Two for You — take two minutes to live and lead with intention
Episode 5.4
How many times have you laughed today? In this episode we explore how laughter is not only good for our wellbeing, it is good for our communities. Discover ways to intentionally increase laughter in your life and leadership.
Laughter is medicine, for you, for our teams and for our communities.
Resources
- Read about the health benefits of laughter and how it can reduce your stress in this article: Stress relief from laughter? It's no joke.
- Check out this Hidden Brain podcast episode, Laughter: The best medicine.
- Read research by Sophie Scott on why laughter is contagious: Positive emotions preferentially engage an auditory – motor “mirror” system.
- Read some kids' jokes and tell one in your next meeting: Here comes the pun: 297 jokes for kids.
- Try laughter yoga free online.
Transcript
Note: Two for You written transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before referencing content in print.
[Lori] Hello and welcome to Two For You. So Denise what do you call a sleeping dinosaur?
[Denise] A sleeping dinosaur?
[Lori] Yeah.
[Denise] Yeah [moves head side to side] I don't know.
[Lori] A dino-snore.
[Denise and Lori] Laugh.
[Lori] All right. So did you know that kids laugh about 300 times a day, but as adults, we laugh only about 17 times a day? Crazy, right. So it really decreases as we get older and yet laughter is really part of our birthright. We start smiling within the first few weeks of our lives and laughing out loud within the first few months of our lives.
[Denise] Yeah and it's contagious. Um, you are 30 times more likely to laugh in the presence of others than by yourself. So it really shows that laughter can be a real strong social skill. Your body wants to laugh too. It's a natural inclination. It wants to laugh.
So let your body laugh, and by doing so when you do it in presence of others you're building positive bonds and these bonds can really buffer against disappointments, um disagreement, and just overall stress.
[Lori] So how do you do that? How do you get closer back to the 300 times a day than the 17 right? So we have three tips for you to try this month.
And the first one is to schedule it. So think about it more like an exercise so maybe it is having a comedy night or even subscribing to one of those jokes a day. This is where I got the dinosaur joke right.
And the second one is really based in research too which is about the three things and studies have found that if you for a week just kind of reflect on three humorous things that happened during that day that your wellbeing increases for months to come.
And the third thing to try is something like laughter yoga. So instead of regular yoga that's more moving your body, it's more of a practice to help us to remember how to laugh out loud and in collection with others. So this month try one of those.
[Denise] And definitely especially as community leaders. Do it for yourself. Do it for others. Do it for the world as you live and lead with intention.
Reviewed in 2021