Today is International "Lets Laugh Day"

Let’s Laugh Day is celebrated every year on March 19. It is an unofficial holiday that encourages people to laugh and enjoy the benefits of laughter.

Studies have suggested that laughter can help people relax and reduce stress. Laughing and being joyful can also have health and social benefits.

Many Health Benefits

Medical studies have shown a few minutes of laughter can reduce blood pressure, increase immunity response of the body, and boost heart rate. Watching or reading something humorous before sleep can also help people sleep better and longer.

Laughing can even burn calories. Research has shown that 10-15 minutes of laughing can burn up to 50 calories.

Friendly People

People who laugh often are seen by their peers as happy and friendly. As a result, they tend to have more friends and are easily accepted as a part of different social groups.

How to Celebrate?

Here are some ways you can celebrate this happy “howl”iday:

• Laugh out loud for a few minutes.
• Spend some time reading jokes and funny stories.
• Watch a funny film.
• Attend a stand-up comedy show.

Did You Know…

…that children laugh more than adults? An average toddler laughs about 400 times a day, while an average adult tends to laugh about 15-20 times a day.

Interesting Facts About Laughter !

1. Rats Laugh When They’re Tickled

Rats laugh when they’re tickled, and the more they play together, the more they laugh. Rats’ laughs are very high pitched.

2. You’re More Likely to Laugh Around Others – Not Because of Jokes

If you're laughing, you're far more likely to be surrounded by others. The critical laughter trigger for most people is another person, not a joke or funny film.

In most cases, the laughter followed a banal comment or only slightly humorous one, which signals that the person is more important than the material in triggering laughter.

3. Your Brain Can Detect Fake Laughter

When you hear staged, or deliberate, laughter, it prompts more activity in your brain’s anterior medial prefrontal cortex, which helps you understand other people’s emotions.

This suggests your brain automatically goes to work deciphering why someone is deliberately laughing.

4. Laughter Is Contagious

The saying "laugh and the whole world laughs with you" is more than just an expression: laughter really is contagious. The sound of laughter triggers regions in the premotor cortical region of your brain, which is involved in moving your facial muscles to correspond with sound and prepare to join in.3

5. Jokes Are Funnier if You Know the Comedian

Familiarity is a key part of humor and laughter, and research shows people find jokes told by famous comedians to be funnier than the same joke told by someone they’re not familiar with.

6. Laughing Burns Calories

Laughing raises both your energy expenditure and heart rate by about 10 percent to 20 percent. This means you could burn about 10-40 calories by laughing for 10 to 15 minutes. While this sounds good in theory, you’d have to laugh solidly for an hour or more for this calorie burning to have any meaningful effect.

7. Laughing Is Good for Your Relationships

Research shows that couples who use laughter and smile when discussing a touchy subject feel better in the immediacy and report higher levels of satisfaction in their relationship. They also tend to stay together longer.

8. Laughter Requires Timing

Comedians use the natural tendency for laughter to grow and fade to their advantage, and will leave spaces at the end of a sentence for the audience to fill in with laughter.

9. Laughter Is Attractive

Research found that women laugh 126 percent more than men in cross-gender conversations, with men preferring to be the one prompting the laughter.

In a review of more than 3,700 newspaper personal ads, women were 62 percent more likely to mention laughter, including seeking a mate with a sense of humor, while men were more likely to offer humor in their ads.

10. Some Things Can Make Virtually Everyone Laugh

While there’s no one joke that makes everyone laugh, one of the best tools for making people laugh is people trying not to laugh in a situation where it would be highly inappropriate to do so.

So Go On....... Have a laugh !!!!