Bridging Laughter and Science: Positive Psychology, Cancer, and Humor with Merv Neal (Australia’s Leading Laughter Expert)

Dr. Brad Miller:00:08

So he's Merv Neal, Australia's leading Gelotologist, and he'll unpack that for us a little bit. And he is all about helping people with their emotional, mental, and physical health through laughter. MERV, welcome to our conversation here today.

Merv Neal:00:24

Brad, thanks very much for the opportunity to come on and spread the message in these podcasts.

Dr. Brad Miller:00:29

What an honor to be with you and to share this time, you just have quite a lot of great things. I should, should say your website is mervneal.com, I always like to say this towards the top of our conversation. So people can check you out, because you a lot of got a lot of great information there before we kind of unpack what you do now about basically a wake up call that you had lit a fire under you in a in a way, tell us a little bit about that, that pivotal moment that changed you, not 20 years or so ago.

Merv Neal:00:58

Yeah, 20 years ago. Where does time go? And it was back in 2002, and when I say to people that I'm a geolotologist or laughter expert or laughter therapist, they go, Well, that's rather weird. So, how do you get into these weird opportunities? And sure, careers are when something weird happens to you, and back in 2002, I'd been working really, really hard. I owned an IT business as we went through the Y, 2k phenomenon, going from one century to another, where the world was going to stop because the computers weren't going to tick over to the right second, and people were just buying as much it as they could, as quickly as they could. So it was an emotional buy. And if you want to make a lot of money, you know?

Dr. Brad Miller:01:45

So, yeah, you were doing business-wise. You were doing pretty well then, right?

Merv Neal:01:50

Doing great. Doing great, because I was just in the right place at the right time, selling it when people thought that they needed it, and absolutely buying emotionally. So there wasn't a lot of rationale in what they were doing.

Dr. Brad Miller:02:03

They liked what they were doing. The white, what the YT, CR, ytk crisis was a big deal for.

Merv Neal:02:09

It was huge. It was huge. But Brad, what a great time to be in business if you're selling it. Sure, I was, I was riding the wave of success. My business was expanding like nothing else. And look, we made lots of money. We were very successful and made lots of money. Now, when the Y2k thing died down, all of a sudden, we projected and looked forward and said, well, the business has no future. It's just had its future in the recent past. What am I? What am I going to do? And I felt rather tired, I'm going, well, it's just because I was making all that money and working so hard. So I said to my wife at the time, Oh, she's still my wife, by the way.

Dr. Brad Miller:02:48

Well, that's good. That's always a good thing.

Merv Neal:02:52

What I should have said was that, at the time, I said to my wife, who is still my current wife. You know, sometimes punctuation matters. Sometimes, it doesn't, but it really does. And at the time, I said to my wife, who was still my wife, after 45 or 46 years, I said, I'm really quite tired. I've made lots of money. Why don't we just sell the business and enjoy life? I was 45 at the time, and I thought, imagine if I could financially retire. How cool would that be? So, put the business on the market. It sold for a particular price, and I sat back, and I'm going, Isn't life great? There is a guy. Unfortunately, once the money went into the bank, I looked down, and I'm in trouble here. I was hemorrhaging internally and externally. My body had collapsed. It had just given way. Had been running on adrenaline and alcohol and long hours of work for several years, and as soon as I went, the body just let go. So I was rushed. I was rushed tothe hospital, and they said, Don't know what you've been doing, but everything inside has shut down. Your bone marrow stopped producing blood. I thought your blood just kept on going. It actually reproduces over about 30 days. So your bone marrow, your bone marrow stopped producing blood; therefore, you have no clotting agents, you have no red blood cells. Everything had stopped regarding my blood and your immune system's dead as well.

Dr. Brad Miller:04:20

So not a good time, not a good list of things to be happening with you.

Merv Neal:04:25

Not at all, not at all. So Brad, I just said to the doctors, I said Well, what do I do? And they said, well, in your condition, we recommend you go home and get your affairs in order. That was a serious decision.

Dr. Brad Miller:04:35

Oh, my goodness, that gets your attention, doesn't it?

Merv Neal:04:39

My goodness, it certainly did. So I went home, and within about 48 hours, I'm a business person, you know, I get stuff done. Within 48 hours, I'd organize my funeral, finances, family, and friends, and then sat down and started to laugh. Now my wife, my wife, came up and said, Why are you laughing? I said, I don't know. She said, There's nothing funny about this. Dollars. I said, No, there's not I said, I just can't stop laughing. And then I had this, this urge for oysters. I didn't particularly like oysters, but all of a sudden, I had this urge to eat oysters by the dozens. Okay? And then my little Jack Russell terrier dog looked up at me and said, Let's go for a walk. So I started walking at least three times a day with my Jack Russell, Terry. I'd sold the business. I had nothing else to do. Then I'd sit down and eat a dozen oysters. Then I'd laugh for about an hour until I

Dr. Brad Miller:05:30

What a combination, walk the dog, eat oysters, I laugh.

Merv Neal:05:36

What a combo, repeat, repeat, repeat after. After a week, I was still here, Brad, so I went back to the doctors and said, I'm still here. What's going on? I said, especially with this, especially with this laughter stuff, why am I laughing? And they said, We don't know. We think maybe you've lost your mind. They

Dr. Brad Miller:05:54

said we could never try to quantify that. Okay, it was

Merv Neal:05:58

a fair assessment, because who laughs in the face of death? We say it, but who actually does it, you know, right? So they said, there's a ward down here that we'd like you to go into. And I said, No, I'm not going into a psych ward. I said, just leave me alone. I said, Let me try and process this whole thing anyway. I kept laughing and laughing, and I finally went back to an Indian doctor. I think that's interesting, because Dr Kataria, who established Laughter Yoga International, as an Indian doctor, yes, and he took, he took a particular interest in me, and he said, um, what's going on? I said, I'm just laughing. I can't stop laughing, and I'm eating oysters by the dozen, and I'm exercising. He said, Great, keep it up. I said, What do you mean? What do you mean? Keep it up. I said, " You're a doctor in oncology and cancer. I didn't have cancer, but it was similar to it. And I said, What do you mean? Keep laughing. And he said, Well, here's what laughter does for you from a body, mind, and physiology point of view. I said, That's fascinating. I said, What do you recommend, Doctor of oncology? He said, Keep laughing. Keep laughing. Don't stop laughing. I'm going, wow. So that was my prescription back then. Fast forward to 2019 I was invited onto a TV show, and one of the health professionals who was interviewing me was a brain surgeon, one of our great Neurological Surgeons here in Australia, and he diagnosed me on national TV 17 years after my illness, because that's the sort of person he is. And he suggested that not only was I hemorrhaging internally and externally, but I was actually having mini strokes and hemorrhaging into my hypothalamus and in my brain. And he said, when people do that, they will start to laugh uncontrollably. He said it's a thing called pathological laughter, and it's real. I'm going. Where were you 17 years ago? I really could have you know done with that information.

Dr. Brad Miller:07:51

Well, just for a second. Was he saying that was kind of a symptom or a bad thing, that you were laughing? What was he saying there about that?

Merv Neal:07:58

He said it was a side effect of my having many strokes. Okay, all right, okay, it was a side effect. So I'm going to say that makes sense, that that's what was happening. So that's the point of that story, Brad, I didn't go looking for laughter to heal me. It found me. It found me through a malfunction in my brain back to 2002, eight months later, totally cured, walked out of there, and put it down to the laughter, as did the doctor.

Dr. Brad Miller:08:27

Wow, how cool is that? That's awesome.

Merv Neal:08:32

It's very cool. And so I went back to my business mentor. At the time. I've always had business mentors. I highly recommend having a good personal or business mentor. I said, Well, what now? And he said, Well, financially, you're okay. He said, Why don't you, why don't you dig into that laughter stuff? He said, If it just saved your life, maybe it could save somebody else's life. I'm going, that would be pretty cool if I could spend the rest of my life not making more money, but saving people's lives. So that's what I did. And the thing that I found was missing, Brad, straight away, was data, information, and research. So you and I were chatting before the podcast, and you said, there's so much information and data and research, sure, on this laugh, human stuff. Go back 20 years. There wasn't a lot, right? There wasn't a lot that was incredible. So I decided that I would become the guy, certainly in Australia, who would dive deep into the impact that laughter has on people's body, mind, and physiology, which is what a geolotologist is. And I would get the data and information for my benefit, along with everybody else's.

Dr. Brad Miller:09:37

That's my life, and now that as a result of you becoming Australia's laughing expert, and that's, as you said, that is exactly what geologist means. But so let's unpack that a little bit here. So what have you done with that? Now, let's talk about some of the research that you have done and how you've applied it to people who have. A need there. And for instance, some of your research has led you to you've written a book the positive psychology of laughter and humor, and I know a part of this, you've also developed basically a formula or a process here, and I'd like you to just go into a little bit of what you found out in those stages and what led you eventually to your formula. If you could unpack that for us as well.

Merv Neal:10:21

Sure. So once again, my focus was on laughter and not humor. And I found this medical doctor called Dr Kataria, who'd established this thing called laughter yoga and popularized it and started to run laughter clubs around the world. So I had a chat to him, and just said, What are you doing and why? And from a medical point of view, he told me about the medical benefits of laughter, and how if we get together as a group and just laugh as an exercise, it will lead to health benefits. I'm going, that's pretty cool. I'll jump on that train and see where it takes me until something else actually arises. So the interesting thing about laughter, X laughter yoga, I beg your pardon. And what's interesting about laughter yoga is that it uses laughter to create laughter, and not comedy or jokes or humor. So that's the big difference. But we're still going down the same path, humorous comedians, joke tellers, gee, lotologists, laughter yoga people, we're all going down the same path of creating laughter, because that's what laughter.

Dr. Brad Miller:11:23

So just an apple, just to give this kind of an example application, you list, literally without an impetus, say, you know, a joke or a TV show or whatever, you just physically say, Okay, let's just start laughing. And you do, and that generates other laughter. Is that kind of how, just in very basic terms?

Merv Neal:11:40

That's it, that's it. And that Brad is really weird because people's rational mind is going, hang on. There's nothing funny about this. Yeah, and we're going, there doesn't have to be just start laughing. So there's been this big debate amongst researchers about spontaneous and nonspontaneous or simulated laughter, and which one's the best, and all that sort of stuff. I really don't care. I really don't care. As long as people are laughing, sure, I just happen to, I just happen to have gone down the pathway of saying, I want to create laughter through laughter, and other people will go down the humor, or the comedy, or jokes track.

Dr. Brad Miller:12:17

And I think it makes some sense, or I think the stimulus is an interesting thought here about what type of stimuli. I just use my own life as an example, but you've heard this term quite a bit. I had to laugh to keep from crying, because oftentimes it is in my case, when I got the phone call that I had cancer, my immediate reaction was just to chuckle and laugh, just like because of the absurdity of it, and other things that I felt, and I felt a little nuts, you know about that felt a little dizzy, a little insane in the moment, but that was, and you hear that terminology, but I lived it out, kind of getting the worst news of my life and laughter, and my wife thought it was crazy, but and I had, I had The phone up to her, and she's in tears, and I'm laughing and so but my point is, the stimuli was something negative, and what you're saying the stimuli Does, does matter here, but the result of laughter is the is the there's the medicine, right? Absolutely.

Merv Neal:13:18

And so you and I have a very similar story about laughing when we're in a bad place, right? And that's just, that's just laughter finding a balance for us, you know, if we could cry if we want, and nothing wrong with crying, nothing wrong with crying, getting rid of all those negative chemicals, buddy.

Dr. Brad Miller:13:37

Sometimes it's both, isn't it? Sometimes there are people you hear people talk about; I laughed until I cried. You know, that happens that way, too.

Merv Neal:13:46

You know, indeed it does so when people, especially when they are in distress and have been given a negative diagnosis or fallen ill or something like that, the last thing they want to do is cry, is laugh. But that's possibly the best thing that they need to do, is laugh. So that's just the process that I use of introducing laughter exercises to people who don't feel like laughing, which first of all, interrupts the process the mindset, which is going very, very negative, and then promotes the concept of positive thoughts, which is what positive psychology, essentially, is all about.

Dr. Brad Miller:14:23

And you started studying this, and you started coming and putting some frameworks on this, and some identifying terminology, quotients, formulas, and things like this. And so what? What can tell a little bit? What you found out, tell us what we're at this quotient, for instance, and how that does apply to people's lives.

Merv Neal:14:40

There's an old saying in business that what gets measured gets done. Yes, right? So, you can't manage what you can't measure. So I was always numbers, numbers, numbers. And I just said to people, if you can define something, I'll put a number to it so that we can measure it to see whether it's going well or whether it's not. You. So I started to look into the research. And I thought, what measurement is for laughter? And guess what? There wasn't one or not that I could find anyway. So I decided to sit down and analyze a laugh. So when someone goes, hahaha, what? What does that look like? What does that sound like? And I had six years in the military, where I was an electronics engineer. So we used to spend our time looking at graphs and sine waves of signal strength and signal optimization, etc. So the best quality signal would be sent to the other end and picked up by the receiver on the other end. And I'm going, well, laughter is a signal, it's an energy, it's a vibration. So I started working with sound engineers, and I said, Let me have a look at what laughter looks like on your equipment. And they started to show these sine waves and frequency, amplitude, and all that sort of thing. Interesting. Great. Yeah. And this fascinated me. I don't know if it fascinated anybody else, but it fascinated me in that I could not just hear laughter, but I could now see it and analyze it. So I started to work with a sound engineer, and I said, What if the perfect laughter looked like this? So I worked on what the perfect laughter was for me. Now what's interesting about that, Brad, is our own unique, authentic laughter is like our DNA or our thumbprint. You. You laugh like you. Wow, I laugh like me, and 7 billion other people in the world laugh like them. But what is that perfect laughter for you? Because that's the laughter that actually resonates, that just feels fantastic, that does all the good things in our bodies.

Dr. Brad Miller:16:41

So just to hit the pause, there, are you saying that there are actually nuances and the sound waves and so on, that you can kind of determine between an authentic, genuine laughter or maybe like a nervous laughter or a scared laughter, or something like that. Is there something? Is there something to that?

Merv Neal:16:57

Absolutely, there is. Now I've been gifted with an ear for laughter as well. So my daughter, Brad, is a concert flute player and conductor, and she can she has an ear for music. She has a thing called perfect pitch. And she can ask someone to play an instrument, and she'll go or higher, lower, oh, that's it, right there. Stop there. That is it, there. And she'll do that with the different parts of the orchestra, and then the orchestra plays in perfect harmony. That just sounds absolutely beautiful. I have the ability to listen to someone's laughter. I'm going. Oh, that's a bit strange. Oh, hang on. Why is that? Oh, you're not really letting loose there. But I look at their face bread, and I go, that's not a happy face. That's not a happy face. So in my research, I found a software package called pain check, and pain check is used in aged care residential homes here in Australia anyway, to measure the level of pain of dementia patients who can't communicate how much level of pain they're in, and what the algorithms and the artificial intelligence done does is have a look at this, okay, gives a score, gives a score out of 10 as to the level of pain you may be in. All right, so people often come up to me,

Dr. Brad Miller:18:17

So this is kind of a combination of the sound waves and the look of your face. It can measure both

Merv Neal:18:23

Absolutely. So you've got the visual, you've got the visual of the sound wave, you've got the look of the person, but then you've got the ear, sure, listening to it and going, Oh, that's perfect. That's beautiful. Like listening to someone playing a musical instrument. You'll know someone who's playing the right note at the right time, and someone who's not sure. So putting all that together, I'm going, there has to be an E equals MC squared here somewhere. So I created it. I looked, and nobody else had, so I did, and it's out. You can find it on my website, moveneal.com, and it's L times r divided by V times p, length times repetition, divided by volume times pitch. Now essentially that's that's the four elements of a laugh, the length of the laughter, the repetitiveness of the laughter, how long we do it over and over and over again, because that's when the therapeutic values come in place, divided by the volume, the decibel level and the pitch, which is the frequency. And from all of those things, we can listen, we can observe, we can see the person laughing. And then I'll go. Look, can you make that a little bit longer? I'd like you to make that length just a little bit longer. Oh, I think you're a bit high. Can you make it? And all of a sudden, we start to play with it. And then I go, there, how was that? And I go, Oh, wow, that sounds awesome.

Dr. Brad Miller:19:41

And so there's actual physical relief at that optimal moment. You've optimized laughter as a treatment, as it were. And I think it's interesting what you say there, because it also reminds me of some of the terminology that people use to describe laughter or laughter events. Because, you know, I've been a public speaker for a long time, and then sometimes you get caught. People talk about being on a roll, for instance, yeah, like, like a comedian or a speaker on a roll, or waves of laughter, or contagious laughter, or it, you know, I'll talk about my two little granddaughters for a minute giggle fits where they just start giggling, you know, they're, they're, they're seven and five years old, and sometimes they just start flat out giggling for an open, apparent reason, and it becomes contagious. Or this is sort of what we're talking about here, how there are these nuances of how things do impact, and they can be, and sometimes people laugh so much that they really can't hear themselves. Or, you know, hear other people, things like that. So am I in my inner work close to what you're working on here?

Merv Neal:20:47

Oh, no, you're right on the money. Right on the money. So people will have experiences when they work with me, doing the laughter training, laughter coaching, or laughter workshops, or something like that. And they will come up to me, if not that day, the next day, and they'll go, oh my goodness, guess what happened overnight? Or they'll come up and they'll go, I just heard something go pop in my body. I just experienced my eyes start to water. This is an eye that, through surgery, has not been able to lubricate, and now it's pouring tears. What's going on and brand over 20 years, I've documented these stories in just one-minute videos of what our health professionals will call medical miracles, because they can't explain it. So it's my job. It's my job to go, well, what could the explanation be from a non-health professional about the health benefits of what just happened? And I've put forward some theories and some ideas that laughter unblocks a big plug of negative emotions that are in our body,and just unplugs all of us. I

Dr. Brad Miller:21:52

Just happened to think of another phrase people use, side-splitting humor means that it hurts. You know, laughs so much that it hurts, you know, because there's some sort of a physiological thing happening there. And so it's, I was going to ask you about some of the surprising things that you found. But you've also, you've kind of already shared some of those things about how ongoing, sustained laughter is showing some benefits that perhaps the other psychological community, the medical community, and the social community may not have identified or appreciated. Have you found this to be the case at all? Are you having some navigation or some interpretation to do with entities that are out there?

Merv Neal:22:38

Yeah, I think what you're saying is, do these entities embrace this weirdness of what I'm doing? And certainly, going back 20 years ago, I was that nutty guy that was out there laughing uncontrollably, just ignore him. He'll go away. You know, that's all that's weird for us. What's happened over those 20 years, and certainly post-COVID? Brad, I'm not sure if you've noticed this,but the whole world has opened up to anything else that can share. There's been this real shift at an energy level and a psychological level where people are open to anything, including our health professionals and including our academics. So it was while we're in lockdown here in Melbourne, the longest number of lockdown days of any city in the world. You can't do that to people and think that they're going to come out of it. Okay, you know?

Dr. Brad Miller:23:30

So we'll have a lot of catching up to do. So not only a physical health crisis, it was a definite mental health crisis going on.

Merv Neal:23:37

Absolutely, absolutely, so I was found by a team of academics online, because all my work was being done online, and then all of a sudden they said, Would you like to work with us? And would you like to do research studies with us? I'm going to attend Bolton University in the UK, and Professor Jerome Carson and Dr. FREDA Pinsky want me on board. Really? I'm going, yeah, they're too. So that was my Wow. And then Professor Jerome, who was one of the great human beings in the world, said we need to write a book on this. This is groundbreaking stuff, and we should call it the positive psychology of laughter and humor, rather than humor creating laughter. So this is the book. It's an academic book. It's online for mainly people studying psychology, and in particular, positive psychology. So all of a sudden, I'm hanging out with these universities and professors and doctors as part of a team, and they call me Brad the pracademic.

Dr. Brad Miller:24:36

Now, okay, I saw, I saw that on your website, the pracademic, go there for a minute and help us understand the relationship you have with these medical doctors, these researchers. You're a business guy, you know, but yeah, so you come from a different aspect here, business guys that I know, you know, in one way or another, they're always thinking about, how can I make this work? In order to you. You know, serve the public, either make a sale or whatever it would be. There's a kind of bottom-line mentality. So, go there, how this all worked out here, how you guys work together, and unpack that word, pracademic.

Merv Neal:25:11

Yeah, so academics have an academic mind, which is not my mind. I've got a business mind. And in business, you've got to be really, really practical. It can't be theoretical and be successful in business. So the doctors and professors would create this concept and these surveys, and ultimately, what they are trying to achieve. And then they go, but how are we going to do this? Hang on, how about we pull in the pracademic and I just say, What are you trying to do? And they say, we're trying to achieve this outcome. And I said, Oh, well, you do it like this, and I just led the team down that side. So awesome. It's a marriage made in heaven, really, because we all are bringing our unique experiences, and mine is 20 years of laughter and 20 years of story. So Professor Jerome, as an example, said to me one day, he said, Merv, I've been telling people for 30 years, it's data, research data, research data research. He said, What about the stories? He said, ever since time, ever since time began, we've been communicating in stories, and now we're communicating in data, research, data research. He said, Tell your 20 years of stories, and that's just groundbreaking for me. That's the application of the data and research; research doesn't do a whole lot of good sitting on a book on a shelf. It's got to be applied to people's lives to make life better, to for the for the greater, for the greater good. So let's go there for a minute. Nerve, my nerve.

Dr. Brad Miller:26:41

God, I just put your, I just put your first name and your last name together. Got nerve, wow. Nerve, the nerve of me to do that.

Merv Neal:26:52

Oh, well, then we got a good laugh out of that. That's a good one, and I'd better your chart. That would be a genuine, genuine laugh there, but absolutely there, but the whatever where I was going with this, tell us a story about someone who just had some profound turnaround, where there was something dramatic that just could not be denied, that this was a factor. You mentioned. Somebody has one-minute videos a minute ago. Yeah, I've got a million of them, but one of them springs to mind because your podcast is about cancer, and this was a young man who came to my laughter club, just turned up and said, I have a brain tumor, an inoperable brain tumor, and my surgeon recommended laughter. Now, ironic. Ironically, this was the same surgeon that I met 10 years later on that TV show. Yeah, this, this is how the universe works now. So it was the same surgeon that I met 10 years ago on TV who diagnosed me on national TV. And the first thing he said, when I said, I'm a laugh therapist, he goes, Oh, laughter. I tell all of my patients to laugh. And I said, Yeah, I know, because I came across 110 years ago. So this young man walked in with his lovely young wife. He said, I have an operable brain tumor. My surgeon recommended I come along and laugh at a laughter club. So here I am. I'm going. That is amazing. That is amazing that you are even told to come here. So he changed his diet, and he changed his exercise regimen. He got into laughter big time weekly, and I gave him daily laughter exercises, along with high-pitched frequency music. So there was an awful lot happening there in regards to the vibration and the sound waves to go into the good old noggin. Anyway, it's about six to nine months, and he comes back, and he goes, Move. I've got some news for you. He said, I just went for my three-monthly checkup. The tumors are gone. That was amazing. Now I am not for one second saying that I can cure brain tumors, not for one second, but it went. It disappeared. It disappeared because he changed his diet and his exercise, and, you know, the laughter, that sort of stuff.

Dr. Brad Miller:29:05

And there's one side, and there are some things are just a bit mysterious, and you allow me a second, you know, they can be a little bit spiritual, or God like to involve with that as well, that there are things that can happen to us when we change our mind, change our attitude, change our spirit, change our bodies, that things can happen.

Merv Neal:29:22

Absolutely, and something has changed in our DNA to make us sick. Yeah, right, that's what happened. Your DNA changes, and you become sick because there is a malfunction at the moment. So, if something malfunctioned to change your DNA, is there something out there that can change it back? And if there is, well, let's observe it. And I believe that's what happens.

Dr. Brad Miller:29:44

And it can be, it can be used in coordination with medical science, psychology, and mental health counseling, and anything else, exercise and diet, the whole bit. It's, it's not a, it's not a silo. Here it is, it is an integration. Of all these things, and that's going to seem like that's what you're finding out with your work with the doctors and the researchers. And do you want to go with you to something else you're involved with that, I think, is related to this, which is laughter yoga. And a lot of people, when they think of yoga, they think, you know, a stretching exercise thing.

Merv Neal:30:18

And, yeah, so laughter yoga is laughter exercises combined with yogic breathing. So at some stage, we're going to laugh, we're going to exhale, exhale, exhale, but then we've got to stop and we're going to breathe in. So, Brad, I'm not sure of the number, but I think there might be 1000 different types of yogas out there. We focus on the one, which involves putting your left ankle behind your right ear and standing on.

Dr. Brad Miller:30:42

Hey, but my friend, you and I are about the same age. If we could do that, we'd be, you know, we'd have our own weird channel, which we don't want to talk about.

Merv Neal:30:54

So, so, so we've focused on yoga breathing in conjunction with laughter exercises. And that's why it's called laughter yoga. So we don't necessarily combine any physical moves, but we certainly embody stretching and moving the body and that sort of thing. But that's what laughter yoga is. So once again, going back 20 years ago, very misunderstood, and if you mentioned yoga to someone, they said, Oh, we're not into that religion. Well, it's not a religion, but then you gave up on that debate, the concept of laughter yoga, which is laughter exercises in conjunction with yoga breathing. And that's when the magic starts to happen for me, anyway. But I think there's a saying out there that says we all laugh the same. Now we don't laugh all the same, but when we do laugh, we have our own authentic laughter that connects with other people. So I can connect with cross cultures with anybody through laughter. There are no barriers. We seem to have this connection, and I think it's through the energy and the vibration coming from me and connecting with them. We're doing a study in Nepal, or Malawi in Africa, which is the other one that I'm involved with at the moment. And people will say, Oh, there are cultural issues. I said, well, there might be, but I don't think there is. With laughter. I think we can sort of put aside all of those cultural issues and just start to laugh in our own authentic way, which connects us as individuals on a, dare I say it, a spiritual, a breath level, sure, a really, a really high level. I'm mindful of cultures, but not afraid to go there with the laughter, because I believe laughter crosses those cultural barriers.

Dr. Brad Miller:32:29

What's fascinating as well, as you do some work where you're applying therapeutic laughter in business settings to help people basically with their productivity. Are you finding acceptance of this? And just tell us a little bit about how that works.

Merv Neal:32:41

Yeah, it works very well. So one of the things that I've got on my side, Brad, is I've got 50 years as a business person, so that gets me through most doors. Then I've got this rather weird concept, which scientifically and medically, we've proven can change people's body, mind, and physiology in a very positive way, then we've got the evidence. We've got the research to prove it. So the very first research study that I did was with business people. I'm going, well, if it helped me in business, who was a business person who got sick, I don't want other people in business getting sick. So that was the very first research study that I did. Several research studies later, we did two more, and I said to Professor Jerome, I want to go into business with this idea. Went straight into the business. I told them about the laughing, which is just one minute of laughing per day, but just starting your day with one minute of laughter, and then laughing back three times a day.

Dr. Brad Miller:33:42

So it's four minutes of laughter spread out over the day. Part of your work day would be to do this, right?

Merv Neal:33:47

Okay, absolutely. So why would we not start the work day with colleagues laughing for one minute? Now we've got one minute, so there's no time barrier there, and then it puts them on an emotional high. So this is a thing called mood, and when we shift the mood of the individuals, Brad, it's another business term called morale. So I've been in business long enough that says if morale is down, if everybody's mood is down and we're not feeling good, we don't turn up to work. Or if we do, we don't turn up and we don't work. So I focus on boosting morale by boosting the mood of the individuals, which then leads to the flow effect, and feeling good about themselves. They're having better relationships with the other people. They're more energized, so they're more likely to work; their thought process is clearer. It has a flow-on effect. So our research study that we did proved that now it's very hard for me as a business person to walk in and talk to another business person and lay down that story and then turn around and go, no thanks. We don't want our people to feel better at work. We don't want increased productivity. We don't want them connecting better as a team. It's a bit of a no-brainer. And the other thing Brad, that I'll mention. And quickly is the disassociation that COVID caused with, oh yeah, putting everybody now that was that was brilliant, and it was tragic. All at once, we found another way to work. We don't have to necessarily go to work, which works for some people but doesn't work for others. So we're in this really interesting hybrid work stage at the moment, where some people will shine at home and others won't. They need to be back in the workplace. So I just say, what if we could connect both teams at a home model and work model, and connect the,m and then boost morale, which will have the outcomes? And we've found that the outcome,s uh, there.

Dr. Brad Miller:35:41

So they just and they can measure their bottom line, or their business, or whatever it would be, and that's awesome. And I think it makes some sense, Merv, that, you know, the settings I've been in, you know, churches and social organizations, businesses that have schools, people it with when there's some natural, uplifting thing, you know, like the teacher who tells a dumb joke before they start the class, or the business person who, you know, they have their newsletter that has a dad joke on it. You know, they start the day that way. Whether there's not the intentional process you talk about, when people do that, it's overall better feeling. You enjoy that. Those are the teachers you remember; those are the bosses you work for. You. You remember, you know, the coworkers you remember, the ones who made you feel a bit better. And it's make some sense. Well, let's bring it around to this, my friend, some fascinating stuff here, but let's just say that there is a business person or somebody out there who's in a funk. It could be somebody dealing with cancer, like we talk about a lot in this here, but it could be someone who's dealing with something else that's eating them alive, a mental health issue, or, you know, they're having a bad experience in business. What would be your suggestion for them to kind of start laugh therapy with the way you might teach it if you're trying to get somebody to, at least to be introduced to this?

Merv Neal:37:01

Well, once again, I go back to the start of the day, so I've just woken up. How do I feel? And I'm a business person, I like to measure everything. So I say to people, you know, how do you feel right now? And they'll go, great. I said, I can't measure great. I can't measure not bad. Give me a number out of 10. How do you feel? Now, what's interesting about that, Brad, is that you go into our medical institutions, and when it comes to pain, you know what they say?

Dr. Brad Miller:37:28

Oh, yeah, they measure it that way. Yes, I'm familiar with that, yes.

Merv Neal:37:31

So you can't dispute my simplistic concept of, let's measure how you feel out of 10, because that's how they measure pain. And so I just say, How do you feel? Out of 10? And they go six. And I go based on what, based on what. Let's go back to zero out of 10. So here's a game, Brad, zero out of 10. If you were zero out of 10, what's the word that would describe how you felt? Zero out of 10? What would you say? Depressed? Great. Let's start there. Now let's go to 10 out of 10. Let's go to 10 out of 10. Poor, absolutely. What's the word exhilarant? Exhilarated? Great, great, great. So on the depressed to exhilarated scale, where are you now? And they go, Oh, I know exactly where I am. Does that make sense? Yeah, all right, once we define it, we can measure it, so we've got depressed, we've got exhilarating. And people go, I'm four, okay, I want you to be five. I want you to be six, I want you to be seven. What could move us away from depression? Well, the first thing is laughter, any type of laughter, laughter, yoga, laughter, comedy, humor, laughter. It doesn't matter. Laughter moves you away because it interrupts that depressive thought process and puts us in the moment, so it stops. Okay. Now, how are we going to get you towards exhilarating what can we do? Well, we can do some more laughter exercises that are more uplifting, that are self-congratulatory, that go, I'm a good person. Things are going well, this is one. So we change the type of exercises to put the body into a state of joy or exhilaration. Yeah, that the mind that the mind then goes, the body's having a good time. It's moving towards exhilaration. Maybe I should stop this, and maybe I should go with it. So what I do with my work, Brad, is I influence the mind through the body, not the body, through the mind.

Dr. Brad Miller:39:24

And that's how these are some of the I'm assuming, these are some of the exercises you use in your workshops. And what have you that type of thing that's awesome? Well, lots of great stuff here. MERV, I just know that our listeners here, they're all look, you know, we really cater to folks who have decided they're not done living, they're going to go they're going to get on with life, and they're going to go hard, you know, finish strong, to whatever, whatever that means. And need the tools and the strategies to do that, and that's part of what you're providing. So would you share with us a little bit about how people can learn more about what? You are about, or perhaps more about, your book or anything else. But how can people get connected with Merv?

Merv Neal:40:05

Yeah, look, just email me. It's what we found because of COVID. Brad, we can connect throughout the world. How did I find you? It wasn't through walking down the street here in Melbourne. It was online. So it's taught us that we can be connected in some way, utilizing the online tools that we had to use during COVID. So if anybody would like to contact me, just send me an email at mervneil.com and let's chat. Sorry, MERV at MERV neil.com, it's on my website anyway, yes, just send me an email and we'll chat. I get lots of emails from lots of people all around the world saying, I have this situation. Can you help me? I'm going, well, that's actually my job, to help people now be more joyful and more exhilarated. So just drop me a line, and the next thing, if we can't solve or address a situation, email, guess what? We have a Zoom call now, sit up, and we have a chat. So that's how I work now. And the interesting thing is, Brad, when I come across an interesting person, I send them an email, and then I have a Zoom, and then all of a sudden, I'm working with Bolton University and then doing things in Nepal and things in Malawi. So we've become so much more connected. And the reason I've been connected to these high-level universities and academics is that I've reached out to offer support. Well, if you need support, reach out to me. We've got nothing to lose, nothing to well, and

Dr. Brad Miller:41:31

That's fairly part of our mission that we do here at Cancer and Comedy. We're all about developing a sensibility of a community of people who are like-minded in terms of helping people to heal with hope and humor, what we like to say or turn the gram into a grin is another way we like to put it nicely. So, so as you certainly do, do that, my friend, and thank you for joining us. We'll put all those connections in our show notes at cancercomedy.com, and we thank you for being our guest today. His name is Merv and Neil, M, E, R, V, N, E, A, l.com mervneal.com, we'll put all those connections to our show notes. He is Australia's laughter expert, and he's been our guest today on the Cancer and Com