Laughter is more than just an emotion; it’s a kind of exercise!

Exercise- this word plays a vital role in our day to day lives as through this activity you can maintain good health. You must have heard about a lot of different types of exercises but have you thought that laughing can be one of them? Well, you might not have thought in this regard but some of the pro researchers at the Oxford have conducted a study on pain and laughter that focused on the fact that how surprisingly knitted is our bodies and emotions. In order to complete the procedure of the study, researchers took help from a big group of men plus women who all were undergraduates.

Laughter as an emotion is universal however its role as a form of exercise was still to be unveiled. Therefore the researchers took off to make the volunteers laugh and here is what they found. Laughter is definitely more than an emotion as it is basically a form of physical activity which involves a powerful action of the lungs in the form of emphatic exhalation of breath. The very popular phrase, ‘laugh until it hearts’ is not metamorphic at all as if you laugh a lot and for a long time then you will actually be tired and feel the pain. Your muscles really do some hard work when you are enjoying some good comedy!

Your laughing continuously is no less than an exhausting workout so it is proven that laughing is a great exercise which you can do at anytime and any place plus it is a fun exercise. Although there is an adjoining question that does laughter evokes any sort of physiological response like that of an exercise? In order to find an answer to this query, Dr Dumbar who happens to be the head of this entire study made the volunteers see a group of short videos that were dry factual infotainment or comic. These videos were watched by the volunteers individually as well as in group.

Prior to watching these videos all the volunteers were required to take a test of how long they can endure a constraining blood pressure cuff. Watching comic videos is supposed to be a fun activity however in this study the element of pain was induced for a specific reason and what would that be you might ask. Straining exercise causes the body to give out endorphins and it is a widely known fact and that is why pain was made a part of the test. It is very hard to check the production of endorphin in a direct manner and none of the volunteers would have nodded their heads in yes if they were asked to do so while watching funny videos.

The final result of this test showed that the pain thresholds did raise when the volunteers saw the funny videos but not when they saw the documentaries. Another important finding was that people laugh more when they are in a group as we all know that laughter is infectious and the same is true for exercise as well because people enjoy working out when they have company.