Dr. Howard Liebgold places a large hourglass on the table he’s behind. “What do these grains here at the bottom represent?” he asks the workshop audience.
We quickly determine those grains represent the past. “You can’t change the past,” he declares with a wiggle of his 18-inch-tall wizard’s hat, which he’d donned at the opening. “You can’t go back.” But we can do something about the grains of sand flowing through the chute now—the present—he says.
When kids, we heard, “Keep your nose to the grindstone,” and “Don’t you ever laugh in church.” Our brains take this data in. Thus, “Many of us are programmed to not be happy.” Before it starts, kids of 4 and 5 laugh and giggle 325 times a day, one study showed. A typical adult? About 15 times a day. By the age of 18, we’ve received 180,000 negative comments from parents, teachers and others, the doctor estimates. “We have a right to be happy, but no one teaches us how.”
Here are some steps he offers to boost your level of happiness:
1. Focus. Ask someone to find the color blue and within seconds he or she will spot the color in a book cover, a scarf, the sky overhead. It’s all around us. The same principle holds true with humor. “When you focus on it, you find it,” Dr. Liebgold says.
2. Treat yourself. “When I went on vacations,” he recalls, “I enjoyed some apricot nectar. Finally, it occurred to me that for about ten cents I could drink some every morning.” Sounds simple except that the doctor, like so many of us, grew up in the Great Depression, so treats didn’t come easy at first.
3. Schedule humor into your life. As the former head of Kaiser’s Chronic Pain Management team, Dr. Liebgold asked chronic pain sufferers to do a gratitude exercise. This requires giving thanks for what works and doesn’t hurt first thing in the morning. In other words, don’t let the pain take control.
4. The activity comes first. Mrs. Leibgold enjoys sleeping in, so early in the morning, he heads for his special room where he might enjoy jazz, yodeling, weight lifting, playing tunes with spoons and juggling. “I come out feeling high,” he says, adding that humor and doing what we enjoy creates endorphins—chemical brain boosters about 200 times more potent than morphine.
5. Don’t delay. Friends of the Liebgolds kept saying that they were going on a hot-air balloon adventure “when we get around to it.” A fatal illness ruined that plan. Dr. Liebgold had to deal with his own mortality after discovering he needed carcinoma surgery. He compared it to being hit on the head by a piano. “Man is the only animal who knows in advance that he will die some day,” he says. “How can this knowledge help? It adds an urgency to life. Do whatever it is that you most want to do.”
He recommends Harold Kushner’s books When Bad Things Happen to Good People for coping with tragedy and When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough if mired in the concept that “I’ll be happy when the kids go to college” or “when I get a raise” or “when I retire” instead of enjoying the moment.
He stays aware of what’s going on in the world, but Dr. Leibgold doesn’t tune in on the news (“It’s practically all bad”). Since his retirement, he’s written three books and created a variety of audio- and videotapes about dealing with phobias, improving self esteem and assertiveness.
During his presentation, Dr. Liebgold switches from his wizard’s hat to a top hat and winds up with a towering headpiece straight out of Dr. Seuss. They offer additional evidence he takes his subject but not himself seriously.
Comments