Laughter therapy really could boost your emotional well-being

It seems that laughter therapy is no joke. Structured interventions that aim to tickle our funny bone, like laughter yoga or hospital clowns, really do appear to reduce anxiety and improve life satisfaction.

Laughter, which is also common in non-human animals, is thought to enforce social connections and may even help babies acquire a sense of self. It has also been linked to improved health, with researchers finding that clown visits shorten the amount of time children spend in hospital.

Yelsyn-Mauricio Porras-Jiménez at the University of Jaén in Spain wanted to understand how we can better support people’s overall health – “not just the physical, but also the spiritual and emotional”, he says. “In the midst of searching for how to truly implement this comprehensive care, I came across laughter therapy.”

Porras-Jiménez and his colleagues carried out a meta-analysis of 33 studies done in the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Many of the participants were nursing students, but they also included people undergoing end-of-life care, surgery or in vitro fertilisation, as well as individuals with depression or burnout.

All of the studies were made up of two groups: one received some form of laughter therapy – such as doing laughter yoga, which combines the physical activity with laughter exercises; being visited by a clown; watching funny films; or taking part in guided group laughing sessions – while the second group acted as the control, receiving either no intervention or carrying on with their usual care.

The researchers found that laughter therapy was consistently linked to reduced anxiety and improved life satisfaction. If you were to measure anxiety on a scale of 0 to 100, says Porras-Jiménez, the control group would have an average score of about 60, while the laughter therapy group would be 8 to 10 points lower. For life satisfaction, the control group would score about 50 and the laughter therapy group 10 to 12 points higher, he says.

But the participants couldn’t be blinded to the fact that they were receiving laughter therapy, so the findings might just be due to the placebo effect, says Sophie Scott at University College London.

But laughter does induce physiological changes that align with feeling less anxious, she says, including reductions in cortisol, a hormone produced in response to stress, and an uptick in endorphins, which act as neurotransmitters in the brain to create a feeling of well-being.

“It’s hard to say whether it’s because of the laughter or because of the social context in which you felt comfortable enough to laugh,” says Scott. “I suspect it’s both.”