Repetitive Laughter Study and Comparisons to Exercise

April 27th, 2010

Laugh your way to health. We have long known that happiness, and especially laughter may have some sort of health benefits. Norman Cousins, a regular guy, in the 1970s with an autoimmune disease documented his treatment of laughter, and claims that it fought his disease into remission.

Dr. Lee S. Berk, a preventive care specialist and psychoneuroimmunology researcher at Loma Linda University’s Schools of Allied Health (SAHP) and Medicine, and director of the molecular research lab at SAHP, Loma Linda, CA, and Dr. Stanley Tan have picked continued this sort of research where Cousins left off. Since the 1980s, they have been studying the human body’s response to mirthful laughter and have found that laughter helps optimize many of the functions of various body systems. Berk and his colleagues were the first to establish that laughter helps optimize the hormones in the endocrine system, including decreasing the levels of cortisol and epinephrine, which lead to stress reduction. Maybe it could help with natural acne treatment? They have also shown that laughter has a positive effect on modulating components of the immune system, including increased production of antibodies and activation of the body’s protective cells, including T-cells and especially Natural Killer cells’ killing activity of tumor cells.

Their studies have shown that repetitious “mirthful laughter,” which they call Laughercise©, causes the body to respond in a way similar to moderate physical exercise. Laughercise© enhances your mood, decreases stress hormones, enhances immune activity, lowers bad cholesterol and systolic blood pressure, and raises good cholesterol (HDL).

As Berk explains, “We are finally starting to realize that our everyday behaviors and emotions are modulating our bodies in many ways.” His latest research expands the role of laughter even further.

So…acting depressed and grumpy all the time surely isn’t healthy for you. We should all know this anyways, but when you see a study that says laughing all the time helps keep you healthy, well you just know that you should appear like a nutcase to everyone all the time and be happy. Either that, or find a nice bag of weed…lol