Laughter is the best medicine!

At Camp Quality, we bring laughter back to the lives of kids facing cancer and we also believe laughter is the best medicine! Are you ready to put that to the test?

You wouldn’t think a good laugh and a gym workout have much in common, but both can boost your mood and produce feel good endorphins.

Here are our top tips to get your daily dose of laughter.

1. Ditch the doomscrolling – try cheerscrolling instead. Instead of scrolling through pages and pages of bad news, try searching for inspiring or uplifting news stories instead!
2. Give Laughter Yoga a go. It’s hard to think of anything more awkward than getting together with a bunch of strangers and pretending to laugh. But the magic of Laughter Yoga is that what starts out as forced ‘ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha’ soon turns into hilarious, spontaneous laughter that becomes infectious.
3. Look for small moments that make you smile. Besides finding more reasons to laugh, it’s important to find at least one thing every day to make you smile.
4. Get a regular dose of humour. Listen to funny podcasts, join a humour group on social media that posts jokes or funny cartoons daily or have a weekly comedy night – get together with family or friends to watch funny movies or sitcoms at the weekend.
5. Get silly with the kids. There’s so much laughter potential in spending time with kids because they’re more in touch with their silly side. They also love telling and learning silly jokes like, ‘Why did the teacher have to wear sunglasses? Because her students were so bright’.
6. Take a laughie. You know how to take a selfie, but how about a laughie? Set aside time each day to take a 60 second video clip of yourself laughing – then play it back to yourself three times a day.
7. Bring humour to dinner … When you’re sitting around the dinner table ask the kids what the funniest thing to happen today was!
8. …and keep a humour journal. Collect and share things that make you laugh, like jokes, quotes or memes and compile them in a journal or keep them in a scrapbook – and on days when you feel flat, flick through it or search for something to add.
9. Grow some gratitude. It’s not a laugh-out-loud emotion but gratitude helps create a calmer mood and teaches us to find joy in the little things.
10. Google some laughter quotes. Quotes about laughter can give you a laugh (or at least a smile). Here’s some of Camp Quality’s favourites:

“When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.” J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan.

“You don’t stop laughing because you grow older – you grow older because you stop laughing’. George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright.

“It’s bad to suppress laughter – it goes straight down and spreads to your hips.’ Fred Allen, US comedian.

So get out there, get giggling and really, what have we got to lose by laughing?