According to UCLA Health, adults laugh just 15 times per day, compared to an average kid who laughs a whopping 400 times per day. Because laughter is so beneficial to us, it makes sense to intentionally look for more opportunities to chuckle and smile more often.
For instance, you could look for humor in everyday situations, join a laughter yoga group, or even take a few small breaks each day to look for witty content. Even simulating laughter can be therapeutic.
Laughter also helps you connect with the people around you, strengthening your social bonds and increasing your sense of belonging.
“Humor and laughter naturally create bonds between us. Say you’re meeting someone new. If you can throw in a joke and make them laugh it’s like, ‘OK, we get each other,’ and you start to feel like you can be more your authentic self with them,” health psychologist Dr Grace Tworek explained to the Cleveland Clinic.
Laughing often can improve your immune system and make you more resilient to disease. It can also decrease your stress levels, reduce physical tension, relax your muscles, increase your circulation, and even act as temporary pain relief.
What’s more, it provides mental health benefits, too, including reduced anxiety and depression.
Broadly speaking, memes are ideas, concepts, beliefs, practices, elements of culture, or systems of behavior that are passed from person to person by means that aren’t genetic.
So, memes are a fundamental part of the human experience, and they’re influenced by natural selection. In modern times, however, many people associate the term with funny images or videos that are shared online.
Originally, the term ‘meme’ was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, ‘The Selfish Gene.’
The New York Times explains that for Dawkins, a meme was the same as a phoneme (the smallest unit of sound in speech) or a morpheme (the smallest meaningful subunit of a word).
“I would explain the concept of a meme—a self-replicating chunk of information—by asking someone about an inside joke they had with friends or an advertising jingle that’s been stuck in their head for 20 years,” linguistics professor Kirby Conrod, from Swarthmore College, told the NYT.
“That chunk of information, the joke or the jingle, self-replicates because we humans like to share and repeat stuff. When we repeat the joke, or sing the jingle, that’s an instance of the meme reproducing itself.”
