Free Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection by Jia Jiang Page B

working and came over to greet me at the counter. After a few casual pleasantries, I asked how much it would cost for a hair trimming.
    “What kind of dog?” she asked.
    “How much would it cost to trim
my
hair?” I replied.
    After a brief pause, she shook her head and said, “We don’t do that.” Then she burst out laughing.
    “Then can you treat me like a German shepherd?” I asked. Then I remembered my Asian roots and appearance. “Actually, I am not German. Can you treat me like a Tibetan mastiff, or a chow chow or something?”
    All four groomers started giggling.
    “I’ll behave. You can tell me to sit, and I’ll sit and I won’t bark,” I said. I was on a roll.
    “I’m sure you’ll be the best client we have,” the groomer joked back, laughing even harder.
    I gave one last attempt before the rejection became final: “What about a manicure?” The groomers’ laughter became almost uncontrollable.
    Leaving PetSmart, I felt a sense of satisfaction. I didn’t mind the no. In fact, I was feeling pretty good about myself because I figured I’d just made these groomers’ day.
    But why didn’t I feel any pain or fear? How come my survival instinct hadn’t kicked in, and the opioids hadn’t started flowing? Why were they conspicuously silent this time?
    I felt like I was onto something, and so I did some more research. It turns out that laughter has been linked to killing pain—literally.
    There is a ton of anecdotal evidence that humor helps to reduce pain and stress—even among politicians, who are rarely known for their comedy. When heckled during a speech to the British Parliament, Ronald Reagan playfully replied, “Is there an echo in here?” Before going into surgery after his assassination attempt, he jokingly said to the surgeons: “I hope you are all Republicans.” On the other side of the political spectrum, when a reporter pointedly asked John F. Kennedy how he felt about the Republican National Committee’s adoption of a resolution that essentially called him a failure, he replied, “I assume it passed unanimously.” Mahatma Gandhi even said: “If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.”
    Researchers have even proved that humor—and laughter specifically—can actually mitigate pain. In 2011, Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford University, ran an experiment in which he exposed participants to various degrees of pain by having them wear frozen wine-cooling sleeves on their arms or keep their legs bent ninety degrees while leaning against a wall, as if they were sitting on an imaginary chair. To determine their normal pain threshold, Dunbar measured how long participants could resist the pain before admitting that they couldn’t take it anymore.
    Then he subjected participants to the same pain again,but this time while showing them a variety of videos, from comedies such as
The Simpsons
and
South Park
, to neutral videos featuring pet training and golf, to documentaries meant to evoke good feelings, such as
Planet Earth
. He found that participants’ pain thresholds significantly increased only when they watched the comedies—and specifically when they laughed. On the other hand, neutral and feeling-good films made no difference. In another words, laughter reduced their pain and stress.
    Dunbar believes that the power of laughter even has evolutionary roots. “Dr. Dunbar thinks laughter may have been favored by evolution because it helped bring human groups together, the way other activities like dancing and singing do,” wrote reporter James Gorman in the
New York Times
. Laughing, dancing, and singing all produce endorphins—a different kind of opioid that not only fights pain but also makes us feel good. Laughing can be like receiving a double shot of natural painkillers from our brain.
    So that explained why I didn’t feel much pain during the rejection attempts that left me laughing. The fear and pain that might have been