THE HEALTH BENEFITS OF HUMOR AND LAUGHTER

Laughter is strong medicine for mind and body
“Your sense of humor is one of the most powerful tools you have to make certain that your daily mood and emotional state support good health.”
Laughter is a powerful antidote to stress, pain, and conflict. Nothing works faster or more dependably to bring your mind and body back into balance than a good laugh. Humor lightens your burdens, inspires hopes, connects you to others, and keeps you grounded, focused, and alert.
With so much power to heal and renew, the ability to laugh easily and frequently is a tremendous resource for surmounting problems, enhancing your relationships, and supporting both physical and emotional health.

The Benefits of LaughterHealth Benefits:

#Mental Health Benefits:

-Adds joy and zest to life
-Eases anxiety and fear
-Releige stress
-Improves mood
-Enhances resilience

#Social Benefits:

-Strengthens relationship
-Attracts others to us
-Enhances teamwork
-Helps defuse conflict
-Promotes group bonding

#Physical Health Benefits:  

-Boosts immunity
-Lowers stress hormones
-Decreases pain
-Relaxes your muscles
-Prevents heart disease
Laughter makes you feel good. And the good feeling that you get when you laugh remains with you even after the laughter subsides.
Humor helps you keep a positive, optimistic outlook through difficult situations, disappointments, and loss.
More than just a respite from sadness and pain, laughter gives you the courage and strength to find new sources of meaning and hope.
Even in the most difficult of times, a laugh or even simply a smile can go a long way toward making you feel better. And laughter really is contagion
just hearing laughter primes your brain and readies you to smile and join in on the fun.
The link between laughter and mental health
Laughter dissolves distressing emotions. You can’t feel anxious, angry, or sad when you’re laughing.
Laughter helps you relax and recharge. It reduces stress and increases energy, enabling you to stay focused and accomplish more.
Humor shifts perspective, allowing you to see situations in a more realistic, less threatening light.
A humorous perspective creates psychological distance, which can help you avoid feeling overwhelmed.
The social benefits of humor and laughter
Humor and playful communication strengthen our relationships by triggering positive feelings and fostering emotional connection.
When we laugh with one another, a positive bond is created. This bond acts as a strong buffer against stress, disagreements, and disappointment.
Laughing with others is more powerful than laughing alone
Shared laughter is one of the most effective tools for keeping relationships fresh and exciting.
All emotional sharing builds strong and lasting relationship bonds, but sharing laughter and play adds joy, vitality, and resilience.
And humor is a powerful and effective way to heal resentments, disagreements, and hurts. Laughter unites people during difficult times.

Using humor and laughter in relationships allows you to:
Be more spontaneous. Humor gets you out of your head and away from your troubles.
Let go of defensiveness. Laughter helps you forget judgments, criticisms, and doubts.
Release inhibitions. Your fear of holding back and holding on are set aside.
Express your true feelings. Deeply felt emotions are allowed to rise to the surface.
Mutual laughter and play are an essential component of strong, healthy relationships.
By making a conscious effort to incorporate more humor and play into your daily interactions,
you can improve the quality of your love relationships as well as your connections with co-workers, family members, and friends.

Creating opportunities to laugh:
Watch a funny movie or TV show.
Go to a comedy club.
Read the funny pages.
Seek out funny people.
Share a good joke or a funny story.
Check out your bookstore’s humor section.
Host game night with friends.
Play with a pet.
Go to a “laughter yoga” class.
Goof around with children.
Do something silly.
Make time for fun activities (e.g. bowling, miniature golfing, karaoke).

A natural part of life that is innate and inborn. little babys begin smiling during the first weeks of life and laugh out loud within months of being born.
Even if you did not grow up in a household where laughter was a common sound, you can learn to laugh at any stage of life.
Begin by setting aside special times to seek out humor and laughter, as you might with working out,
and build from there. Eventually, you’ll want to incorporate humor and laughter into the fabric of your life, finding it naturally in everything you do.

Here are some ways to start:
SMILE
For “laugh therapy,” find it’s possible to laugh without even experiencing a funny event.
The same holds for smiling. When you look at someone or see something even mildly pleasing, practice smiling.
Count your blessings. Literally make a list. The simple act of considering the good things in your life will distance you from negative thoughts that are a barrier to humor and laughter.
When in a state of sadness, we have further to travel to get to humor and laughter.
When you hear laughter, move toward it. Sometimes humor and laughter are private, a shared joke among a small group, but usually not. More often,
people are very happy to share something funny because it gives them an opportunity to laugh again and feed off the humor you find in it.
When you hear laughter, seek it out and ask, “What’s funny?”
Spend time with fun, playful people. These are people who laugh easily both at themselves and at life’s absurdities and who routinely find the humor in everyday events.
Their playful point of view and laughter are contagious.
Bring humor into conversations. Ask people, “What’s the funniest thing that happened to you today? This week? In your life?”
Want to bring the fun? Get a pet…
Most of us have experienced the joy of playing with a furry friend, and pets are a rewarding way to bring more laughter and joy into your life.
But did you know that having a pet is also good for your mental and physical health? Studies show that pets can protect you depression, stress, and even heart disease.

Developing your sense of humor:
Take yourself less seriously
One essential characteristic that helps us laugh is not taking ourselves too seriously.
We’ve all known the classic tight-jawed sourpuss who takes everything with deathly seriousness and never laughs at anything. No fun there!
Some events are clearly sad and not occasions for laughter. But most events in life don’t carry an overwhelming sense of either sadness or delight.
They fall into the gray zone of ordinary life giving you the choice to laugh or not.

Ways to help yourself see the lighter side of life:
Laugh at yourself. Share your embarrassing moments. The best way to take ourselves less seriously is talk about times when we took ourselves too seriously.
Attempt to laugh at situations rather than bemoan them. Look for the humor in a bad situation, the irony and absurdity of life.
This will help improve your mood and the mood of those around you.
Surround yourself with reminders to lighten up. Keep a toy on your desk or in your car. Put up a funny poster in your office. Choose a computer screensaver that makes you laugh.
Frame photos of you and your family or friends having fun.
Keep things in perspective. Many things in life are beyond our control particularly the behavior of other people.
While you might think taking the weight of the world on your shoulders is admirable, in the long run it’s unrealistic, unproductive, unhealthy, and even egotistical.
Deal with your stress. Stress is a major impediment to humor and laughter.
Pay attention to children and emulate them. They are the experts on playing, taking life lightly, and laughing.
Checklist for lightening up
When you find yourself taken over by what seems to be a horrible problem, ask these questions:
Is it really worth getting upset over?
Is it worth upsetting others?
Is it that important?
Is it that bad?
Is the situation irreparable?
Is it really your problem?
Using humor and play to overcome challenges and enhance your life
The ability to laugh, play, and have fun with others not only makes life more enjoyable it also helps you solve problems, connect with others, and be more creative.
People who incorporate humor and play into their daily lives find that it renews them and all of their relationships.
Life brings challenges that can either get the best of you or become playthings for your imagination.
When you “become the problem” and take yourself too seriously, it can be hard to think outside the box and find new solutions.
But when you play with the problem, you can often transform it into an opportunity for creative learning.