“Laughter is the best medicine.” We’ve all heard it before. But can laughing at social media, comedians and your friends really improve your health?
According to both students and experts, the answer is a resounding yes.
Laughter drives several physiological and psychological changes in the body, and ultimately results in stronger social connections, a healthier immune system and above all, a less stressful life.
Laughing can relieve muscle tension, enhance your intake of oxygen and reduce stress, something that ninth grader Adrian Greenstone has seen firsthand through his time co-leading an improv comedy club at Lab, Thursday Afternoon Live, and performing at The Second City.
“It’s just a sort of a different way of thinking about the world,” Adrian said. “When I’m performing, it’s like there’s less stakes, and I can just feel comfortable when I’m doing it.”
Adrian thinks that you don’t need to be a comedian to feel the benefits of humor. Just cracking jokes with your friends can be enough to de-stress.
“When I’m talking to my friends, and we’re joking and stuff, it’s a way to just get out tension during the day,” he said.
In fact, according to Sophie Scott, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, laughter is an intrinsically social expression, and people are more than 30% more likely to laugh when they are with someone else.
When animals laugh, it is always associated with social contexts, whether through interactions between parents and infants or through the playful behaviors that are common amongst mammals. According to Dr. Scott, human laughter isn’t too different.
“It has that same role for humans, but as we get older we start using laughter in a more communicative way,” Dr. Scott said in an interview. “We use laughter to show we understand each other, … to deal with stressful situations and to maintain social bonds.”
Genuine laughter activates the hypothalamus, a region in your brain crucial for releasing hormones, and in doing so drives a lot of physiological changes in the body, the first of which is a sharp reduction in the fight-or-flight hormone, adrenaline.
“If something scares you and you feel your heart rate race, that’s adrenaline at work,” Dr. Scott said. “Laughter leads to the exact opposite of that: If you measure your heart rate before and after you’ve been laughing, you’ll find that after laughing it’s lower, and that’s just the reduction in adrenaline at work.”
Laughing can also make day-to-day life less stressful by increasing the production of endorphins, the body’s naturally circulating painkillers, and by slowing the brain’s production of a hormone called cortisol.
“If you’re working too hard, staying up too late, you’re really stressed at work or stressed at school, that sort of horrible nagging feeling you get is cortisol,” Dr. Scott said. “Over a longer timescale, when you’ve been laughing you start to get a reduction in cortisol, and with lower levels of cortisol you may be less stressed.”
By increasing the body’s production of human growth hormone and endorphins, laughter also helps you grow and boosts your immune system’s health.
“Human growth hormone is obviously very important when you’re a baby or child and your body is growing,” Dr. Scott said, “but it actually continues being important even when you’re an adult and have stopped growing physically taller because it remains important in your immune system.”
“Everybody has a different sense of humor, there isn’t one thing that everyone thinks is funny. But while we do laugh at the stuff we find funny, most laughter happens when you’re in social interactions,” Dr. Scott said. “So if you want to laugh more, the thing would be to make time to spend time with the people with whom you laugh most. For me that’s my family. When I’m with my partner, when we’re with our son, that’s when the most laughter happens for me.”
