Saturday, January 28, 2012

Treatment Of The day - Laughter

For decades, researchers have explored how humor helps patients relieve stress and heal.


Laughter is a powerful antidote to stress, pain, and conflict. Nothing is more effective in bringing your mind and body back into balance than a good laugh. Humor lightens your burdens, inspires hopes, connects you to others, and keeps you grounded, focused, and alert.

Scientists tried to discover the effects of humor in various contexts such as: supporting medical professionals to cope with their stressful job, helping the elders to stay open and fit, increasing the communication at workplace, in the relationship between employee-manager.

It seems that people work better and more efficiently in an environment where they have managers or colleagues with a sense of humor used properly, because it helps them to cope with the stress and they deal more easily with the difficulties. It improves your job performance, especially if your work depends on creativity and solving complex problems. Also, students tend to learn more from teachers who know how and when to bring humor into their work.

With this great power to heal and renew, the ability to laugh easily and frequently is a tremendous resource for surmounting problems, enhancing your relationships, and supporting both physical and emotional health. Even if you don’t consider yourself the person with the most refined humor or you feel that you just are not particularly funny, this does not have to stop you to enjoy its beneficial effects.

You can integrate humor into your life through different means. Laughter is infectious. Jokes, humor, the sound of roaring laughter are far more contagious than any cough, sniffle, or sneeze. When laughter is shared, it binds people together and increases happiness and intimacy. In addition to the domino effect of joy and amusement, laughter also triggers healthy physical changes in the body.

Humor and laughter strengthen your immune system, boost your energy, diminish pain, and protect you from the damaging effects of stress. It reduces pain and allows us to tolerate discomfort. It reduces blood sugar levels, increasing glucose tolerance in diabetics and non-diabetics alike. Laughter relaxes the whole body. A good, hearty laugh relieves physical tension and stress, leaving your muscles relaxed for up to 45 minutes after.

Laughter boosts the immune system; it decreases stress hormones and increases immune cells and infection-fighting antibodies, thus improving your resistance to disease.

Laughter triggers the release of endorphins, the body’s natural feel-good chemicals. Endorphins promote an overall sense of well-being and can even temporarily relieve pain.

Even more, laughter protects the heart. It improves the function of blood vessels and increases blood flow, which can help protect you against a heart attack and other cardiovascular problems.

0 comments:

Post a Comment