Laughter is the invisible armor to protect us from the stresses of life. ~Barbara Johnson
If we couldn’t laugh, we’d all go insane. ~Robert Frost
We have a pleasant place to take walks in my little corner of the world. Paths circle the perimeter of seven lakes filled with a variety of fountains and waterfowl. As I walked around these lakes deep in thought about a current upheaval in my life, I heard the sound of women’s laughter. Imagine my surprise when I looked toward the JOYful noise and saw nuns, in full habits. I stopped and watched the sisters, enchanted by their complete abandonment of the seriousness I would expect from nuns. The eleven women lifted their long, cumbersome skirts while they chased a soccer ball through the grass. Their veiled heads bobbed up and down as they ran. They seemed oblivious to the world around them as they giggled, laughed, and frolicked like children. This sight turned my upside-down smile around. I laughed in delight for the first time that day.
A dear friend of mine challenged me a few years ago to make myself laugh. While we discussed my current drama, she told me about an exercise where you giggle, even if you can’t think of one thing funny. You make noises that sound like laughter until happiness erupts from deep within and you begin to laugh. I looked at her and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. Are you nuts?”
Then, right there before God and everyone, she began to laugh. At first, a slight smile changed to a lopsided grin. The grin stimulated a chuckle. My eyes must have shown how crazy I thought she acted because she began to giggle. The cute giggle turned into a boisterous cackle and before long, she laughed hysterically. The merriment erupted full-force from her stomach. The comical sound must have continued for a full minute.
My friend’s infectious noise struck a chord within me. I could not control myself once her glee hit full force. My cheeks became wet with tears from my relentless laughter. I tried to stop but only snorted, which caused a deeper laugh to explode from within. The exercise turned into a slapstick comedy that would not stop.
Her experiment and my nuns prove a point—laughter is contagious.
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Regardless of how my brain has been programmed, I made a decision to investigate happy versus sad. A number of reasons encouraged me to change my lifelong thought pattern.
Insight on laughter:
- It’s catchy. The sound of someone’s glee activates areas in the brain which help move facial muscles to link with noises. This process prepares us to join in the laughter.
- If you have tight, painful muscles, laugh to relax. Great idea for those of us who spend many hours at the computer each day.
- Heart rate and energy usage will increase somewhere between 10-20 percent when you laugh, which might help burn some calories. Maybe not many, but every little bit helps.
- Couples who laugh together stay together longer. Imagine what a lifetime of giggles would do for a relationship.
- It’s a positive, active tool that might help with short-term memory loss.
- Happy people enJOY life more and have less stress since laughter can lessen the cortisol in the body. Cortisol is a hormone that causes stress. This reason alone encourages me to give a little more time to laughter.
- An improvement in digestion, blood pressure, immune function, oxygen intake, pain, and sleep might take place in the body. I feel healthier already.
- Your well-being and general attitude might improve.
I choose to live my life with JOY. Laughter will help me become a healthier, happier, and JOYous person. I need to accept the responsibility to do what it takes to experience as many smiles, grins, chuckles, giggles, snickers, and cackles I can muster up. I want to be moved to tears of JOY as I laugh my way through life.
Be filled with JOY, my friend, as you treasure humor and laugh your day away.
Some of the above tidbits of information came from the following link:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/11/13/10-fascinating-facts-laughter.aspx