Professional Documents
Culture Documents
a stressful lifestyle.
Laughter provides a full-scale workout for your muscles and unleashes a rush of stress-busting
endorphins. Since our bodies cannot distinguish between real and fake laughter, anything that
makes you giggle will have a positive impact. You do not need to be happy or have a sense of
humour to benefit from a good laugh.
Laughter therapy aims to get people laughing in both group and individual sessions and can help reduce
stress, make people and employees happier and more committed, as well as improve their interpersonal
skills.
Therapeutic Laughter
By way of introduction, I am a member of the UK Laughter Network. We are a group of professionals with a common goal to bring
more happiness and laughter into people’s lives through therapeutic laughter.
Cousins found, for example, that ten minutes of mirthful laughter gave him two hours of pain-free sleep. His story baffled the
scientific community and inspired a number of research projects.
Dr Fry proved that mirthful laughter provides good physical exercise and can decrease your chances of respiratory infections. He
showed that laughter causes our body to produce endorphins (natural painkillers).
After one year the ‘humour’ group had fewer arrhythmias, lower blood pressure, lower levels of stress hormones, and required lower
doses of medication. The non-humour group had two and a half times more recurrent heart attacks than the humour group (50% vs.
20%).
He is the founder and director of the Gesundheit Institute, a holistic medical community that has been providing free medical care to
thousands of patients since 1971. He is the catalyst for the creation of thousands of therapeutic care clowns worldwide.
Dr Annette Goodheart
Goodheart is a psychotherapist and inventor of laughter therapy and laughter coaching. For 36 years she has been using laughter to
treat cancer, AIDS, depression, and other illnesses and been teaching at universities, schools, companies, organisations and
public events, bringing laughter to every part of the world.
He then created a range of laughter exercises including elements of role-play and other techniques from his days as an amateur
dramatic actor. Realizing the importance of child-like playfulness, he developed further techniques to stimulate this within a group.
Laughter Yoga was born and is now accepted all over the world.
Laughter Yoga
Laughter Yoga includes four things:
When you take part in a laughter workshop you get a release of endorphins, giving you a "feel good” factor; the whole body
relaxes and stress and tension is reduced.
You also get an aerobic exercise. Laughter tones your muscles and improves your respiration – and your immune system is
boosted which helps you to resist disease.
You can easily acquire the skills to lead a laughter yoga workshop. You will need an outgoing personally, be a good communicator
and quite happy to lead a group of people into laughter.