Laughter Yoga Activities Supporting Older People
Laughter, playfulness, and Laughter Yoga activities supporting older people and people of all ages involved with older people, including a laughter toolkit.
Laughter helps us physically and emotionally, and socially, to be healthier and happier throughout our entire lives. It is such a special and important physiological response. It is one of the universal languages with which the whole world communicates, dissolving the barriers of age, background, and status. It is a mood-altering substance which is free and legal, and doesn’t need a prescription.
We lead laughter workshops in care homes, day centres and sheltered accommodation, and created a toolkit to help bring appropriate playfulness and laughter to the lives of everyone involved.
Used in a care home setting, doing something as simple as laughing with each other can uplift the spirits of both residents and staff. People remember laughter with fondness. Laughing together is social glue which brings people closer. By increasing the amount of appropriate laughter in a care home, we can improve the quality of life for everyone involved.
A colleague, Jo Eadie, said, “At the end of a session, people often talk about how much better they feel; they’ve got to know each other. One elderly person recently said that she’d been given a whole list of exercises to do by her doctor, but had never been able to bring herself to do them. However, she’d found herself doing all sorts of similar moves quite happily in the session – rolling her shoulders, stretching her arms up, shaking her wrists – just because they were all accompanied by a laugh.”.
