10 Things Science Says Will make You Happy.

1. Savor Everyday Moments
Pause now and then to smell a rose or watch children at play. Study participants who took time to “savor” ordinary events that they normally hurried through, or to think back on pleasant moments from their day, “showed significant increases in happiness and reductions in depression,” says psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky.
2. Avoid Comparisons
While keeping up with the Joneses is part of American culture, comparing ourselves with others can be damaging to happiness and self-esteem. Instead of comparing ourselves to others, focusing on our own personal achievement leads to greater satisfaction, according to Lyubomirsky.
3. Put Money Low on the List
People who put money high on their priority list are more at risk for depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem, according to researchers Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan. Their findings hold true across nations and cultures. “The more we seek satisfactions in material goods, the less we find them there,” Ryan says. “The satisfaction has a short half-life -- it’s very fleeting.” Money-seekers also score lower on tests of vitality and self-actualization.
4. Have Meaningful Goals
“People who strive for something significant, whether it’s learning a new craft or raising moral children, are far happier than those who don’t have strong dreams or aspirations,” say Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener. “As humans, we actually require a sense of meaning to thrive.” Harvard’s resident happiness professor, Tal Ben-Shahar, agrees, “Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning. Whether at work or at home, the goal is to engage in activities that are both personally significant and enjoyable.”
5. Take Initiative at Work
How happy you are at work depends in part on how much initiative you take. Researcher Amy Wrzesniewski says that when we express creativity, help others, suggest improvements, or do additional tasks on the job, we make our work more rewarding and feel more in control.
6. Make Friends, Treasure Family
Happier people tend to have good families, friends, and supportive relationships, say Diener and Biswas-Diener. But it’s not enough to be the life of the party if you’re surrounded by shallow acquaintances. “We don’t just need relationships, we need close ones” that involve understanding and caring.
7. Smile Even When You Don’t Feel Like It
It sounds simple, but it works. “Happy people…see possibilities, opportunities, and success. When they think of the future, they are optimistic, and when they review the past, they tend to savor the high points,” say Diener and Biswas-Diener. Even if you weren’t born looking at the glass as half-full, with practice, a positive outlook can become a habit.
8. Say Thank You Like You Mean It
People who keep gratitude journals on a weekly basis are healthier, more optimistic, and more likely to make progress toward achieving personal goals, according to author Robert Emmons. Research by Martin Seligman, founder of positive psychology, revealed that people who write “gratitude letters” to someone who made a difference in their lives score higher on happiness, and lower on depression -- and the effect lasts for weeks.
9. Get Out and Exercise
A Duke University study shows that exercise may be just as effective as drugs in treating depression, without all the side effects and expense. Other research shows that in addition to health benefits, regular exercise offers a sense of accomplishment and opportunity for social interaction, releases feel-good endorphins, and boosts self-esteem.
10. Give It Away, Give It Away Now!
Make altruism and giving part of your life, and be purposeful about it. Researcher Stephen Post says helping a neighbor, volunteering, or donating goods and services results in a “helper’s high,” and you get more health benefits than you would from exercise or quitting smoking. Listening to a friend, passing on your skills, celebrating others’ successes, and forgiveness also contribute to happiness, he says. Researcher Elizabeth Dunn found that those who spend money on others reported much greater happiness than those who spend it on themselves.

Read more about Laughter Yoga on my blog

THE GRATEST AMERICAN POET ROBERT FROST QUOTES:

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life. It goes on.”

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

“The difference between a job and a career is the difference between forty and sixty hours a week”

“Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with.”

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper"

“The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

“The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.”

“A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

“A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.”

My Wish for 2011: Closing the Happiness Gap

Catherine Ryan Hyde

This is my New Year's wish: I'd like us all to be happier.

This may initially strike you as bland, nonspecific and a bit sentimental. But bear with me, please.

Granted, in part this wish displays my altruistic side. But the lion's share of it springs from my snarkier and more discouraged nature. I look around and see us abusing, controlling and taking advantage of one another, and I know happy people don't behave like that. They have no need to.
Happy people have good self-esteem and never waste time trying to make anyone feel bad. What purpose would that serve? They don't compete unfairly with others, partly because they're not willing to hurt anyone, partly because they're not obsessed with amassing "more." They're already happy.

In short, looking around at modern society, I have concluded that we are suffering from a severe happiness shortage.

Here are some thoughts I'll employ for finding my own happiness in the new year. I don't know to what extent anyone else will adopt them or how much happiness they'll find, but I can just about guarantee these ideas won't make folks any less happy than they are right now.

No more excuses: My life is a combination of welcome and unwelcome factors. What a surprise, right? Just like everyone else in the human club. Since this is consistently true, I've decided it's a bad excuse for being unhappy. It stuns me how long I postponed happiness for some nebulous moment in the future when all my ducks would be in a row. Obviously I didn't know ducks very well. As it turns out, quack happens. So my (admittedly challenging) personal quest is to be happy now. Anyway. No excuses.

I've found great freedom in being happy "in spite of" rather than "because of" life circumstances. "Because of" puts happiness squarely out of my reach, leaving me at the mercy of events beyond my control. "In spite of" is mine any time I care to reach for it.

Let others misbehave: Possibly my greatest freedom from suffering came in the form of allowing others to misbehave. I used to be an angry driver. Now I know that, though certain fellow motorists should indeed learn to drive, it's not my role to teach them. I remind myself that I know there are bad drivers in the world, so I should not be too surprised to encounter one. It was my need to change that person that used to cause stress. Dropping it feels heavenly. And, by the way, dropping the need to change others had no real-world effect on anything but my stress level, because I was never able to change others anyway. Why do you think it's so stressful? Impossible tasks always are.

Need less: Happy people don't acquire more. They need less. Simplicity is a good match with happiness. The blind collecting of "things" seems intended to fill a gaping hole in our happiness. I've tried it. I'm amazed by how long it took me to notice it never works.

Look at the long term: Happy people don't reach for short-term pleasure if it only causes more pain in the long run. But that was me, almost 22 years ago, as a practicing addict and alcoholic. In recovery, I've found the maturity to invest in my life long term. And it pays big dividends every year.

Happiness first: In the past, I made New Year's resolutions and didn't keep them. I vowed to eat better, so I could be thinner, convinced that if only I were thinner, I'd be happier. But I had it backward. First I got happier. Then I got thinner.

This New Year's I vow to cut out the middleman and just make a resolution to be happy. Instead of trying to find it in life circumstances, I'll go direct.

If you're not sure how to do this, here's a hint: Search in the bonds between you and any other being -- your spouse, your dog or your waitress at breakfast. Relationships seem to hold the key.

And, whatever you do, don't try to find it in any moment but this one. Happiness is hiding in plain sight. Check the now.

Happy New Year.

Laughter Therapy and cancer treatment

At Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA), we fight cancer using an integrative approach. Our Mind-Body Medicine Department offers supportive options, including laughter therapy, to help you cope as you receive conventional cancer treatments.
Laughter therapy strives to help you use and enjoy laughter as a tool for healing. Dr. Katherine Puckett, National Director of Mind-Body Medicine at CTCA, first introduced laughter therapy to Midwestern Regional Medical Center upon a patient's request.
CTCA offers humor therapy sessions, also known as Laughter Clubs or humor groups, to help cancer patients and their families use and enjoy laughter as a tool for healing. These leader-led groups take patients through a number of laugh-related exercises including fake laughter and laughter greetings.


aughter Club is based not on humor or jokes, but rather on laughter as a physical exercise. One group laughter exercise involves patients standing in a circle, with the leader in the middle. Patients put their fingertips on their cheekbones, chest or lower abdomen and make “ha ha” or “hee hee” sounds until they felt vibrations through their bodies. Dr. Puckett says during these exercises, it is hard for people not to join in because laughter is so contagious.
According to Dr. Puckett, at the end of a laughter therapy session, patients have said things like "I didn't even think about cancer during Laughter Club" and "That felt great! Things have been so hard that we hadn't laughed in months." Dr. Puckett adds that, just recently, the eight-year-old daughter of a CTCA patient who attended Laughter Club said afterwards: "I never thought about laughing everyday, but now I realize I can. Like even when I don't feel happy, I can still laugh and feel better."

Norman Cousins, anatomy of an illness

In the 1960s Cousins had an experience that changed his life and that, at the same time, reinforced some of his deepest convictions concerning the nature of the human being. Stricken with a crippling and life-threatening collagen disease, Cousins followed a regimen of high doses of vitamin C and of positive emotions (including daily doses of belly laughter), all in consultation and partnership with his sometimes skeptical physicians. He chronicled his recovery in the best-selling Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing and Regeneration, published in 1979. In the book, generalizing from his own experience and research, he affirmed that "the life force may be the least understood force on earth" and that "human beings are not locked into fixed limitations. The quest for perfectibility is not a presumption or a blasphemy but the highest manifestation of a great design."

When Cousins had a heart attack fifteen years following his earlier illness, he wondered whether it would be possible to recover from two life-threatening conditions in one lifetime, but he was determined that he would. As he was brought into the hospital on a stretcher following the attack, he sat up and said, "Gentlemen, I want you to know that you're looking at the darnedest healing machine that's ever been wheeled into this hospital." Once again Cousins recovered, and once again he chronicled his experience in a book, The Healing Heart: Antidotes to Panic and Helplessness. And once again he generalized from his experience with life-threatening illness to the experience of life threatened humanity. He was struck by the irony that all of his books on the ills of nations did not have the total readership of his one book describing his personal experience of disease and recovery, Anatomy of an Illness. Yet his concern, as he wrote in The Healing Heart, was "that everyone's health—including that of the next generation—may depend more on the health of society and the healing of nations than on the conquest of disease." He concluded the book with a call to conquer war, affirming that "the health and well-being not just of Americans but of the human race are incompatible with war and preparations for war."

The last years of Cousins' life, following his retirement from Saturday Review in 1978, were spent as a faculty member of the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine. There he taught ethics and medical literature and continued his research into the relationship of attitude and health; yet he never lost sight of the larger goals of global peace and justice. Just as belief is, Cousins affirmed, an integral ingredient in personal healing, so did he affirm that belief was integral to global healing. And in all this, he believed that communication was also essential: "The starting point for a better world is the belief that it is possible. Civilization begins in the imagination. The wild dream is the first step to reality. Visions and ideas are potent only when they are shared. Until then, they are merely a form of daydreaming."
During the last year of his life, Cousins received additional awards, including the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism and the Japan Niwano Peace Prize.

Norman Cousins died on November 30, 1990, following cardiac arrest, and having lived years longer than doctors more than once had predicted: ten years after his first heart attack, sixteen years after his collagen illness, and twenty-six years after his doctors first diagnosed heart disease.

What Laughter Yoga can do for you and your business.

By Dr Madan Kataria
Why Laughter Yoga in Business

Work place is becoming too serious because of increasing stress levels. The general impression is that serious people are more responsible and more productive. This is not true. More productive people are those who take their work seriously but take themselves lightly.

Scientific research shows us that laughter can help resolve workplace stress and create a happy, energized and motivated workforce. But, until now there has been no reliable and effective way to induce laughter. Humor has been one of the ways but it seldom leads to continuous hearty laughter.

Laughter Yoga is a breakthrough laughter delivery system that enables a person to laugh continuously for 15 to 20 minutes with short breaks of yogic breathing.
To get the scientifically proven benefits, laughter has to be:
Hearty – emanating from the belly (diaphragm)
It has to be extended for a longer period of time.
In our daily lives we laugh for barely a few seconds here and there, which is not enough to bring about powerful physiological changes. But Laughter Yoga is an ideal practice, which allows laughter to be extended at will.

What is Laughter Yoga

Laughter Yoga is a unique exercise routine that I have developed and launched as a movement in 1998. According to this concept anyone can laugh without relying on humor, jokes or comedy. Laughter is simulated as an exercise in a group. With eye contact and childlike playfulness, it soon turns into real and contagious laughter. The reason we call it Laughter Yoga is because it combines laughter exercises with yoga-based breathing patterns. This allows more oxygen into the body and the brain, which makes one feel more energetic and healthy.

The concept of Laughter Yoga is based on a scientific fact that the body cannot differentiate between fake and real laughter. One gets the same physiological and psychological benefits.

This innovative concept has been widely accepted all over the world and has been written about in prestigious publications including the TIME Magazine, National Geographic, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Daily Telegraph (UK) and many others. Laughter clubs were also featured on Oprah Winfrey Show, BBC, CNN, ZDF (Germany ) NHK (Japan ), ABC news ( USA ) and other TV networks.

Corporate Benefits of Laughter Yoga

Laughter Yoga, which initially started as a social club movement, has now entered the business world, where it provides companies and organizations powerful operational benefits. Companies around the world are starting to introduce Laughter Yoga and employers find that it can have a profound influence on their business even making their company more profitable. By introducing laughter sessions for all staff, companies have reported a happier workplace, increased efficiency, better communication, increase in sales and productivity, increased creativity and better teamwork, decrease in illness and absenteeism, and a reduction in employee turnover.
How Laughter Yoga helps improve business and performance

Workplace stress: While there are many tools available for stress management, Laughter Yoga is a unique practice that helps reduce physical, mental and emotional stress at the same time. It works both at the physical and mental level. A research conducted in December 2006 on 50 information technology professionals in Bangalore found a significant reduction in stress levels as shown by reduction in cortisol levels in saliva.

Improved efficiency: At a given time, performance depends upon mood and Laughter Yoga has the power to change the frame of mind within minutes by releasing neuro-peptides from the brain cells called endorphins. Science tells us that the brain needs 25% more oxygen than other body organs. Laughter Yoga increases the net supply of oxygen, which helps in optimal performance and boosts energy levels.

Team building: “People who laugh together, work together”. John Cleese, a renowned British comedian, once said during his visit to Mumbai that laughter is a great connector of people. It breaks all hierarchies and is a force for democracy. Laughter Yoga has the ability to change the work environment drastically by making people happy and cheerful, bringing positive mental attitude, hope and optimism in the workforce. It also increases communication skills to help in teambuilding.

Leadership skills: A good leader is the one who is in touch with his or her emotional being and understand those of others. Laughter Yoga helps connect with people in the workplace and bring an emotional balance. This is greatly helpful in achieving targets and accomplishing goals.

Innovation and creativity: The most creative people in the world are children. The essence of Laughter Yoga is to cultivate child like playfulness. This playfulness stimulates the right brain activity, which is the seat of creativity. This helps in generating new ideas and insights about workplace issues and problems.

Increasing attention span in HR trainings: The human brain cannot concentrate for more than 90 minutes after which the attention span reduces. Even a 5-10 minute Laughter Yoga session can provide a great energy boost during long HR training sessions and conferences. It helps in increasing the attention span, enhancing learning skills and overall concentration.

Positive work environment: Job dissatisfaction and hostile work environment compel people to change jobs more frequently, thus affecting productivity and profitability. Laughter Yoga creates positive energy and improves communication between people. The study on IT companies in Bangalore also confirmed an increase in positive emotions and decrease in negativity, thereby developing an emotional intelligence. This helps in creating a more constructive work environment and ensures loyalty and commitment.

Motivation and communication: For people working in front office and sales and marketing, Laughter Yoga helps to bring a smile on their face and generate an overall feeling of wellbeing. This enhances their communication and motivational skills thus increasing their client base and customer satisfaction.

Health benefits of Laughter Yoga
The basic objective of every human being is to enjoy life, live in harmony with family and friends. But, one cannot enjoy life if one is stressed out. Laughter Yoga is a single exercise routine which brings physical, mental and social wellbeing in shortest possible time. People can experience benefits of this unique practice from the very first session.

In my 30 years of experience in medicine, the two most common causes of ill health are wrong food habits and lack of exercise which leads to heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and many stress-related illnesses.
Executives are very busy and have no time to exercise. Dr. Williams Fry of Stanford University proved that 10 minutes of hearty laughter is equal to 30 minutes on the rowing machine- this is not in terms of muscular movement but a cardio pulmonary endurance. The purpose of all aerobic exercises is to stimulate heart rate, increase blood circulation, supply oxygen and remove toxins.
The author is Mumbai-based medical doctor and founder of Laughter Yoga International

How Laughter Can Help People With Diabetes Avoid Heart Disease

Diabetes drastically raises your risk of heart disease, but you may be able to laugh off some of the danger.

Researchers prescribed a daily "dose" of humor -- 30 minutes of a favorite sitcom or video -- to diabetes patients, along with standard medication. Other diabetics got the medical treatment but not the shot of fun. Blood tests taken before and after the study showed that patients who tickled their funny bones lowered their heart risk substantially: They had about a 26 percent increase in HDL ("good" cholesterol), compared with a bump of just 3 percent among patients in the control group. And levels of C-reactive protein, a marker for heart-harming inflammation, dropped by 66 percent, compared with a 26 percent decrease in the other patients. "Stress can be deadly," says study coauthor Lee Berk, DrPH, at Loma Linda University in California. "And laughter suppresses stress hormones -- it really is the best medicine."

From Reader's Digest - July 2009