‘LOL’ followed by ‘ROFL’ along with ‘ROFLMAO’ might sound like nonsensical way of putting alphabets together, but you might be surprised to know that they hold the secret to good health! LOL or laughing out loud, like ROFL or rolling on the floor with laughter are very basic factors that can influence whether you have good health or not. Laughter has long been the unknown elixir of a long and healthy life! Ever heard the saying “the more you laugh, the longer you live!”. Well, it stands true even today.
Is laughter really healthy?
Wonder why people gather in groups every morning just to laugh at your local park? It’s because laughing in groups is believed to be therapeutic and is proven to grant much more health benefits than an individual laughter. Plus, laughter is contagious and inspiring too, in the sense that when you watch someone laughing out loud you are bound to join in!
Norman Cousins, a famous political journalist, has aptly termed laughter as ‘internal jogging’. Cousins, who was diagnosed with a life threatening heart disease took an alternative route of laughter therapy to becoming healthy, after consulting many doctors and finding their treatments methods lacking and ineffective! He checked himself out of the hospital and into a hotel, where he watched funny tapes till his sides hurt from laughing too hard, soon, his condition began improving and all this laughing further supported by just the medicines, he reported a full recovery!
Cousins, like many others, believed in the power of laughter, but just how does laughter make us healthy? The answer to this question lies in our children who don’t suffer from heart diseases, stress, depression, anxiety and other such ‘adult’ conditions due to the simple fact that a child on an average laughs 400 times as compared to the measly 15 times that an adult laughs through an entire day!
How does laughter improve our health?
While many believe that laughter induces a positive vibe in people and is an instant stress buster, there are still many critics as to whether it really improves one’s health! To answer this question, let’s ask ourselves another question, ‘Do we feel good after having had a nice big laugh?’ The answer is yes. Ever wondered why? It’s because of the hormones that are released by our body when we laugh that we feel good. Following is a list of similar health benefits of laughing.
Laughter strengthens our immune system: Laughing out loud causes our internal organs to convulse i.e contract and expand rapidly, kind of an internal work out. This internal work out helps in better circulation of the lymphatic fluids which carry food to cells, while clearing out any waste or excess products that might have accumulated in our tissues or organs. Our lymphatic system by itself is not capable of ensuring proper circulation of the lymphatic fluids; we need to move ourselves in order to ensure proper circulation and a good booming round of laughter helps greatly in this.
Laughter helps oxygenate our bodies: Whenever you laugh, you tend to take in large gasps of air which translate to a large quantity of oxygen going into your body. This oxygen is then used up by your organs and tissues, which helps them to repair any damage and also to fight off any infection that might be affecting any organ or cell. Furthermore, oxygen is needed for breakdown of food that we eat for energy and also for intracellular energy generation!
Laughter ‘works out’ your muscles internally: As mentioned earlier, laughter gives you an internal work out, as it causes a convulsion of your organs, wherein they are expanded and contracted. This convulsion massages your internal organs and boosts their performance, especially the abdominal muscles which boost the performance of mainly the digestive system, liver and kidneys too!
Laughter improves blood circulation: Laughter is known to greatly improve our blood circulation. In fact to be precise, blood circulation gets a boost of 22% according to research conducted on the effects of laughter on blood circulation. Laughing out loud causes expansions and contraction of the endothelium - the tissue found on the inner lining of blood vessels - to contract and expand, this endothelium controls the blood flow, regulates the thickening and coagulation of blood in our body. This increase in blood circulation is immensely helpful to our hearts and brains, as it boosts their performance and effectiveness!
Hence the harder and longer you laugh, the better your body circulates blood!
Laughter cuts down your stress: Remember the question about feeling good after laughing? Well here’s a detailed answer to it, laughing out loud releases endorphins - the body’s very own ‘feel good’ hormones and neurotransmitters - while reducing the levels of cortisol – the stress hormone and epinephrine, another stress hormone! Laughter also increases the effectiveness of T cells that help in protecting the body against many infections! With so much good going on within your body, you are bound to feel good!
Recent studies have also proven that, laughing helps us have a better mental front, along with a healthy physical front!
How do I laugh more?
Laughing more isn’t rocket science! To start with, try seeing situations more lightly, start telling jokes, watch funny movies or serials; hanging out with a funny pal also helps immensely and if you just can’t laugh, try faking it! Research has proven that even though fake laughter isn’t as healthy as compared to genuine rib tickling laughter, it has its own little set of health benefits; plus you never know when fake laughter would actually inspire real laughter from somewhere within you!
To sum it up, you don’t really need any guidelines to laugh more. All you have to do is trip on a metaphorical banana peel, and begin laughing at yourself! And as the popular saying goes, “Laugh and the world laughs with you; weep like a sissy and the world points fingers while laughing at you!” Moral of the story here is that, it doesn’t matter whether you laugh at yourself or someone else, at the end of the day you’re laughing away to a healthier you!
