5 Facts of Humor’s Balancing Act
By Dan Gascon
Your sense of humor allows you to constantly create new realities to enrich and bring balance to your life. Along with laughter, it provides you with greater physical health, helps you cope with perspective and gives you more happiness. Here are 5 benefits of laughter and how it brings balance to your life:
1. RELIEVES YOU OF TENSION AND STRESS. Humor and laughter combat and create opposite effects. When you laugh, you are cheerful, upbeat, playful, light-hearted, you let go, vent, relax and unwind.
2. GIVES YOU AN AEROBIC AND INTERNAL WORKOUT. The diaphragm is the large muscle which separates the chest cavity from the abdominal cavity and gets a great workout when we laugh heartily. Our respiration is enhanced, blood pressure is lowered and the amount of oxygen in the blood stream increases. Ever laughed so much it hurt? The movement of the diaphragm also stimulates surrounding organs, such as the stomach, kidneys and liver, acting as an internal massage.
3. STIMULATES YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM. University studies show laughter lowers serum cortisol levels, increases T-cell production, lowers blood pressure and increases the number and activity of disease-fighting killer cells. These are all natural Ahealth substances,@ endorphins and encephalons that free us of pain and illness.
4. GIVES YOU PERSPECTIVE THAT HELPS YOU COPE. Your sense of humor has the power to manage, endure and lighten any load. By not allowing yourself to take things too seriously, you gain a greater ability to see change as challenging, not threatening. It gives you the capacity to cope with stress and difficulties in ways that are positive, uplifting and successful. Humor and laughing helps detach us from the funk we may be in. We then get a sense of self-protection and control over our environment.
5. EMPOWERS AND ENHANCES YOUR QUALITY OF LIFE. A lighthearted spirit always has the power to see you through. When you are troubled, feeling low, depressed or down, the experience of laughter, if even just for the moment, banishes feelings of loneliness, anger and fear. Humor and laughter can transcend any predicament with feelings that are lighthearted, carefree and hopeful. Humor has the power to turn any situation around by drawing our attention away from upsets. When you experience more laughter, smiles and feel carefree, your happiness increases with the spirit’s energy and powers the will to live. You make your life sweeter.
“Humor and most notably laughter, frees the mind, eases the faculties and causes the soul to lift. Thus, they must not only be looked on as great pleasures
but also as superior in the composition of human life.”
Markus De Lorne
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Copyright 2005 by Dan Gascon. Founder of Humor for your health. Reprinted with permission. Reach Dan at www.humorforyourhealth.com
