Some Interesting Facts about Laughing that You May Not Have Known

October 31, 2009 by Gil Pizano
Filed under: Helpful Insights 

Laughing Child

One of my favorite per­sonal real­iza­tions is that life is too short not to enjoy it. Don’t get me wrong, I have my dif­fi­cult and chal­leng­ing days from time to time (some­times more than expected and/or wanted). With that said, I fig­ured one very quick and sim­ple way a per­son can enjoy life is by find­ing some­thing funny and hav­ing a good laugh.

Did You Know Laughter:

Is a great team builder and social equal­izer – When we laugh with a group, social/class/cultural/racial bar­ri­ers to com­mu­ni­ca­tion are quickly over­come and a mutual feel­ing of trust devel­ops within the group. Laugh­ing is con­ta­gious (just think of the laugh tracks of tele­vi­sion sit­u­a­tion come­dies).

Peo­ple who laugh often have a ten­dency to be more pop­u­lar and are likely to have a greater impact on group deci­sions. Research shows that when we laugh, we tend to talk more, make more eye con­tact and do more of the things that help us con­nect with oth­ers. Laugh­ter also lessens tension.

It’s hard to feel angry, tense or anx­ious when you’re laugh­ing. :-)

Inter­est­ingly enough, regard­less of the cul­ture, laugh­ter sounds the same. This has lead some researchers to believe laugh­ter helped our ances­tors bond. In fact, the sound of laugh­ter is so com­mon and famil­iar that it can be rec­og­nized if played back­wards on tape.

Is Aer­o­bic – it increases the oxy­gen intake of your body and also gives your diaphragm a good work­out. Hearty laugh­ter mas­sages our major organs (sci­en­tists call it ‘inter­nal jog­ging’) and boosts cir­cu­la­tion in our lym­phatic system,

Varies with age – Chil­dren who are six years of age laugh an aver­age of 300 times a day. Adults laugh an aver­age of 15 times a day.

Low­ers lev­els of stress hor­mones and strength­ens the immune sys­tem – The lev­els of two stress hor­mones, epi­neph­rine and cor­ti­cal which sup­press the body’s immune sys­tem, actu­ally drop after a dose of laugh­ter. Laugh­ing also helps us breathe more deeply, increases our heart rate, and stretches many dif­fer­ent mus­cles in our face and upper body and helps our mus­cles to relax.

Accord­ing to a study by Dr. Lee Berk and Dr. Stan­ley Tan of Loma Linda Uni­ver­sity in California

  • Eustress or “good stress” is cre­ated by laughter
  • Laugh­ter increased the nat­ural killer cells that attack viruses along with some types of can­cer and tumor cells.

Is an inex­pen­sive med­i­cine – sus­tained laugh­ter has been shown to stim­u­late an increased rate of endor­phins, the body’s nat­ural mor­phine. It also helps to nor­mal­ize our diges­tive sys­tem and may help resolve to stress-related con­sti­pa­tion, diar­rhea, gas and even ulcers. Laugh­ter has also been shown to reg­u­late our sleep sys­tem and can help to over­come many sleep disorders.

Bal­ances the brain – Dur­ing nor­mal beta activ­ity, the left and right sides of your brain look dif­fer­ent under a PET (positron emis­sion tomog­ra­phy) scan. When you laugh, both sides look almost identical.

Here are some other inter­est­ing facts about laughing:

  • Peo­ple laugh at jokes and funny movies; how­ever, 80% of our laugh­ter occurs dur­ing every­day com­ments in every­day social situations.
  • We used to laugh 20 min­utes out of every day in the 1950’s.  Now we laugh for 6 min­utes out of every day. What’s changed between now and then?
  • A daily laugh­ter work­out of 15 min­utes can burn 40 calo­ries and melt away 4 pounds over the course of a year.

A Few Good Ideas for Find­ing a Way to Have a Laugh

  • Find funny clips on YouTube. Many times I over­hear fam­ily mem­bers and friend talk­ing about a funny clip they’ve seen or heard of on YouTube.
  • Watch a com­edy movie.
  • Check out some late night talk show such as Jay Leno, or Conan O’Brian.
  • Watch a com­edy on tele­vi­sion. Many of the half hour sit­u­a­tion come­dies (sit­coms) are great for a quick laugh. Most often many within a half hour period.
  • Go to a com­edy club. Some of the best laughs I’ve ever had have come from being in a large crowd lis­ten­ing to stand up comics talk about a par­tic­u­lar event. Since laugh­ter is con­ta­gious and is enjoyed more when done in a group, the pos­i­tive energy in the room that man­i­fests itself when every­one is laugh­ing hard is big.
  • Work on becom­ing friends with peo­ple who are happy/funny peo­ple. I can almost guar­an­tee you that when you become friends with a peo­ple who are funny and happy, they will every so often have you laugh­ing at one thing or another.
  • Check­out the comics in the local news­pa­per or sub­scribe to a daily or weekly online comic strip.

Again, I say life is just way too short not to enjoy it so why not choose to do so?

When was the last time you had a good laugh?

What are ways do you believe are good for help­ing a per­son get a good laugh? If you know of one, why not share it in the com­ments sec­tion below?

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  • <a href=“http://www.facebook.com/share.php?v=4&src=bm&u=http://gilpizano.com/helpful-insights/interesting-facts-laughing/&t=Some+Interesting+Facts+about+Laughing+that+You+May+Not+Have+Known” rel=“nofollow” class=“external” title=“Share this on Face­book” onclick=“javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/outbound/article/www.facebook.com’); window.open(this.href,“sharer’,‘toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′); return false;”> 
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  

Sphere: Related Content

Related Posts

  • No Related Post

Tags: , , , ,

Comments

Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!





CommentLuv Enabled

Spam Protection by WP-SpamFree

  • Add to Technorati Favorites
  • Sub­scribe to my FREE Newslet­ter:

    Enter your email address:

    Deliv­ered by Feed­Burner

  • Google FriendsConnect

  • Sponsors

  • Top Commentators

Rss Feed Tweeter button Technorati button Reddit button Myspace button Linkedin button Webonews button Delicious button Digg button Flickr button Stumbleupon button Newsvine button Youtube button
My Highlights powered by RoohIt (for WordPress)