Exploring Health Benefits Of Laughter

I have never met anyone who doesn’t enjoy laughing. Laughing is one of the best ways to feel better about any situation and an excellent way to bond with the people that you love. Laughter truly is the best medicine.

However, there are some ways that laughter benefits your health that we are not even aware of. It is a lovely thought that simply giggling over something silly with someone you love might make you healthier.

Here are some of the ways that laughter benefits your health and wellbeing.

Workout

You may know the feeling of having a really good laugh with your friends and then getting a stomach ache or a stitch because you’ve just laughed way too much. This is because laughing is a workout.

When you laugh, your stomach muscles contract as if you were doing an ab workout. This means that laughing will make you fitter (if you do it enough) because it is a miniature stomach workout each time.

Hormones

Laughing will often leave you feeling happy and in a good mood for the rest of the day, and this is because of the hormones released by our brains while we are having a good laugh. That’s right, laughing is chemically good for you.

Laughing will reduce all of the stress hormones that you have in your body and increase the levels of healthy and happy hormones, like endorphins. This means that you will feel much happier and healthier after a good laugh.

Pain Tolerance

If you’re in pain at any time, a good laugh might help you feel much better. It seems insane, but studies have been done that suggest that having a good laugh has been associated with feeling less pain.

Laughing is not a painkiller in the way that paracetamol might be, but it can allow you to feel less pain, perhaps because you are focusing on something else and not on the pain that you are feeling.

Breathing

You probably do not focus on your breathing very much. Honestly, not many of us do because it comes so naturally to us. However, laughing can help you breathe better because it forces you to take deeper breaths, which you should be doing as often as possible.

Heart Health

Speaking of laughing being healthy for your heart, laughing has been proven to improve heart health. When you take deeper breaths, you are flooding your body with oxygen that it might previously have been short of.

Doing this allows your heart to have much more oxygen, which will allow your heart rate to pick up when you are laughing. Laughing also increases the thickness of your arterial walls.