Laughter is incredibly good for you. No, honestly, it isn’t just something fun to do. It genuinely affects your well-being in a very significant way.
Countless studies show that laughter is good for your physical and mental health.
For instance, one meta-analysis that evaluated the impact of spontaneous laughter on cortisol (aka stress hormone) levels found that the former greatly reduces the latter.
“Current evidence demonstrates that spontaneous laughter is associated with greater reduction in cortisol levels as compared with usual activities, suggesting laughter as a potential adjunctive medical therapy to improve well-being,” the meta-analysis claims.
Based on the findings, laughter intervention can reduce cortisol levels by around a third (31.9%). Meanwhile, sensitivity analyses show that even a single laughter session reduced cortisol levels by as much as 36.7%.
Stress reduction isn’t the only thing that humor is good at, even though just that already greatly increases the quality of your life.
According to Stanford Lifestyle Medicine, laughter can also reduce the severity of anxiety, depression, and insomnia. What’s more, it can also boost your memory and improve productivity, focus, and creativity.
One way that you can introduce more humor into your life is by intentionally doing laughter exercises.
This is something that Gigi Otálvaro, PhD, associate director of Stanford Living Education, offers as part of her course, ‘Laughter & Play for Wellbeing.’
According to Dr. Otálvaro, laughter exercises can help people live with more presence, joy, and intention and feel more productive.
However, unlike laughing at a joke, laughter exercises give you the opportunity to laugh for no reason.
In short, you try to enjoy the experience itself. “These practices encourage students to laugh from the body rather than the mind since we are bypassing the cognitive and judgmental processes of determining if a joke is funny or not,” Dr. Otálvaro explained.
“Thanks to mirror neurons that help us feel what we see others feeling, laughter is contagious. So, laughter in a group setting—even if it starts out ‘fake’—often transforms into genuine joy,” Dr. Otálvaro notes, adding that laughter also brings more oxygen to the brain and releases anti-stress hormones.
Something else to think about is that laughter can also be good for your emotional regulation and boost your resilience. Or, as Dr. Otálvaro puts it, “After laughter exercises, we have a greater capacity to feel joy, even amidst hardship.”
