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Ha-Ha-Have a Good Laugh
How a Rip-Roaring Chortle Improves Your Health

Whenever Doctor Kathleen Hall, a Georgia-based stress expert, feels blue, she turns on cartoons and laughs herself silly. "My husband says the color in my face changes."
Dr. Hall's little ritual could lengthen her life; studies show laughter boosts immunity by invigorating cells that attack infection and send more oxygen into the blood, which jump-starts healing. "The sound of roaring laughter is far more contagious than any cough," says Dr. Hall, author of A Life in Balance: Nourishing the Four Roots of True Happiness (AMACOM, 2006). "It has a domino effect. It reduces stress, lowers blood pressure, elevates mood, boosts your immune system, and improves brain function."

People who are stressed seem to be magnets for illness. But "Laughter shifts the whole system," says Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum, an internist in Annapolis, Maryland, and author of Pain Free 1-2-3 (McGraw Hill, 2005). "It's hard to be on high alert when you're laughing. Laughter triggers the parasympathetic nervous system, distributes blood to the rest of the body, and allows it to get what it needs for healing to go on."

What's more, Teitelbaum insists that laughter could actually save lives. Heart attacks are more common among people who are depressed or hostile. "A laugh a day can keep a heart attack away," he jokes.

Scientists now connect pessimism and a lack of laughs with depression; it is as much a risk for disease as high blood pressure or smoking.
Neuroscientist Dr. Robert R. Provine, author of Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (Penguin Books, 2001), believes laughter's health benefits stem from the social support that a good laugh stimulates. "Laughter is not primarily about humor, but about social relationships," he says.

To get more laughs in your life, find your funny bone. Dr. Hall buys her surgeon husband "Far Side" calendars to help him de-stress. So have a good laugh - your life may depend on it.