Self-Help Happiness Blog

You can diet.  You can work out at the gym.  You can take up martial arts.  But why bother, when laughing is such a fun way to shed those pounds?

A burst of hearty laughter can give your body what neuroscientist Dr Helen Pilcher calls a “mini-aerobic workout”.  It makes your heart beat faster.  It makes your chest heave.  It makes your belly muscles tighten.  Facial muscles tighten (good for keeping the skin looking young). It’s a good all-round workout - a belly laugh can help shrink the belly.

There is some bad news and some good news in this.  The bad news is that you have to laugh heartily for an hour to burn off 100 calories.  The good news, is that an hour of extra laughing each day would be good for us party-pooper adults who forget to laugh throughout our day.  How can we add more laughter?

• Sign up for some humorous email broadcasts. 
• Follow some funny people on Twitter and befriend some funny people on FaceBook.
• Get up from your desk every now and then and drop in on the office clown, or anyone with whom you have found you can share a laugh.
• Tickle somebody (probably best to do this one at home); it often can end in getting very playful.
• Have kids.  Yes, they also can cause a lot of stress, but they give you someone you can repeatedly tickle.

How would you increase the laughter in your day?  Please let us know in the comments below.

By the way, you can tweet this post by clicking here: ReTweet this 

Haven’t I always said it?  Happiness is contagious.  Just smiling at people in a room can pick up the mood of a room…and in the process help you keep your own mood up (because happiness is contagious whether you are giving or receiving).

Dr. Nicholas Christakis, professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School, and James Fowler are co-authors of a 20-year study called Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network.  Here is the abstract of the study

Clusters of happy and unhappy people are visible in the network, and the relationship between people’s happiness extends up to three degrees of separation (for example, to the friends of one’s friends’ friends). People who are surrounded by many happy people and those who are central in the network are more likely to become happy in the future. Longitudinal statistical models suggest that clusters of happiness result from the spread of happiness and not just a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals. A friend who lives within a mile (about 1.6 km) and who becomes happy increases the probability that a person is happy by 25% (95% confidence interval 1% to 57%). Similar effects are seen in coresident spouses (8%, 0.2% to 16%), siblings who live within a mile (14%, 1% to 28%), and next door neighbours (34%, 7% to 70%). Effects are not seen between coworkers. The effect decays with time and with geographical separation.

In other words, it is in your own self-interest to make people around you happy.  Smiles, random acts of kindness, humor, music…adding all these uplifting features to your neighborhood will make your life better.  I wonder why the effect was not seen between coworkers; it really should have been, considering how close many people are to their coworkers, spending huge portions of their day with them and being incredibly affected by their moods.

If you want to influence people, give them the right environment.  Of this there is no question.  Most recently, a study confirmed what we all knew about how they cleaned up New York City.  This line from The Globe and Mail a few days ago:

Urban decay is contagious because people generally behave badly when others in their neighbourhood do, say Dutch researchers whose article was published yesterday in the online journal Science.

This principle applies in the home and in the workplace, too.  If you leave things all over the house or allow employees to get sloppy in their work habits, expect more and more of the same.

On the other hand, if you want people to take pride in their work or keep the house tidy, apply yourself to the task.  Pick up stuff around the house when others are not around.  And when they are, solicit their help in tidying up.  The tidier you keep it, the tidier they will, too.  And, the more attention they will focus on cleanliness and following rules and generally responsible behavior.

By the way, this is the same psychology I have repeatedly mentioned with regard to smiling.  The best way to brighten up your environment is to smile.  Your smile will be contagious.  And before you know it, you will notice that all those grumpy people you kept bumping into have given way to smiling, happy people.
 

SMILE

A smile is worth a thousand words.

I know, I know. You heard that is was a picture that is worth a
thousand words. Well when I tweeted this though (posted at
http://twitter.com/amabaie ), one of my followers replied “does this
mean a picture of a smile is worth 2000 words?”

Cute. But that’s not the point. A smile is a picture. It says so
many things. It says, “I’m happy”.

It says “You’re OK”.

It says “I like you”.

It says “Don’t worry”.

It says….well, I’m not going to let this post go on for 1000
words. Why not hop on over to Twitter and tell me what else you think
a smile says? Just type in @amabaie and say your piece.

Taken from today’s Daily Dose of Happiness 

Great story on “smile surgery”.  Here is the story through Zoomit Canada for discussion, too: 

http://health.zoomit.ca/smile-surgeons-bring-expression-back/