LAUGH YOUR PAIN AWAY

“How is that possible”

“But you don’t understand how stressed my life is”

“But with so much pain, how do you expect me to laugh”

Did any of such thoughts cross your mind when you read ‘Laugh your pain away’?

As per a study at Oxford university, participants were made to watch different videos.

Funny ones, neutral ones and positive but unfunny ones.

Afterwards, they tested participants’ pain resistance using a frozen wine sleeve or a blood pressure cuff.

They found the participants who had watched the funny videos to be more pain resistant than the participants in the other two groups.

As per the research, the muscle contractions that are produced when we laugh, result in release of endorphin hormones which results in resistance to pain.

Haven’t we all grown up listening to “Laughter is the best medicine”?

Somewhere, many of us forgot to actually live by that and even went to the extent of telling our subconscious mind that “we have good reasons to NOT LAUGH”.

For close to a decade, I spent about 10–15 minutes with my parents every day before they retired to bed. In times when we are living together, I did it in person, else on phone. And part of that 15 minutes was spent in me narrating some nice jokes to them, with tonality and style that only made it sound funnier. And we used to laugh out loud and said our good-nights.

Since the last few years, since they switched to smartphones and became part of whatsapp groups, they started reading jokes on their own. The laughter got muted and faded away. Very recently, I happened to narrate a joke and we were back to laughing out loud, and it resulted in an instant relaxation in our physiology. That’s when we realized that we had discontinued a beautiful practice and decided to resume it.

Many of you are aware of the origin of laughter clubs by Dr Madan Kataria. He founded the Laughter Yoga International in 1995 to instill a discipline of laughter so that more and more people derive benefits that are scientifically proven as well.

21st June is International Yoga Day and we see many people posting pictures of themselves in yoga postures on social media. Can we include laughter yoga in our fitness regime and post pictures of that too? And your mirror neurons will do the rest.

The body cannot differentiate between acted and genuine laughter and hence both produce the same ‘happy chemistry’.

I will not ask you to recall when was it that you last had a hearty laugh.

I will only suggest that start to LOL today…

I mean start Laughing out loud today….NOW…and don’t just type it in your smartphones where you are exchanging messages with friends.