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Laughter IS Good Medicine: Feel-Good TV Shows & Films
Nov 04, 2010
Nov 28, 2023
Self-Care & Mental HealthSheryl Kraft, a freelance writer and breast cancer survivor, was born in Long Beach, New York. She currently lives in Connecticut with her husband Alan and dog Chloe, where her nest is empty of her two sons Jonathan. Sheryl writes articles and essays on breast cancer and contributes to a variety of publications and websites where she writes on general health and wellness issues. She earned her MFA in writing from Sarah Lawrence College in 2005.
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I love to watch a good movie or television show, but for whatever reason, I usually gravitate toward the darker types where the main characters are either in a state of mental distress, fostering suicidal or homicidal thoughts or are practically comatose with depression. And when it all gets too much to bear, I start to crave an honest-to-goodness, all-out silly or ridiculous comedy. Instead of getting a headache from grinding my teeth, feeling the distress of all the characters, my jaw pleasantly aches from laughing. What a nice change of pace.
Laughter doesn’t just affect the way your jaw feels: it has an effect on your whole body. Researchers at the University of Marylandstudied people as they watched either comedies or dramas. They found that blood vessels of the group who watched the comedy expanded and contracted normally, while the blood vessels of the people who watched the drama actually tensed up, reducing blood flow. Other studies have found that the ability to use humor may actually raise your body’s immune responseand lower blood sugar levels.
So I asked friend and fellow blogger Jane Boursaw, the queen of all things cinematic, to share her well-researched list of movies and TV shows that are bound to leave you cheerful and buoyant instead of making you wish you’d never been born into an awful, depressing, dark and hopeless world. Jane is a family entertainment writer who specializes in movies, TV and celebrities. If anyone knows, Jane knows.
It’s so easy to turn your attitude around with a good laugh…take it away, Jane!
Five Feel-Good Films and TV Shows
It’s a tough world out there, and sometimes you just need to settle in with a movie or TV show guaranteed to take you to a happy place. I polled my readers at Film Gecko recently, who kindly replied with a wide array of great ideas – everything from ‘The Gilmore Girls’ to ‘When Harry Met Sally.’
It got me thinking about my own favorite shows and movies – the ones I turn to when the world closes in or when I need to escape for a while. It’s tough to narrow it down, but I’ve managed to pick my top five:
So there you have it. When my life is crashing down around me, these are the shows and movies that get me through. And there are plenty of others, including any romantic comedy starring Andie MacDowell, Meg Ryan or Julia Roberts; holiday movies like ‘White Christmas’ and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’; any episode of ‘Modern Family’; and one of the best musicals ever, ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’ The scene where Gene Kelly dance-splashes his way down the street is one of my all-time favorite movie scenes.