Benefits of Laughter

Have you ever had a really bad muscle ache that lasted all day and just wouldn’t go away no matter what you did? That happened to me the other day; my low back had been hurting, nothing was stopping it, and I was getting frustrated. Trying not to let it completely ruin my day, I started looking at some funny stuff on the internet. My mood started to improve, and within a few minutes, I was surprised and happy to realize that I was in much less pain than I had been in all day.

Laughter is probably one of the most enjoyable as well as the most powerful and beneficial aspects of the human experience.

As if the feel good hormones, or endorphins, released when you laugh weren't reason enough to make you want to do it, laughter is like the single “magic” prescription, that you don't need a doctor to prescribe, that costs nothing, and that will improve your overall quality of life.

This article will first discuss the specific benefits of social laughter, as well as how laughter strengthens the immune system, and lastly, how laughter can be good physical exercise.

Groups of people laughing together have been proven to cause other people to laugh and to enable those in the group to tolerate pain longer.

A September 2011 article co-authored by Jennifer Welsh and the website LiveScience.com, and posted on scientificamerican.com, refers to a study on laughter done by Robin Dunbar, a researcher from the University of Oxford, and his colleagues. This study showed that the participants who had laughed along with others were able to tolerate pain slightly longer than those who had laughed alone.

Welsh and LiveScience explain that after establishing the pain thresholds of the participants, the researchers had those in the experimental group watch things such as funny video clips and “a live comedy show” to cause them to laugh... “and then tested pain levels again.” A general conclusion of the tests, to quote the authors, was that “on average, watching about 15 minutes of comedy in a group increased pain threshold by 10 percent. Participants tested alone showed slightly smaller increases in their pain threshold.“

Luckily for all of us, it is not hard to receive this benefit of group laughter as long as a couple of other people start laughing first.

Robert R. Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, observed 1,200 people spontaneously laughing, and stated in his November, 2000 article on psychologytoday.com, that “…[l]aughter was 30 times more frequent in social than solitary situations.” In fact, in an article on laughter from WebMD.com, author R. Morgan Griffin refers to “a 2005 article published in the Quarterly Review of Biology,” that said that “the primary function of laughter may… be to trigger positive feelings in other people.”

Griffin also mentions a 1962 incident in what is present day Tanzania in Africa, in which symptoms of uncontrollable laughter started with “three school girls” and spread to “about a thousand people.” A June 2009 article by Molly Edmonds on howstuffworks.com, mentions a study done in 2006 that might explain this. Researchers from University College, London found that sounds with both positive and negative connotations activate an area of the brain called the premotor cortical region which “readies our facial muscles to react to sounds.” However, the researcher’s findings indicated that “our brain is much more likely to respond to positive sounds than to negative ones.”

I suppose the logical conclusion to all of this is if you’re going to have a painful accident, ideally it should be done in a group of people who can find some humor in it, which will make the experience a little easier to bear.

With that in mind, let’s move on to explore one of the many other benefits of laughter; a benefit to our physical health.

Psychoneuroimmunology is a scientific field which focuses on mind-body connections, such as how laughter, which originates in the mind, affects the immune system.

In her 2009 book, “Fingerprints of God”, author Barbara Bradley Hagerty says that “Anne Harrington, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University, identifies Norman Cousins as the man who triggered the revolution” that led to scientist’s acknowledgment of the mind-body connection. According to an article by Marco Vespignani, N.D. on the Multiple Sclerosis Foundation website, that was last reviewed in August of 2011, Cousins was a “journalist and peace advocate” who in 1964 “was diagnosed with a rare form of… autoimmune arthritis [that] typically leads to the fusion of the spine and is incredibly debilitating and painful.”

Hagerty’s book tells us that Cousins, who was told by doctors that his illness was terminal, decided that “he had nothing to lose” and chose to replace specialists and living in the hospital with his own personal treatment plan. He stayed in a hotel room, watching “films of Candid Camera and the Marx Brothers” and reading “all sorts of funny books, and he discovered that ten minutes of a belly laugh gave him twenty minutes of pain free sleep.” Cousins continued on like this until, according to Vespignani, many years later, “it was discovered that his arthritis had not progressed.” Hagerty writes, “as it came to be famously remembered, he laughed himself back to health.”

In the same way that we could compare a good round of laughter to taking a multivitamin, we could also compare it to a relaxing soak in a hot tub.

According to a neuroscience article by Melanie Winderlich on discovery.com, “levels of stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine tend to decrease during bouts of laughter.” She later mentions that “laughter also relaxes muscles, which can help reduce stress…”

A July 2013 article on the Mayo Clinic website states that “a rollicking laugh fires up and then cools down your stress response and increases your heart rate and blood pressure,” resulting in a feeling of relaxation. The article goes on to say that “positive thoughts… release neuropeptides that help fight stress and potentially more-serious illnesses.” According to Chris Li and Kyuhyung Kim from wormbook.org, “The Online Review of C. elegans Biology”, “Neuropeptides are short sequences of amino acids that function either directly or indirectly to…” affect chemical signals in the brain. “In addition, neuropeptides may also function as primary neurotransmitters.”

So overall, we could probably say that a nice episode of spontaneous laughter is like taking a big dose of vitamin c while getting a full body massage.

Still, there are more benefits of laughter. The last one we will explore today is the fact that laughter is good physical exercise.

Yes, it’s true; the enjoyable and effortless act of laughing is, in fact, a form of aerobic exercise.

Winderlich says on discovery.com that “According to researchers, laughing 100 times is equivalent to 10 minutes on a rowing machine or 15 minutes on the stationary bicycle.” She goes on to say, “Just like with exercise, people tend to take deep breaths in and out during heavy laughter, which helps unclog airways and enhances inhalation and oxygen intake.”

A 2008 Oxford University Press article by Mary Pane Bennett and Cecile Lengacher on Medscape.com tells us that hard laughter speeds up your heart rate and breathing rate and causes you to take in more oxygen, which is similar to what happens during aerobic exercise. A 2005 Seattle Times article by Don Oldenburg quotes William Fry, a retired professor of clinical psychiatry from Stanford University as saying "A belly laugh is internal jogging." Laughing involves "a great deal of physical exercise and muscular behavior."

One creative way that you can intentionally take advantage of the physical exercise offered by laughter is through the practice of something called Laughter Yoga.

The Laughter Yoga Institute website, in a section titled “About Laughter Yoga,” describes the practice as “…a revolutionary new technology” with which anyone can choose to laugh, “…without the need for comedy, jokes, or humor.” “Yogic breathing is integrated with laughter as a form of exercise,” and the resulting practice offers many health benefits.

This practice involves things like pretending to start and push around a lawn mower, pretending to be a cowboy riding a horse and swinging a lasso, or using exaggerated body gestures all while purposefully laughing. The bodily movement is meant to increase the aerobic benefits. The guiding principal behind Laughter Yoga, according to the website, is that “Motion…” (the Action of Laughing) “…creates Emotion” (the Neurochemical Equivalent of Joy). In other words, the human body cannot really tell the difference between “genuine” laughter and intentional or “artificial” laughter, so both types can generate the same health benefits.

So the next time you’re just too tired to go to the gym, why not get some aerobic exercise in the form of laughter instead and stay home guilt free.

Laughter provides great benefits to your health overall, and social laughter expands on these benefits while also allowing you to take advantage of them more easily.

Today we have learned that the laughter of others can spark our own, and this social laughter increases pain tolerance, that laughter strengthens the immune system and decreases stress, and that laughter is a form of aerobic exercise.

If you are looking for an easy and enjoyable way to improve the quality of your health and overall life experience, you can simply choose to laugh on a regular basis. Laughing along with others will make this course of action even easier and more beneficial.

I have already experienced laughter as a pain reliever. Now that I know a lot more about it, I want to take full advantage of it for my health. I hope that you will consider doing the same.