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IF YOU HAVE two minutes and 37 seconds to kill before meeting with your boss, watch the below Louis C.K. video. Yes, because it’s funny, but also because busting your gut before an important event can help you be more successful.
Blogger and “Choose Yourself” author James Altucher says he likes to watch stand-up comedy before every meeting, date, dinner, media appearance, conversation, and public talk.
“I have a lot of inhibitions when I meet people,” he shares on Quora. ”
“I’m scared and somewhat introverted. Stand-up comedians are the best public speakers in the world, and I think they are the most astute social commentators on the human condition.”
Not only that, Altucher reports that watching stand-up gives him a boost of energy, material to fold into his conversation, and a better sense of how to time his communication.
Heaps of psychological studies suggest that a positive mood — like that brought on by laughing at Louis— has all sorts of positive effects, including enhanced memory, improved judgment and decision making, and more willingness to take risks.
A 2010 study is a case in point. In the journal Psychological Science, a team led by University of Western Ontario psychologist Ruby Nadler primed participants with a range of videos:
After watching any of the various videos, participants were then given a test where they had to classify novel stimuli. The result: The folks who laughed along with the baby outperformed their less-jolly peers.
“Generally, positive mood has been found to enhance creative problem solving and flexible yet careful thinking,” Nadler says.
The mechanism at work here is cognitive flexibility, or the ability to take new information and apply it to things you already know about.
Watching funny things — and thus learning to make funny jokes — trains the brain in nimble thinking. Take it from Wake Forest philosopher Adrian Bardon, who in “Comedy: A Geographic and Historical Guide“ writes that:
“Humour is explained by human beings’ special conceptual abilities. The pursuit of humour represents a kind of play that contributes to conceptual flexibility.The feeling associated with this kind of play is amusement …(Humour) actually helps sharpen our ability to respond to cognitively challenging situations.
This would also explain why adults tend to demand more clever and subtle humour than children do: One needs humour of increasing subtlety and complexity in order to challenge one’s cognitive flexibility, and humour can only be funny when it does this.”
So watching a funny video can actually be the opposite of wasting time. Instead, it’s training you to be more cognitively flexible, so you can think on your feet when you’re talking with your boss, your date, or your audience.
- Drake Baer
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Wow, housing crisis, healthcare in a mess, judiciary suspending sentences of thugs, prisoners being let out early due to lack of capacity, people working full time but struggling to make ends meet, nurses emigrating while we trawl the world looking for nurses, I could go on and on…….but Michael Martin wants to ban sun beds, Jesus ….use your time to do something useful.
@Eddie Garvey: Multiple things can be done at the same time.. jesus fkin wept like..
@Ian: Yes, multiple things can, but he chooses to do none.
@Eddie Garvey: With skin cancer being the fastest growing cancer in Ireland (more than 13,000 new cases (over 12,000 non-melanoma skin cancers and 1,100 melanomas) diagnosed each year, I’d say reducing these numbers is “something useful”.
@Jack Hayes: “7% of the population using sunbeds and 3% regularly” seems very high!
No point, it’s only chavs that use them anyways so who cares
@Eddie Garvey: tell us ye love sunbeds without telling us ye love sunbeds !
@Ian: While obviously the above sentiment is predictable I’m not so sure we do anything but make life harder for ourselves.
@Eddie Garvey: Your wasting your time talking about the Bertie Kisser who has been
fooling the people for 40 years
Can we possibly, just maybe, allow grown adults to make up their own minds? Don’t like it? don’t do it/use it/get one/smoke/drink/eat whatever it is but allow us to be a free thinking people
@Isla Carabine: The problem is that grown adults are destroying themselves and are a drain on the health system and public finances because of bad habits!
@another one? what’s going on is the semi state sec: Public finance’s? You mean the taxes the public pays which in turn pays for the health system? Our health system isn’t drained because people are using sunbeds. It’s drained because of poor management and running.
@Ger Whelan: Yes. Well done. Public finances = made up in part of income tax. There is a lot of money spent treating people from issues ranging from skin cancer, to addiction, to obesity…..etc all due to people damaging themselves by poor lifestyle choices….. It is also drained by poor management. Wasted money in the health sector is not down to one thing. People looking after themselves would save a lot of money and resources. Thanks for missing the point completely.
@another one? what’s going on is the semi state sec: Yes, but we always legislate for the minority. It’s driving people nuts.
@Isla Carabine:
We all want freedom,but we also owe it to the younger upcoming generation to lead by example
If we allowed them to do all of those things,including drug taking,the country,and health system would fall apart
How’s about a ban on RTE?
@Padraig O’Brien: All we’ll be left with is Virgin Media channels. No thanks.
Who does Mehole think he is? Justin Trudeau?
Skin cancer is the fastest growing cancer in Ireland. There are over 13,000 new cases of skin cancer diagnosed each year. If you have ever used a sunbed your risk of melanoma increases by 20% and using it before the age of 35 increases your risk by almost 60%. But the usuals whinging here … even if it comes to trying to reduce these numbers.
@Jack Hayes: if you want to help try to find a reason for the global excess mortality rate. I will give you a clue. It is not because of sun beds nor is it because I had a bag of tayto when I was seven
@Oh Mammy: were they cheese and onion or smokey bacon flavoured tayto?
@Ger Whelan: without a doubt it was the smokey bacon. The smoke did not come from organic wood.
@Oh Mammy: But nobody is talking about excess mortality, they’re talking about increased cases of skin cancer – or is that a global conspiracy now too?
@Jason Memail: why do you have to wait till everyone is talking? Independent, critical thinking is what’s needed. Sunbeds are nonsense. I do not doubt they are harmful but nonetheless a distraction. No one was talking about Biden being incapacitated until last week. And that was an easy one.
@Oh Mammy: Here I thought we were living longer.
@Thesaltyurchin: you are behind the times. Update your reading.
@Oh Mammy: I’m talking about skin cancer, not any ‘global excess mortality’, Dim Bulb.
@Jack Hayes: keep burying yourself in their distraction.
Ah he’s back from globe trotting and saving the planet.good man micháel
Mehole.again…stop now journal just stop
Six articles about mehole this week,there’s other chancers out there too
Don’t sun-beds boost the immune system in areas where the population don’t get enough Vitamin D? Maybe we should all use them, not to be browner, just to subsidise our sunless existence.
@Thesaltyurchin: you are better off taking large doses (50,000 mcg) of vitamin d
@Oh Mammy: I was reaching a bit far there in fairness :)
Its proven that sunbeds cause skin cancer and when your in your twenties you don’t realize that later in life you will pay for the sun bed treatments with skin cancer that can kill. Skin cancer becomes a life changing experience for people that get the cancer and it becomes a ailment that is avoidable and a drain on the health service. Choice is good but the choice of giving yourself skin cancer later in life is not a choice a person should have.
What’s that? Mr. Burns wants to block out the Sun?!
I support The ban on him commenting anything
Nice, no more orange lady ?
Where these not banned in the 80s and 90s. Why were they allowed to start up again.
@Colette Byrne: (a) They were not (b) they were not.
have your say