Attitude, The Ultimate Power: Therapeutic effects of laughter

Why read Monday Morning Power?

You will find a consistency and a focus in all of my content that can change your attitude which can fuel a positive change in your life, if you want it to. If you are happy with your attitude and your life and see no reason for changing, then you either already have a PMA (Positive Mental Attitude), or you are a victim and want to hold onto your misery. These postings will then serve to fortify the person with PMA, or, hopefully, convince the "victim" that there is a better way. This site will contain essays, poems, stories, humor and links, all with the same goal: The pursuit, capture, care and feeding of a Positive Mental Attitude. I have had readers tell me that they have spent hours on my site and feel great about themselves both during and after. I log onto my own site frequently to help fuel my attitude; I hope you will as well.

Saturday, June 2, 2007

Therapeutic effects of laughter

Some of you may be wondering why I so often include cartoons and jokes in my blog about attitude.

In our striving to better ourselves, as well as the day-to-day activities, it is very easy to loose perspective. I find that laughter helps me reevaluate and refocus. I also believe that in order to "achieve" one must have fun.

The following comes right out of the pages of Wikipedia:

While it is normally only considered cliché that "laughter is the best medicine," specific medical theories attribute improved health, increased life expectancy, and overall improved well-being, to laughter.

A study demonstrated neuroendocrine and stress-related hormones decreased during episodes of laughter, which provides support for the claim that humor can relieve stress. Writer Norman Cousins wrote about his experience with laughter in helping him recover from a serious illness in 1979's Anatomy of an Illness As Perceived by the Patient. In 1989, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article, wherein the author wrote that "a humor therapy program can increase the quality of life for patients with chronic problems and that laughter has an immediate symptom-relieving effect for these patients, an effect that is potentiated when laughter is induced regularly over a period".

Some therapy movements like Re-evaluation Counseling believe that laughter is a type of "bodily discharge", along with crying, yawning and others, which requires encourgement and support as a means of healing.