Ways of Being: Life Coaching to Heal Your Life!
Marlene Shiple, Ph.D. The Life Coach Dr.: Heal Your Past + Heal Your Thoughts + Heal Your Self => Heal Your Life!

Aug

8

Laughter for Healing

Filed Under Emotional Healing, Life Coaching, Mental Healing, Physical Healing, Spiritual Healing

The late Norman Cousins — in his book, “Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient : Reflections on Healing (1979)” — describes his experiences with the healing effects of laughter.  Cousins’s results were Laughter is Strong, Powerful Medicinederived from his personal, informal experimentation.  Since the time that Cousins popularized his findings, solid research has been performed that demonstrates just how laughter triggers healthy physical changes in the body.

Dr. Lee S. Berk is a psychoneuroimmunology researcher and preventive care specialist at Loma Linda University’s Schools of Allied Health (SAHP) and Medicine, and director of the molecular research lab at SAHP, Loma Linda, CA.  He has performed research with Dr. Stanley Tan since the 1980s.  Together, they have studied the human body’s response to a positive-stress reaction, which they termed “mirthful laughter”.

In their research, Dr. Berk and Dr. Tan found that laughter aids in optimizing many of the functions of various body systems.  Berk and his colleagues were the first to determine that laughter helps optimize the hormones in the endocrine system.  These researchers found that decreasing the levels of cortisol and epinephrine leads to stress reduction.

In addition, Drs. Berk and Tan have demonstrated that laughter has a positive effect on modulating components of the immune system.  Their research has shown that laughter increases antibody-production and activation of the body’s tumor-protective T-cells.

So, if you are serious about health and healing, take time each day to indulge in that amazing cure:  Laugh yourself to spectacular good health!

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