Fear Relief…Laugh it off!

                                                  Laughter is the Best Medicine?

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Struggle with making decision? Feel strangled by emotions that seem to choke you? Do you think there is no escape from the tension you face daily which then falls into your sleep time? Stress making your eyes bulge out of their sockets? Clarity looking like a mud slide in your head? Find your mind reeling with ‘what ifs’; no answers anywhere to be found? Yes, I know all of these situations as well as most. Being trapped until someone nudges me, sometimes more strongly than a nudge, to do what I already know relieves me but have been blinded to remember. I do not even have to add the stress of changing my clothes, or getting into a car to go anywhere. What’s so easy to have right in your home? My relief right at home can be found with the internet or a video, a funny book or simply remembering a time when I laughed till I cried! Whatever makes you laugh!

From a young age I heard the expression ‘Laughter is the best medicine’. ‘Funny’ thing is we forget that valuable quote, so easily available, will release us from the daily grind of stress and even heart ache.

Laugh Therapy is actually what we have been doing for years but without instruction. You already know when you laugh you feel so much better. We are lifted and lightened. Good news is it does not just effect the time of your laughing but for hours after! What a gift to be happy and for it to continue relieving your body of stress and negative feelings well past the laughing time.

Is there a difference between laughter and humour?

Yes, and recognizing that difference is a real key to understanding the healing power of playful laughter. Humor is intellectual, a way of viewing the world. There’s been a lot of studies on humor, but no agreement on what's funny. You think certain things are funny and I think other things are funny, because we have different senses of humor. We may cross over in certain areas but there will still be basic individual differences. People in Russia are amused by different things than we are here. There are differences between someone in New York and someone in neighboring Connecticut. Another interesting thought is a man's idea of funny is often different from a woman's. These differences go on and on.

Laughter, on the other hand, is universal. It's a profound process that involves every major system in the body. It's spiritual, physiological, and emotional. It's not intellectual, except perhaps with adults after the fact. Think of the kind of laughter babies do. When we see a baby laughing, nobody says, 'Doesn't that baby have a wonderful sense of humor?' Most people think our sense of humor is what causes us to laugh, but it's really the other way around. And we would have more opportunities to laugh if we didn't think we have to agree on what's funny.

Laughter doesn't need a reason to be.  Laughter is unreasonable, illogical, and irrational. Laughter exists for its own sake. Infants provide a good example of this, because they learn to laugh first and later on develop a sense of humor, which is a playfully intellectual way of relating to the world.

The health benefits of laughing are ~

They begin with the dilation of the cardiovascular system, which enables us to keep our flexibility. Initially, when we laugh, our heart rate and blood pressure go way up, then they drop down below our norm. That's wonderful for those constricted blood vessels that cause high blood pressure. We know that four-year-olds laugh five hundred times a day, while the average adult laughs only fifteen times a day. If we could laugh as frequently as a four-year-old, we could have the heart rate and blood pressure of a four-year old.

Next, as the diaphragm convulses in laughter, our internal organs get massaged, which is what keeps them functioning, plump and juicy. As we gulp in massive amounts of air, our blood is highly oxygenated. The air that is expelled during laughing has been clocked at seventy miles per hour, so we know our respiratory system is getting a tremendous workout. We also lose muscle control, which relaxes the skeletal system.
Also laughter is one of the things that cause our brain to produce hormones called beta endorphins, which reduce pain, and our adrenal glands to manufacture cortisol, which is a natural anti-inflammatory that's wonderful for arthritis.