Reducing Stress with Laughter

Is there too much stress in your life? Is everything piling up and weighing you down? Perhaps you’ve tried pharmaceutical and herbal remedies, but nothing seems to work. You should try a proven natural therapy that has been used for generations to relive stress and make you feel better. So what is this miracle cure that makes us feel so great? It’s laughter. Laughter is nature’s way of easing tension and helping us relax. So take some time to laugh every day and you’ll be feeling better in no time.

So how does laughter work exactly? Well, laughter works on several levels to make us feel better and less stressed. First, laughter works to relieve stress physically. When we laugh, stress hormones in our blood, like cortisol, are actually reduced. Laughter also gives us a mini workout, which improves out health and releases hormones that make us feel happier. Lastly, when we laugh, it helps boost our immune system. The stronger our immune system is, the better we feel and the more prepared we are to combat stress.

Laughter helps us emotionally release stress as well. Our bodies are designed to release excess emotions physically through acts such as laughing and crying. When we laugh, it releases some of our negative emotions as well. It can also change the thoughts that promote our emotions. Laughter helps us think more positively, worry less, and be less stressed. Even if laughter doesn’t promote positive thinking, it can make us forget about our negative thoughts and feel better.

If you’re laughing with friends or loved ones, you are also promoting social bonding. When we are bonded with people, it promotes supportive relationships that can make us feel more supported and less burdened, so we feel less stressed out about our situation.

So what do you do if life just isn’t that funny? What if you just can’t find anything to laugh at? You fake it. That’s right, fake laughing. Consider one study done on forced laughter. Participants were asked to watch a movie and either not laugh at anything or laugh at the jokes whether they thought they were funny or not. After the movie, participants filled out a survey on how much they liked the movie. Believe it or not the people who laughed rated the movie as significantly better and funnier. Laughing, forced or not, improves the way you view the world and helps to fight stress from your everyday life.

In addition to stress relief, laughing has also been show to help you eat less, boost your immune system, increase your pain threshold, and even help you heal faster. So don’t delay. Whether it means going to a funny movie or laughing for no good reason at all, start laughing your way to a less stressful life today.

Help Someone Dealing with Stress: Smile

If you’ve ever spent time with a depressed person, you probably already know that depression is contagious. If we are constantly exposed to negative attitudes and emotions, they tend to rub off on us and affect our thinking. The good news is that this works the other way as well. Having a positive attitude can rub off on a depressed or severely stressed person and help them start to feel better. So if you’re around someone whose feeling burnt out, or just want to improve the attitudes of people around you, just take some time to share a smile.

There have been tons of studies one to show that smiling makes us feel better. Just the physical act of smiling improves our mood and helps shift our thoughts from negative to positive. Sure, we usually smile when we’re happy already, but studies have shown that the smiling helps uplift our spirits and improve our mood even when it’s forced or if we don’t know we’re doing it at all!

Sure, smiling makes you feel better, but how does that help de-stress someone else? Next time you walk past someone on the street or in a hallway, try this experiment: look at them, smile, and then watch their face. Chances are they’ll smile back. When someone smiles at us, we tend to smile, whether it’s on purpose or just by instinct. Smiling is contagious, and as I already said, just the act of smiling makes that person feel better about life. Sure, the smile’s probably forced, but it works either way.

Want to know what’s even more infectious than a smile? A positive attitude. If we think positively, and point out the good things in life, we encourage others around us to do so to. Since smiling puts us in a better mood, we’re not only spreading stress relief through getting other people to smile, we’re also doing it my spreading our good mood. That makes smiling a double whammy.

Are you more likely to be friends with a person who smiles and is kind to you or someone who is always busy, stressed, and never pays attention to you? Hopefully you answered the person who is kind to you. Being pleasant and smiling at a person makes them more likely to open up and be friends with you, and friends are a fantastic stress reliever. It gives us someone to share problems with, relax with, or just blow off steam to. Don’t stop smiling once someone is your friend. A smile can be a silent show of support or a reminder of friendship.

So, what’re you waiting for? Help de-stress someone around you while giving your cheeks a workout. Smile!