Have a good laugh
COMBINING LAUGHTER AND YOGA CAN MAKE YOU HAPPIER AND HEALTHIER
If you can’t remember the last time you enjoyed a bellyjiggling laugh, you’re not alone. Besides recent pandemic stresses, our work and home lives keep us busy, making a good laugh less common than it used to be.
In his 1979 bestseller, Anatomy Of An Illness As Perceived By The Patient, Norman Cousins famously explains how a self-prescribed “laughing cure” involving 10 minutes of deep belly laughs helped him to sleep pain-free and ease his arthritis.
While the health benefits of laughing are well studied, if you add yoga they multiply.
“Laughter yoga combines unconditional laughter with yogic breathing,” says Dhevaksha Naidoo, a Gold Coast yoga teacher. “It has many health benefits including an increase in oxygen flow in the body as well as blood circulation, it potentially influences your DNA, it boosts the immune system, and it can even make you look younger.”
Laughter yoga, also called hasya yoga, was founded in India in 1995 by Dr Madan Kataria. Bronwyn Roberts of Let’s Laugh, a Melbourne-based provider of health and wellbeing programs, trained under Kataria in 2002 to become one of Australia’s first laughter yoga teachers, and is the only Australian to complete a Certificate in Humour as Therapy.
“Laughter yoga gives us a ‘DOSE’ of happiness, boosting levels of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins, along with other ‘feel good’ chemicals mitigating the release of those associated with stress,” she says.
“It also works to shift our autonomic nervous system from sympathetic c or flight, fight and freeze, to parasympathetic which is rest and relax.”
Recent studies of laughter yoga suggest additional benefits. Researchers in Iran in 2018 found it could be effective in reducing depression and anxiety among retired women, and in January 2021, a study from the Buckinghamshire New University in England found it enhanced human connection, while providing an “inoculation against the stresses of life”. And in 2022, a small pilot study from the University of
Chittagong in Bangladesh found that adults using laughter yoga had a significant improvement in memory function. Another major plus is that anyone can practise it.
“Laughter yoga is based on the principle that motion creates emotion,” says Roberts. “There are exercises encouraging playfulness, and exercises encouraging movement, with some to increase strength and improve balance, all accompanied by laughter.”
Naidoo, who runs physical and virtual wellness retreats, says there’s been increased interest in laughter yoga in recent years. Roberts agrees, noticing a spike in demand in Melbourne within weeks of the March 2020 lockdowns.
Carolyn King, a kinesiologist and author of Empowered Happiness, from Berwick, Victoria, has practised yoga in the past. The mum-of-two was drawn to laughter yoga after receiving a shock breast cancer diagnosis last year.
King practises daily for 10-15 minutes. She begins in “namaste” position: a slight bow, with hands pressed together and fingers pointing poin upwards close to the chest, ch while smiling. “Then I breathe b in through my nose and a exhale with a series of
hoo, h haa, hee, then ho ho ho, h ha ha ha, and he he he and an so on,” she says. “As I do this I stretch my arms up and relax rela on the out breath.”
She follows with a few minutes of general laughter, and the session ends as it begins.
King has since trained to become a laughter yoga teacher. “Laughter yoga energises my whole body, it allows me to de-stress, and it wakes up my brain,” she says. “It also puts me in a present state of being, and allows me to truly connect with everything I am grateful for right now.”