How To Manage Stress The Fun Way

When the body is under deep stress, it releases a hormone called cortisol that has a profound impact on your health because it directly suppresses the immune system. This makes a stressed person more vulnerable to attack from bacteria and viruses and can cause anything from generally feeling run down to full-blown flu and heart attacks.

Laughter is nature’s counter to bad stress

Laughter is the #1 natural enemy of bad stress because they are physiological opposites. The predominance of one tends to prevent the other. A clue to this may be found in the body’s typical actions after extreme stress of the fight or flight kind: deep panting (all relaxation response are exhalation based) and using laughter to make light of events that provoked fear. The predominance of one (deeper breathing and laughter) tends to prevent the other (fear).

Laughter helps improve the cardiac vagal tone, which reflects how much your heart rate is influenced by your breathing. It’s an indication of your body’s capacity to regain calm after you’ve been in a stressful situation. Low vagal tone has been linked to chronic inflammation throughout the body, which is a known risk factor for heart failure, stroke and diabetes. Research suggests that the more positive social connections people had over a nine week period, the more their vagal tone increased.

It’s interesting to note that laughter has lasting effects:

“Our findings show that the physiological effects of a single one-hour session viewing a humorous video appear to last anywhere from 12 to 24 hours in different individuals. This leads us to believe that by seeking out positive experiences that make us laugh we can do a lot with our physiology to stay well.” ─ Lee Berk, DrPH, Assoc Res Pro Loma Linda School of Medicine

Life is all about the balance of tension and relaxation. We need tension to stand erect, move, do anything. If we didn’t resist our own movement each time we drank a cup of water, the cup would crash into our face. Life, therefore, is also all about balance, or rather learning to be balanced in our thoughts and actions. Just like we must learn to fine-tune the push and pull forces in all of our movements to perform smooth actions, we must also learn to relax and slow down (or engage and speed up, depending) in our daily life. If we don’t, the tensions we naturally experience will escalate and create pain.

Therefore, pain, anxiety and stress have an important role to play in our lives. They are the voice of the body calling for attention, saying that something is out of balance.

Eastern wisdom says that any pain, anxiety or stress that prompts us to take action is good. Otherwise it’s just a waste of time and energy, because it’s like sitting on a rocking chair. One gets the illusion of movement, but he or she won’t be going anywhere.

Laughter allows us to vocalize our aches and pains in a positive manner without having to verbalize anything. There is no need to explain why we are laughing.

Laughter reduces stress levels quickly and naturally and provides new ways of dealing with stress, which can lead to long-term stress reduction. By providing a new mental perspective, choosing to laugh often converts the perceptions of problems that were seen as huge to minor irritations.

Laughter on the other hand relieves tension and is a big revitalizer.

Dr. Travis Stork confirms saying, “Laughing can be one of the best and easiest ways to boost your energy throughout the day.”

Indeed. Laughter recharges your batteries by enriching the blood with ample supplies of oxygen, the lifeline of our system, and cutting through energy-sapping emotions and replacing them with energizing emotions. It fights burnout by giving you back the energy you’re supposed to have, and by making your life and work more enjoyable.

Laughter is an excellent natural way to provide violent-free emotional release through catharsis. It also provides new ways to deal with these strong emotions in a healthy, non-violent and non-confrontational way.

The hypothalamus is very affected by everything we consume both beneficial and toxic. The hypothalamus is also linked to emotions like anxiety and fear, and the effect of these emotions on blood pressure, heart rate and breathing. Continuous emotional stress may weaken the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus works very closely with the pituitary gland sending it messages that regulate hormone production.

Laughter is the best medicine for reducing stress hormones produced in the hypothalamus section of the brain, lowering blood pressure, reducing risk of heart attack and stroke. Significant reductions can occur in minutes and, as seen earlier, last for days. It affects the brain cognitively, increasing your intelligence, improving you memory and ability to process information.

Being a great neutralizer, laughter can dissipate frustrations and help you reframe a situation, thus fostering a more positive outlook. In times of difficulty, laughter counteracts negative feelings of anger, frustration, or helplessness. It is shown that it actually breaks the pain cycle, gives comfort, restores energy, and can give you hope to keep fighting if you are battling an illness or depression. Laugher can be a great coping mechanism or temporary escape.

In Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, describes research that he and George Bonanno, professor of education and psychology at Columbia University in New York City, conducted to answer the question, “What allows people to adjust to life-altering traumas?” They interviewed 45 adults who had watched their spouses die six months earlier. Keltner and Bonanno wanted to determine which emotions predicted a healthy adjustment to loss in these survivors. They assessed anxiety, depression and protracted grief in the months and years following the loss. As Keltner describes in his book, he and Bonanno found the widows and widowers who smiled and laughed when they talked about their deceased spouses during the initial interviews experienced less grief six, 14 and 25 months later.

Keltner and Bonanno also checked for a correlation with elevated heart rates, a sign of emotional arousal, in their grieving subjects during interviews about their dead spouses. Both laughers and non-laughers had higher heart rates. The non-laughers, though, also displayed increased emotional distress, while the laughers’ heart rate elevations weren’t linked to emotional distress. This led Keltner and Bonanno to conclude that laughter gave these people a brief “vacation” from mourning, helping them separate the emotional and physiological components of grief. “What it’s telling us,” says Keltner, “is that laughter is this little trap door that allows you to escape from the toxic stress.”

Laughter also helps to release unhealthy inhibitions. It brings you to a place where you can set aside your fear of holding back. Choose to laugh at a situation now instead of years down the road. In many instances it is only the passage of time that makes something turn from unpleasant or embarrassing to hilarious.