They say laughter is the best medicine, right?
What does Laughter do to our body?
Laughing relaxes the whole body as it relieves physical tension and stress, leaving your muscles relaxed for up to 45 minutes after laughing. Laughing can boost your immune system and decrease stress hormones as it increases our immune cells to fight off infection and produce antibodies to resist us from certain diseases.
Laughter also reduces anxiety and depression by lessening your stress on your mind and body which makes it easier to cope with difficult situations, while increasing and boosting our endorphins.
We can laugh when we’re nervous and we can laugh when we’re angry.
Some researchers at Sleep.com have studied that laughing when we are nervous is a defense mechanism to help fight off vulnerability and weakness.
It has also been studied that laughing can help us achieve a better night’s sleep.
What is Laughter Therapy?
In clinical settings with your licensed Counselor or Psychologist, they can help bring this therapy into your sessions that allows one to laugh.
Laughter therapy is therapy also known as therapeutic humor. Therapeutic humor enlightens the individual to feel “Happy” and stimulate other emotions during their path of healing.
I thought it was pretty neat to see a study that shows how our blood flow increases by 50% when we are laughing, maybe that explains why your face appears red when laughing so hard.
With therapy it can normalize our blood pressure for the time being and increase calmness over 60%, it is where the mind doesn’t allow us to “think” of anything else at that given
moment. Laughter can also help individuals living with chronic pain by placing energy into happy receptors and decreasing their energy on their specific pain site.
How do we laugh when we aren’t feeling happy?
Researching laughing therapy there are 4 steps to take:
- Clapping to warm up and build positive energy
- Deep breathing helps bring physical and mental relaxation to yourself.
- Being playful in your sessions can bring a “childlike mood” and can help achieve happiness and laughter.
- Exercise, move around.
Fake it to make it.
Fake laughing is a strategy of repetition. I’m sure it will sound weird, feel strange and even uncomfortable. All you need to do is chuckle, real or fake laugh, and continue shrugging your shoulders.
Start by 5 minutes a day and increase until you get to 15 minutes a day.
One example that I found was to use your cell phone “off ” to pretend you’re laughing into a phone, which will help train your mind.
Another example was to watch YouTube videos of babies and ice cream. There is something about babies laughing that makes us reciprocate that same laugh.
Mental health refresh
Lets go ahead and refresh our mind, body and soul. Laughter is free and no one can take that away from us. With many of us that have endured difficult times recently and in the past. I know I have felt that I will never know what it feels like to feel or be happy again.
That’s why I feel that laughter exercises can be a new mindset, a new hope. Maybe we shouldn’t think of laughter as something we do when we only see something humoring.
Maybe we should express it as an exercise like walking.
With joy in our hearts and daily laughing we can get through all the healing.
Give it a try! I know I am going to.
Laughter is no longer a quote we have used from back in the day.
It truly can be the best medicine.
This post was written by Lauren K., and published by Convenient Counseling Services.
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