New Book Explores The Health Benefits Of Laughter

Online, June 24, 2012 (Newswire.com) - "How Laughter Can Change Your Life" celebrates laughter and its amazingly varied gifts. Many of us enjoy laughter as a welcome interruption to the seriousness of our lives. But laughter is so much more than that. Although we are only vaguely aware of the fact, laughter is at the heart of human health and happiness.

"How Laughter Can Change Your Life" is a philosophy book with a solid scientific foundation. It is also a psychology book with health as its recurrent theme. Most of all, it's a book about how, in various practical ways, we can use laughter to unlock a superior lifestyle, giving us an optimistic, upbeat outlook and considerably improved health.

In researching the book we spoke to a broad range of laughter experts. The aim was to get to the core of how laughter can elevate our lives―physically, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually.

The result is an engaging and enlightening account of how laughter immeasurably enhances our existence, making us healthier in mind, body and spirit.

"How Laughter Can Change Your Life" is priced at just $1 as an introductory offer during June; and $2.99 thereafter.

The book can be viewed here:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0089PD0U0

EXTRACT:

Joe Hoare is a British personal development specialist. He uses laughter science in his stress management programmes, and runs regular Natural Laughter Skills (NLS) sessions for organisations and the public. He encourages his clients "to explore the values of lightness, spontaneity and creativity which develop their confidence." He endeavours to help them "push back the boundaries of words like 'impossible,' 'unthinkable' and 'unimaginable.'"

"We generally hold much more tension in our bodies than we realise, or than we need," he says. "When a group of people does a lot of body exercises in a very light-hearted way, playfully interacting with each other, they really enjoy themselves. And they get very creative. It's like dropping little laughter bombs around the walls of seriousness. Seriousness is a kind of cultural norm. The trouble is that there is a kind of heaviness that goes with it."

Approaching a situation with a spirit of lightness is the better option. "It allows communication to be better. People find it easier to be open-hearted and open-minded, and also to be creative. With added lightness of being, we can express ourselves better, and read situations better."

Hoare says: "That sense of relaxation improves your life experience. Relatively little of our emotional communication is contained in our words. Slightly more is in our tone of voice. We also communicate through our body language, posture and gestures. So we are constantly making a statement about our relationship with life, or the situation we're in, by the way we deport ourselves. Enhanced physical awareness enables us to communicate these emotions in a much subtler, more nuanced way."

The original observations in this field were made by the American psychologist William James, way back in the 1880s. He realised that laughter generally comes before happiness, not after it. He was also one of the first to recognize that when we change the way we are physically, it inevitably impacts on our emotional state. Joe Hoare says: "If you adopt the physical posture of a certain frame of mind, it's a bit like method acting―you change your frame of mind accordingly."