas of our lives that give us stress. The L stands for our livelihood or a career. The I stands for what I call our imagination or our conscious mind because that’s our creative area too. The G is your genius. Your unconscious mind that we were talking about earlier. H is for physical health, which is so critical. T is time because time and health are our greatest assets. They really are. E is our environment. We need to make sure our environment is supportive of our efforts, and then the N is our network of relationships, both personally and professionally.

The book has all these ideas, about over 120 of them, in five minutes or less, that you can try to give yourself a little bit more balance in your life. The reason why most of them are five minutes or less is because that’s the reality. Most of us are running from meeting to meeting, project to project, everything like this. We don’t have a lot of time. Let’s make a minute or two or three count. Try something. If it works, run with it because using it regularly will benefit you long-term. You have to start today. If it doesn’t work, big deal. What would you take, one minute, or two minutes? Try another one next time. That’s why it was so popular.

That’s brilliant and such a good reminder to all of us that no matter how busy we are, we deserve to carve out five minutes a day. I also love that you give our listeners permission to experiment, copious ideas, all very easy, and lots of them. You can wade through one after the other and create a little arsenal or a little cup of the ones that you can reach into and say, “I’ve got five minutes. I’m going to do this.”

We have that kind of attitude of lightness, of graciousness, of spaciousness. That alone doesn’t have to be something that we have to do because it becomes something we want to do to improve our health and the time that we have on the planet. For the person who wrote in, you’re not yet 40. You have plenty of time, plenty of five-minute slots you can create every day for the rest of your life. It doesn’t have to be a burden. It can be a joy.

Incorporating Laughter and Self-Care into Daily Life

As a perfectionist, this is an easy thing to do. Bock it in your calendar every day, same time every day, and treat those five minutes like you would treat an important appointment. Don’t blow it off.

Many people have a routine where they’re having a cup of tea in the morning or a cup of coffee. Treat it like that. We tend to spend a lot more than five minutes getting our cup of coffee or cup of tea if we’re going to a coffee place. You treat it like, “This is essential for me.” At the end of the day, “I wanted to do this for me. It’s five minutes. Excellent.” I agree with you, Professor Pete. All of those little practices tend to snowball into creating more resilience, and more positive energy, and when we learn to incorporate some humor in our lives as well and start laughing at some of the ridiculous things that happen in life, many of which we do to ourselves, then it does make the journey a lot more positive.

It does. Even if you can get into the habit of doing something where you laugh for ten seconds, it is amazing how much of a relief your body will feel to do that. I did this in my TEDx Talk. The organizers say, “You can’t engage the audience because that’s what you’re supposed to do. The cameras and the mic are only on you, so you just have to do the talk. I said, “No, I want to take people through this.” It worked it worked, but it only took ten seconds. That’s the mentality that we have to have. Nobody else is going to do this for us. We have to engage ourselves. As weird as laughing for no reason feels, so what? Just feel how good it feels after you do that.

That’s why I like laughing at myself. Not in a disparaging or demeaning way. Sometimes I do something wonky and I start laughing. Sometimes we’re our own best audience because it’s a stress reducer for us and it creates this window to be gentle to ourselves. Learn that it’s such a wonderful practice. Thank you, Professor Pete. Thank you for sharing your time with us. Where can our listeners find you?

The easiest place to find me would be at PeteAlexander.com. That’s where all of my social media places are. By all means, go ahead and take a look there. Find me, reach out to me, and connect with me. I’m happy to continue the dialogue. It has a link to my Laughter Yoga website as well. It has some great news articles and stories on the benefits of laughter in different applications.

Thank you so much for the very powerful tools that you gave us. Thank you. To our listeners, thank you for sharing your time, and your energy with us. It’s always a joy for me and this is Imperfect Love.

Important Links

• Professor Pete Alexander
• Laughter Ambassadors
• Leveraging Laughter to Overcome Fear of Rejection | Pete Alexander TEDx Talk – on YouTube
• Professor Pete Alexander on LinkedIn
• LIGHTEN Your Day: Fast, Easy, and Effective Stress Relief
• Professor Pete Alexander on Instagram
• Professor Pete Alexander on Facebook
• NAMI HelpLine
• Dr. Carla Marie Manly, PhD
• Dr. Carla Marie Manly on Instagram
• Dr. Carla Marie Manly on X
• Dr. Carla Marie Manly on Facebook
• Dr. Carla Marie Manly on LinkedIn
• Dr. Carla Marie Manly on YouTube
• Dr. Carla Marie Manly on TikTok

About Professor Pete Alexander

Professor Pete Alexander is the President of the greatest interior landscaping company in the San Francisco Bay Area – Office Plants by Everything Grows. In addition, he has served as an adjunct college professor for several universities, where he helped inspire thousands of students to develop and apply key concepts of marketing specifically to their area of interest.

He’s also a TEDx speaker and best-selling author on reducing stress – helping transform burned out unhappy workers, which costs U.S. businesses $1.9 trillion in lost productivity(1), into engaged employees. Lastly, but certainly not least, he is a certified Laughter Yoga leader/ambassador, and improv comedy cast member, supporting his community to laugh more and stress less.