26 Sep Did you hear the joke about…happiness!
from today's free eNewsletter (sign up HERE)
Did you hear the joke about the happiness researchers investigating links between humour and well-being? It's actually very serious…
…life's too short not to be happy and happiness is too serious a subject not to joke about! This week, we bring you some cutting edge research findings linking laughter and the benefits of humour for those wanting more happiness and health.
So read on, have a laugh, and know that you're doing yourself some good each and every time you smile and giggle : )
Finding health and happiness…you have to be joking!
Following on from last week's research update we're happy again to bring you some more interesting findings from the Journal of Positive Psychology…
Researchers from James Cook University in Cairns, far north Australia, just published the fascinatingly titled article "Promoting emotional well-being through the use of humour"!
In short, they tested the hypothesis that "humour skills programmes" would assist in improving emotional well-being by increasing self-efficacy, positive thinking, optimism and perception of control, while simultaneously decreasing negative thinking, experiences of stress, depression and anxiety.
The good news (or the punch line) is that this is exactly what they found; and more so, the found that training in humour skills was significantly more effective than comparison conditions in which participants were encouraged to either do nothing, or to interact with others (a social group).
So we can now, with confidence, laugh our way to health and happiness. We can justifiably have fun and now we're doing ourselves good at the same time. Who knows, watching a funny movie might be as good for us as working out at the gym!
And here's some more great laughter research…
Scientists Hint at Why Laughter Feels So Good
By JAMES GORMAN
Laughter is regularly promoted as a source of health and well being, but it has been hard to pin down exactly why laughing until it hurts feels so good.
The answer, reports Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, is not the intellectual pleasure of cerebral humor, but the physical act of laughing. The simple muscular exertions involved in producing the familiar ha, ha, ha, he said, trigger an increase in endorphins, the brain chemicals known for their feel-good effect.
His results build on a long history of scientific attempts to understand a deceptively simple and universal behavior. “Laughter is very weird stuff, actually,” Dr. Dunbar said. “That’s why we got interested in it.” And the findings fit well with a growing sense that laughter contributes to group bonding and may have been important in the evolution of highly social humans.
Social laughter, Dr. Dunbar suggests, relaxed and contagious, is “grooming at a distance,” an activity that fosters closeness in a group the way one-on-one grooming, patting and delousing promote and maintain bonds between individual primates of all sorts.
Read the full and original article HERE
In this morning's free eNewsletter I also included some practical tips but let's hand it over to you now. What does all this mean? How can you take advantage of this laughter research to enjoy more happiness in your life?
Share your thoughts and ideas HERE on our Facebook page and then, have a happy and laughter filled day!