A Laugh A Day

October 28, 2008

A good laugh will do just as much for your health as a mini-workout in the gym.  Did you realise that 20 seconds of intense laughter can double your heart rate for 3 to 5 minutes, a feat that would normally involve rigorous exercise? There is a symbiotic relationship between health and humour. Humour has an impact on most physiological systems of the body.

The medical world started taking note of the possibilities of therapeutic laughter after Norman Cousin’s book, Anatomy of an Illness, came out in the late 1970’s.  In it, he described how watching comedies and reading funny books and articles helped him recover from a life-threatening tissue disease which left him in chronic pain.

So in keeping with the theory that laughter is the best medicine, here is your laugh for today…