Humor and laughter

Every now and then turn up your mouth corner into a smile! Humans need good laugh to get through the stress. Stress is part of our lives. Sometimes it can prolong long like Pandemic lockdown stress, stay home orders, job loss stress or relationship stress. In these situations, humor and laughter can take your stress away.

Stress and anxiety have great influence on our health, and well-being. However, managing stress is a skill and humor is not everyone’s cup of tea! Sometimes, we all need help to understand how to manage stress before situation goes out of our hands and we end up in illness. One way to manage stress is, by improving sense of humor and laugh more!

Laughing and improving sense of humor will help you to reduce and eliminate stress. If you do not have sense of humor, you can learn! Once you develop sense of humor, you will find things are not stressful as you think.

How humor and laughter help relieving stress?

• Your muscle feels relaxed and buoyant
• It helps you to stay resilient
• Improves immune system and makes it stronger
• Relieves chronic pain
• Helps you to communicate and get along with others
• Improves mood and relieves anger
• Will help to get out of depression

How to improve sense of humor:

If you are not a pro at understanding humor, learn it. It is easy.

• What makes you chuckle? Grab old and new photos, memories with siblings and friends, comics, greeting cards, childhood toys that brings smile and make you chuckle. Keep them or hang them in close vicinity. Funny wording, reading jokes, funny movies, funny cartoons (something like all-time favorite Tom and Jerry cartoon!) will boost humor.
• Learn to laugh: Sometimes it is better to laugh loud at your own situations. It makes your heart go light. Eventually smiling and laughing becomes a habit. You don’t need to fake your smile. You should look at your situation from a different angle that brings smile naturally on your face. Join laughter yoga group where people laugh for no reasons and laugh becomes spontaneous. This will have positive effect on your mind.
• Read jokes: Go for good jokes. Visit library or local bookstore. Read jokes online. Share jokes with family and friends. When they laugh, you will enjoy sharing jokes. Remember, your jokes should not hurt anyone. Understand what is fun and what is not. Don’t laugh at expense of others, you can joke at yourself and it is also sense of humor.

There are other simple ways to incorporate humor in your day to day life.

1. Watching stand up comedy on TV or videos, there will be something on internet. Spend few minutes watching, reading and listening to- memes, videos, jokes, blogs.
2. Talk to friends or family who exhibit sense of humor. Listen to them, learn from them.
3. Expert suggest, participating in games, dumb charades, karaoke, drawing funny characters designed to bring humor in mind are good for stress relief
4. In your dairy list out few funny things that happened to you in a day
5. Read books filled with jokes and humor
6. Spend time with pet, play with pet.
7. Try imitating famous comedians, try getting into their characters.
8. Spend time with children and play with them. Make them laugh and you will also end up smiling with them.
9. Goofing up with your friends and siblings (in a good way)

Try it out! Learn to be humorous,  Be humorous, smile and laugh!! These simple actions will assist you to keep up good health.

Image credit: Tom & Jerry cartoon, Pinterest