Laughter Yoga & Community Wellbeing
We facilitate joyful sessions to reduce stress, improve mental health, and bring communities together in shared laughter and support. We lead regular Laughter Clubs and also one-off workshops exploring and understanding laughter. We train people to be Laughter Leaders to lead sessions for their community.
Laughter Yoga & Community Wellbeing
Across the world, laughter therapists and laughter club leaders use playfulness and laughing to empower, to combat depression and isolation, and to instil positive emotions. Laughter doesn’t always mean happy. But its role in our lives can be immense because of the changes it brings to our physiology – to our body and our mind. These physiological changes are simply the result of laughter.
We start to laugh when we are a few weeks old. As babies, we don’t get the joke; we just laugh, maybe hundreds of times a day. We play and learn. Then as teenagers, working out our identity and how we belong in society, we may stop laughing freely, think that it is being strong to hide our positive emotions, not realising that actually it takes emotional strength to express them. And then, as adults, we may still inhibit ourselves from laughing, even though it is part of our natural behaviour, for fear of being judged.
Laughter is an important coping mechanism. Engaging with appropriate laughter can help us lead healthier, happier and less stressed lives. We can choose to find humour in our own lives, share it, and in this way, we laugh together, making our work and home environments happier places to be in.
Laughter benefits
- Because laughter boosts the immune system, it helps reduce sickness and enables organisations and families to get the best from their lives.
- Because it reduces ‘bad’ stress hormones (such as cortisol) it helps people manage their lives more effectively and healthily and encourages and enables creativity and clear thinking. It helps to focus, learn more effectively and overcome difficulties without maybe resorting to anger.
- Because it releases endorphins, the body’s own morphine, it helps increase morale and helps people feel happy.
- Because it releases antidepressants serotonin and dopamine, it is a powerful tool for feeling good.
- Because it gives us a good physical workout, massages the internal organs, and clears out the lungs, it increases our energy and our focus and our creativity.
- Through mirror neurons and brain activity, it strengthens social skills and helps community building.
- It is a social language in itself, so understanding it and using it helps us to communicate.
- Because it is a social tool, it helps us to make contact with other people, and helps to combat loneliness, and makes people more approachable
Our work includes
- Laughter for schools, teachers, students and young people
- Laughter for older people and in residential and care homes
- Laughter as a social glue for community organisations
- Laughter for Health Professionals, and Laughter on Prescription
- Laughter for good mental wellbeing
