Laughter is the best medicine

CHICOPEE, Mass. (Mass Appeal) - Whoever said laughter is the best medicine...was right! There is now scientific proof that laughter has therapeutic benefits. To tell us about those benefits is Mark Sherry, certified laughter yoga instructor.

Laughter yoga is a way to feel good, have fun and improve your health all at the same time.

There's so much medical evidence that's opinion done in studies by several different medical schools that show that laughter can, number one, lower your blood pressure over time. The more you laugh, actually, your blood pressure at first spikes and then it goes down. We always say laughter is a de-stressor. Well, when you laugh, actually, there's a hormone in your blood stream called coltisol is broken down and it's the one that puts you under that stress. Any time you're under stress, cortisol is released in the blood stream. Laughter breaks it down. That's why you feel relieved from stress because it physically leaves your body. In addition, there are hormones that are called endorphins. The endorphins are sort of the feel-good hormones.

Sort of the body's natural drugs. They actually as soon as you start to laugh, the production of them goes way up.

Even more so, the thing that's probably the biggest health benefit is that actually, our immune system gets incredibly boosted on their cells that are called t-cells which are sort of called the killer cells, that actually fight disease. Production of those goes way up again as soon as we start to laugh.

Typically, at a laughter session, and we do these in all kind of different settings for all kinds of different people. We do them even for people who have physical handicaps.

Today we're going to limit it a little bit. We're going to have lots of fun, though. That's really what it's all about. We're going to do a few different laughter activities. We don't laugh using jokes because we can't have comedians with us all the time unless we are really lucky and we have to really enjoy their jokes, which we don't always do.

So since we can't do that, laughter yoga is based on ways to get people to laugh without necessarily having to rely on jokes. We do a lot of role playing games.

Let's start with one. Since it's the beginning of the winter season now, a cold season, this is called the sneeze laugh.

We have three little rules before we get started. One is that we have to give ourselves permission to laugh and be silly.

Number two is that we are not laughing at anybody. Maybe at ourselves. That's the only one.

We're laughing as a group. We just have to again just have fun.