#health #laughter #knights
“Laughter is often the best medicine and can improve our overall health”–Paul Ebeling
You may have heard that old saying, “Laughter is the best medicine.” Well, it turns out there really is some medicinal merit to a good laugh.
“Laughter is the physical manifestation of finding something funny, and it can help to reduce inflammation and stress hormones, improve circulation, and enhance the immune system,” says the Everyday Health Wellness Advisory Board member who is the founder of Synergy Brain Fitness, a consulting company that creates cognitive performance programs, and is also the executive director of the American Institute of Stress. Her claims about laughter are based on evidence published in studies in publications such as the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) Journal, Medical Hypotheses, and Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine.
Laughing changes brain activity, explains Hanna, who is also on the board of the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor (AATH), a nonprofit organization. Research that looked at the brain activity of people who were laughing showed that laughter can stimulate healing gamma waves, similar to those seen in long-term meditators, according to a study published in April 2020 in the FASEB Journal.
To bring the funny to your life, you do not even need to laugh out loud, says Dr. Heidi Hanna: “Just finding something funny or amusing can have the same benefits.”
Humor allows us to see things in a new and unexpected way, she explains. “It’s not about making difficult things funny or ignoring pain and suffering, but allowing ourselves to also see the lighter side of life more often as a way to release the tension and recharge our own battery.”
Knights know that wverything in life can be drama, horror, or comedy.
The Big Q: How often are you looking at it as a comedy?
The Big A: A good place to start: Laugh, laugh, laugh. If you find something funny, do not hold back and simply smile to yourself, but push out an audible “Ha ha!”
This might feel fake at first, but after a while, you will release and laugh naturally more often and louder than before. The more you play with humor, you will get better and better at it.
Social media Doomstrolling is trendy, do not do it.
Humor can foster learning by building an emotional connection that strengthens memory, and therefore can help you understand and retain information. The stress hormone cortisol damages the area in the brain that plays a role in learning and memory (the hippocampus). But laughter is a powerful antidote to stress that helps repair that damage and makes it easier to form new memories, according to research published in the Spring 2014 issue of Advances in Mind-Body Medicine.
Train your brain to see the humor in difficult situations, and it teaches you to let go of some of your stress!
Have a happy, prosperous day, Keep the Faith!
