It’s true: laughter is the best medicine.
This is because laughing is beneficial for both your social and emotional health. Laughter strengthens your immune system, boosts your mood, and continues its reign as the best medicine that we humans can utilize anytime, anywhere. It can even reduce stress and pain.
Furthermore, laughing can enhance relationships as well. You cry less, get sad less, and feel less pressured. And best of all?
It’s free.
Why Laugh?
1. Laughter Strengthens Relationships
Laughing together is a great way to keep your relationship exciting. It does so by adding vitality, joy, and resilience as well as emotional sharing in a relationship.
Not only that, humor is a fantastic approach to mend feelings of hatred, differences, and pain. Laughter is also a great too for uniting people during times of difficulties.
Playful conversations and humor will strengthen your relationships because it triggers positive feelings and stimulates an emotional connection. A positive bond is created when we laugh with one another. It is the bond that acts as a barrier against disappointments, stress, and disagreements.
In relationships, the existence of humor and laughter allows you to:
- Be spontaneous in situations;
- Become less defensive in conversations; and
- Express your true feelings more easily.
2. Laughter Reduces Tensions and Disagreements in a Relationship
If you find yourself dealing with tensions and conflicts, try to relax a little by imagining your future self looking back at your current self, and attempt to muster up a laugh.
Try adding some humor into your communication to ease disagreements the next time you are with your family, friends, or partner. This will lower everyone’s stress levels and allow rational thoughts to prevail.
Here is how you can do so.
3. Laughter Helps You Stay Mentally Healthy
Laughing releases endorphin, a chemical the body uses to deal with stress and pain. In short, endorphins can provide a level of relief to times of distress.
Consequently, laughing without being in duress can be even better. This feeling will stay with you even after a brief moment of laughter.
Laughing can invigorate within you a sense of boldness and courage to discover and explore new wellsprings of hopes. Indeed, even in extremely troublesome occasions, a giggle or grin can go far towards making you feel better.
What’s more, laughing truly is infectious—simply hearing a giggle primes your brain to anticipate the good times.
4. Laughter Makes You More Sociable
Laughing can likewise help with our social connections and this can include people we barely know.
We are also more likely to connect and open up with people who laugh, not to mention that good times are usually accompanied by lots of laughter.
5. Laughing Reduces Intimidation/Aggression
The ideal approach to ease any tense situation is by using humor.
We have all experienced one of those silent minutes following a disagreeable or undesirable remark, and it is during these minutes that negative feelings, for example, outrage and animosity can emerge.
A clever comment i.e. diversion that delivers a giggle can help calm the air and eliminate any confusion. It also helps to keep everybody’s tempers from flaring.
6. Laughter Reduces Your Stress Levels
Stress in the modern society affects nearly everybody. This makes it all the more important to laugh as often as you can.
Laughter should in fact be like meditation – something that you practice everyday no matter what, where, or when.
After all, everybody deserves a good laugh from time to time.
Just Laugh
Our time on Earth is (relatively) short, and we should not take any moment for granted. Cherish the moments that you have, laugh more, be more helpful, and be thankful for everything that you have right now.
Bonus tips: here are five more ways to help you laugh more often.
- Bring more humor into your conversations;
- Watch a funny video;
- Get a pet;
- Hangout with your friends often; and
- Learn to not take things too seriously.
