Stress and Laughter aren’t opposites for no reason… you can hack stress with a little laughter.

I love using  Laughter Yoga to support creative thinking and training, help stress and laughter really is the best way.  Just recently I’ve been doing some training using laughter to support organisations with their stress-management, and I’ve been consistently impressed at the benefits that laughter offers… 

…one of these benefits is facilitating creative thinking in a stressful situation. Anyone who’s tried to be creative whilst stressed-out, may well have noticed that stress is not the most resourceful creative state to be in.  That’s because the logical left brain thinking that accompanies the feelings of stress and overwhelm, tends to focus purely on analytical processes.

We’ve all heard about the left and right sides of our brains – left for logic, right for creative.  And like most things in life, we need both sides to be functioning well to really maximise our results.   However being a stressful situation without any release can lead to circular thinking, with the problem and issue just going round and round in our minds as we seek a “logical” solution.  Of course, the solution doesn’t appear and this in itself can cause yet more stress and so the circle turns into a downward spiral.

Once this starts, the issue can often remain unresolved because it needs some creative input – but the log-jam of logical thought processes and stress simply won’t get out of the way to allow the right brain creativity to be heard.

Stop Stress and Laugh – use laughter when stressed out – it offers a release!

The benefit of using laughter at this point, is it offers a very real release from this analytical thinking/dwelling.  In short, it is impossible to be stressed and logical whilst you’re rolling on the floor in side-splitting laughter!

It is the physical activity of laughter that transmits a stress-release signal (endorphins) which finally quietens down our stressy logical thought process and allows us to access the creative right side of our brain and allow creative solutions to appear!

Not convinced?   Well you can evidence this yourself – after all how often do you just dwell on a problem and get nowhere, but as soon as you stop thinking about it, or move on to deal with something else, the solution pops into your mind?

Lighten up stress – use laughter to get out of a brain-spin

So next time you’re in a brain-spin, and desperately seeking a solution, try lightening up instead.  Take yourself out of the stressed situation – watch a funny YouTube clip, or enjoy a laugh with a friend on the phone, and allow yourself to become totally immersed in the humour of the moment. The aim here is to completely forget what you were worried about. Stress and laughter work on opposite sides of the brain (stress on the left, thinking side, and laughter on the right creative side) so stop stress with a laugh to give your creative right brain the respite to come up with the solution.  So have fun for as long as you can, and when you finally choose to return to the problem, chances are the answer will either pop up out of the blue, or the scale of the problem will seem to have shrunk to a more manageable size – and either way that’s a great result!