When we grew up, somehow we lost a few hundred laughs a day. By learning to smile and laugh again, more easily and often, we could have a profound and positive effect on our health and well being. The new science of psychoneuroimmunology is the study of how our state of mind affects our health. More than ever, scientific evidence suggests that laughter really is one of the best medicines. At California's Loma Linda University Medical Center, Lee Berk, assistant research professor, and Stanley Tan, Endocrinologist, and their colleagues, are in the lead in understanding the physiology of merriment.
Laughter is a form of good stress, or stress in reverse.
Research on stress has shown that bad stress suppresses your immune system. Tan and Berk wanted to find out if a form of good stress, or laughter, would improve the immune system. They studied groups of average adults and found that both arms of the immune system got a boost out of laughter. Subjects faced a solid hour of induced merriment from videos of comedians, while a control group sat quietly out of earshot. These doctors took blood samples at 10 minute intervals before, during and after the laughter workout.