Reducing Stress Through Laughter
How many times would you say you laugh in an average day? Once? Five times? Ten times? Never? People who study this kind of thing have found that a baby will laugh - okay, it’s frequently just a quick giggle - about 300 times a day. So, are we adults just uptight or is there something else going on?
More than likely, we’re too freaked out about whatever we’re going through on a particular day to find anything to laugh about, or at, or with. As stress overtakes us, we forget how good laughing feels. Kids of all ages know it, but since we’ve all been told to grow up and took on the responsibilities of adulthood, we seem to have let that side of ourselves go.
This is unfortunate on a lot of levels. Laughter plays an important part in our health, as well as our happiness, as it helps reduce the aforementioned stress that’s making us sick and keeping us from enjoying ourselves.
There’s a sort of snowball effect to laughter. If you can find just one thing to laugh about and get rid of just a little stress, you’ll feel a little bit better. With that modest improvement in your mood, you might find something else to chuckle over and chip away at another layer of stress and so on, and so on. Next thing you know, you’re actually happy!
If you want to be proactive about it, find that first thing to laugh about before you’re freaking out. You might find you’re better able to fight off that tendency.
You’re going to have to buy a 2009 calendar soon, so make it a funny one. You can find ‘joke of the day’ desk-top calendars with 365 tear-off pages and a joke on each one – so pick one! As cliched as ‘start your day off right’ is, it beats starting your day off miserably, doesn’t it?
