“We Are Happy Because We Laugh”
This episode is all about what is happening to your brain as you laugh. We talk about the science behind laughing and how laughing can improve your immune system.
Laughing Lovebugs, Lauren and Alik are a husband and wife team of Certified Laughter Yoga Leaders. Yes… LOL! You read that right we are “Laugh Yogis”…we are the Laughter Professionals.
In laughter yoga, we combine laughter exercises & deep breathing with childlike playfulness & movement to connect, unwind, and let go. No sense of humor, flexibility, or yoga mat required!
Laughter Yoga is perhaps the only exercise routine that helps to ease physical, mental & emotional stress all at the same time.
Scientific studies show that Laughter yoga strengthens the immune system and infection-fighting antibodies, alleviates pain, relieves tension, lowers blood pressure, controls blood sugar, and keeps the heart healthy.
In this challenging time, we are attempting to cultivate human connection via laughter. We would love to spread the word to encourage people to participate in doing something that not only feels good but is good for them.
Laughter Yoga helps alleviate, reduce, or eliminate anger, loneliness, anxiety, comfort with loss, pain, depression, and more.
Laughing Lovebugs offer virtual laughter yoga sessions for individuals, groups, couples, corporations, children, schools, mental health organizations, treatment centers, senior centers, hospitals, and more.
An open mind & heart is all you need to bring…you don’t need to be in a good mood to receive the health benefits of laughter yoga…So come do something great for your mind, body, and soul and experience the gift of laughter.
In this podcast, Could Laughter Be The Best Medicine, we cover:
- Why laughter is essential for your body and your mind
- The reasons you should laugh every single day
- About the “3 D’s” of laughter yoga
- How you can reframe stress through laughter
Why Laughter Is Important
When you laugh, you’re allowing more oxygen into your bloodstream, which helps your blood to circulate better. Laughter strengthens your heart and lungs. The better you breathe, the better you feel, and the better your immune system works. Plus, laughing improves your mood, lowers your cortisol levels, and lowers your blood pressure. When people get nervous, they start laughing. It’s the body’s way of calming us down. Laughter does a lot for us, even fake laughter because it still gives you happy hormones.
The Type of Laughing To Practice
You can laugh silently; it doesn’t have to be loud. You will still get happy hormones no matter what type of laughter you are doing. It doesn’t matter if your laugh is low or loud; you still activate the happy hormones. You can laugh without relying on humor, jokes, or comedy. Usually, people wait for something funny to happen. However, you can laugh for no reason at all. Intentional laughter will help you reap the health benefits.
The Three D’s of Laughter
Depth: Deep belly laughs will expand your diaphragm and increase your lung capacity. Deep laughs will contract your lungs more and help you exhale a lot of air that is just sitting there. Overall, it will bring more oxygen into your body.
Duration: It has to be at least fifteen minutes straight of laughter.
Dependability: On average, an adult laughs ten to fifteen times a day. In contrast, children laugh three hundred to four hundred times per day. In a laughter yoga session, you are guaranteed laughter.
Reframing Your Interaction With Stress Through Laughter
When you’re laughing for happiness and satisfaction, it’s not uncomfortable. We don’t have to practice stress, fear, anxiety, and doubt. However, we have to practice feeling good, and that’s what laughter is all about. Laughter reframes and interrupts your interaction to stress. Even when you’re experiencing challenging moments, you can still feel good. In the moments when you feel like you can’t laugh or you don’t want to, those are the moments when you should be laughing.
Give Yourself A Laughter Break
Give yourself a laughter break – it takes practice to remember to laugh. Once you start taking laughing breaks, you’ll feel so much more empowered. You can choose to laugh and remember to do it throughout the day. Remember to laugh without any condition. Allow yourself to feel good in the present moment. Even if the stress doesn’t disappear, you’ll be easing yourself into the next moment with lower levels of cortisol.
Lauren Colbert 0:00
We’re not laughing because we’re happy we might be because we laugh, we still experienced challenges. And we appear very happy because we laugh. We choose to laugh even when we’re experiencing a challenging moment.
Dr. Mindy 0:16
I am a woman on a mission that is dedicated to teaching you just how powerful your body was built to be. I like to do that by bringing you the latest science, the greatest thought leaders and applicable steps that help you tap into your own internal healing power. The purpose of this podcast is to give you the power back and help you believe in yourself again, my name is Dr. Mindy Pels. And I want to thank you for spending part of your day with me. On this episode of The recenter podcast, we are going to take a whole new twist with neuroscience and dive into the neuroscience of laughter.
So I have brought you Lauren in a leak, and they call themselves the laughing love bugs. And I’m going to give you a little background on these two, I actually found them through my husband, who I found laughing in my house one day to himself, and I walked into the room and I thought, What are you doing? And he said, I’m following, I’m listening to these two beautiful people called the laughing love bugs. And he started doing a daily laugh session with them. And I could really start to see a change not only in him, I joined in a few times, I could see a change in me. And of course, my science brain went crazy and wanted to understand what was happening to our brains as we laughed. And it is really profound. So you’re gonna fall in love with Lauren and a leak, they are really passionate about what they’re doing, they’re going to talk about different laughing exercises. When this episode we talk about the science behind laughing and it’s really cool, how laughing can improve your immune system. It’s really neat. And they’re going to talk about how laughing can fit into relationships, how you can use laughing in the corporate world, how we can get back to laughing like we did as kids, the part of the brain that is affected by laughing It is really a fun episode. So if you’re looking for a new stress tool, if you’re looking to move your life to a happier place, I truly believe what you’re about to hear will have a dramatic effect on you. And stay tuned because at the end, they took me through a laughing exercise that no doubt left me happier. And I see this as an incredible tool for all of our resellers. And I can’t wait to share it with you. So enjoy. Okay, resetera is I have a really cool new product for you that Organa FIDE just put out. And it’s called harmony, beautiful name for what it does, it helps balance hormones. And specifically it’s going to help with progesterone production, which Hello, so many of us need more progesterone to calm ourselves and feel better. So it has three nutrients in it that I’m really excited about. It has Makkah and it has chaste tree which is going to help with progesterone production, but they also put stinging nettles in it, which is a really cool nutrient. Don’t worry, you’re not going to taste it or, or feel any stinging on your tongue. But stinging nettles is an incredible detoxifier. So I always say that just because you make a hormone doesn’t mean you’re using that hormone and that you’re breaking that hormone down into a nutrient that you can actually put into action. Well when we detox when we support our liver with things like stinging nettles, now we’re supporting the liver. We’re using maka and chase tree to help make progesterone and you’ve got an incredible product that’s going to help us burst our progesterone stores. The other really cool thing about this product that I’m excited about is how do we use it with our cycle. So remember, you’re getting the most amount of progesterone the week before your before your cycle starts. So what if we lean into harmony doing a scoop two skips maybe even three skips a day before the week before our cycle and see if it brings our progesterone stores up. And postmenopausal women we need progesterone more than any other person on the planet. So a scoop every day would keep your progesterone stores up. So it’s called harmony. It’s chocolaty, which is really good. I put it in some probiotic rich yogurt and it was like a dessert. I’m really excited about this product as hopefully you can tell and remember Organa phi will always give you 25% off if you use this code. It’s Organa phi.com forward slash pells. That’s Organa phi dot COMM forward slash lapels, let me spell it for you, O r, g a nifi.com. forward slash pals p ELZ. So check it out, let me know what you think. And happy hormone balancing.
There’s many reasons I wanted to bring you guys on. I like I said, I can’t imagine a more important time for us to be laughing. But what you may not know about me, or maybe in the little bit that we’ve talked about, I get called out all the time for my laugh, I have a really big laugh. And part of it is because I can’t when I find something funny, I don’t know how to hold back. It’s just it just oozes out of me. And because I don’t know how to laugh softly, I just know that if something hits me, I want to fully express it. And after looking at like your guy’s website, and kind of diving into the science behind laughter, I realized that maybe it’s because it’s making a physiological change in me when I have when I laugh hard. So help us understand why laughter is so important. And what is happening to us as we laugh.
Lauren Colbert 6:17
Thank you so much for sharing that laughter story, that little laughter story with us. That is so interesting. And laughter there’s so much that happens inside of us. When we laugh, we’re allowing more oxygen into our bloodstream, which helps our blood to circulate better strengthens
Alik Colbert 6:35
your heart, your lungs, that improves your mood, the better you breathe from laughing better you feel, the better you feel, the better your immune system works.
Lauren Colbert 6:43
It also increases your blood circulation. It also lowers your cortisol levels, your stress response, and your blood pressure. Yeah, so maybe that’s what’s going on when you laugh. It’s just like a natural response that our body does. If you notice that a lot of times when people get nervous, they start laughing. It’s like, the body’s way natural way of calming ourselves down. And it lowers the cortisol levels in our bodies as well. And it also releases endorphins when we laugh, which is the pain reliever. And it does so much. It’s so interesting. What laughter does, even with a fake laughter. Your brain does not know the difference between fake laughter and real laughter So even if you fake laugh, you’re still getting those happy hormones of the
Alik Colbert 7:37
dopamine, the oxytocin, the serotonin and endorphins. And another thing. Every person has a signature lab. Yeah, so yours is your own senator, like me with me learned first started dating, she noticed my laugh, I laugh and I spell my last house. So I say, haha, and it was so funny. I never noticed that I actually saved my life. Yeah.
Dr. Mindy 8:01
And so it is, you know, I’ve actually been kicked out of restaurants before. Like, I’ve upset people. It’s my laugh. I mean, not a few people. But um, you know, it’s just sort of who I am. And I can’t, I can’t hold it back. But then some people laugh like he, you know, they’re a little softer. laughters. So it doesn’t matter how hard you laugh? Does it matter the style of laugh? Or does it just have to move you to want to laugh to get those kind of neuro response neural responses that you’re talking about?
Alik Colbert 8:34
Where he can laugh silently? Yeah. Yes. Just laughs yourself. You’re still laughing?
Lauren Colbert 8:41
Yeah. And you’ll still get those happy hormones no matter what type of laughter you’re doing, like so. All of those happy hormones are activated, even with fake laughter doesn’t matter. If you’re laughing blow your laughing loud, or silently. Like we’ve just demonstrated, you’re still activating those happy hormones in your body. And what’s interesting, since we’re certified laughter yoga facilitators, it’s so interesting that we help people to feel good with laughter without waiting on a condition without relying on humor jokes, or comedy, which feels very awkward for many people, because we typically wait for that moment to laugh. Yeah, but we encourage laughter for the health of it. We always say it’s fun, the health of it, is there is a reason. We just are uncomfortable with that because we’re always on the left side of our brain that’s logical, analytical and judgmental. So we’re waiting for that reason, sense of humor, a level of happiness, satisfaction in life in order to laugh, but when we’re laughing in the laughter yoga session, since we’re not relying on the reason, it’s intentional laughter It’s unconditional, and you reap the health benefits of laughter. So although it doesn’t matter matter the type of laughter you’re doing the length of laughter So it has to be sustained laughter for at least 15 minutes.
Alik Colbert 10:09
So duration is
Dr. Mindy 10:10
Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, so duration matters.
Alik Colbert 10:13
Yeah, that’s the main part of the duration of your laugh.
Lauren Colbert 10:16
Yes, there’s actually three DS in order to read the health benefits of
Dr. Mindy 10:23
death. If you’re laughing, I got that one master.
Alik Colbert 10:27
dependability of your laughter and the duration. Yeah, duration and dependability.
Lauren Colbert 10:32
Yeah, so for the death, you have to think that deep belly merciful Africa is expanding your diaphragm, increasing your lung capacity, you’re allowing more oxygen into your body helping your blood to flow better. And that is the depth of laughter. So it has to be that really intense deep belly miralax,
Alik Colbert 10:52
you’re really flushing your lungs of all the oxygen that’s sitting inside that you don’t breathe, typically you don’t exhale as much as you think you. So you could have Murphy, you’re actually contracting your lungs more and exhaling a lot more air is just sitting sitting there.
Lauren Colbert 11:05
Yes. And typically, when you’re watching a funny movie, or listening to a joke, you’re laughing very shallow, you’re laughing from your chest. That was funny. But in the laughter yoga session, we stress the importance of that deep belly laughter. So you’re activating your, your diaphragm and increasing your lung capacity, which helps to bring more oxygen into your body. So there is a huge difference when people say, Oh, I laugh all the time. All laughter is good. But in order for those health benefits to kick in, you need to have that deep belly mirthful laughter. The other thing is the duration. Like we mentioned earlier, it has to be at least 15 minutes straight. oblak crazy, we can only get that no laughter yoga session, because if you’re watching a movie, or listening to a joke, you’re laughing for maybe a minute, if you’re lucky. But in the laughter yoga session, we facilitate laughter for a sustained period of time, so you can get those health benefits. And the last one was dependability that always mentioned and dependability really matters. Because in life, especially with these challenging times were experiencing, you’re unlikely to laugh. Adults really don’t even laugh
Alik Colbert 12:19
at all, what average adults laugh about 10 to 15 times per day, on average. Children last between 300 to 400 times per day on average. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Because there’s a huge discrepancy.
Lauren Colbert 12:32
Yeah, cuz adults. But in the laughter yoga session, we, uh, we you’re guaranteed laughter because you chose to be there. You volunteer your laughter and we’re not relying on conditions to laugh. We facilitate these laughter exercises and deep yogic breathing.
Alik Colbert 12:49
So the powerful part is you don’t rely on any outside stimuli. It’s all up to the participant.
Dr. Mindy 12:54
Yeah, fascinating. So Well, for starters, I can’t believe that even adults laugh tended, would you say 10 to 20 times a day. I mean, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen adults that don’t even do that.
Lauren Colbert 13:07
It’s such a simple thing that we don’t do. Because as children, we all were children at one time, and what laughter yoga does is awaken the inner child within us. So we’re playing when we’re laughing that we do different, like chance. Very good, very good. Yay. So awaken that inner child within us. And this helps to awaken that inner child that desire freedom with laughter. And the reason why we don’t laugh is because we’re always on that left side of our brain logical analytical, we wait for that moment to laugh. The condition. Yes, so true. This is why and laughter yoga, we’re like, you know, you can live without waiting on that condition. For the health of it, laugh because it feels good. And it’s good for you. So we’re so passionate about it, because like, it really improves the quality of our lives. And we’re just so excited every time we get the opportunity to share that. Well.
Dr. Mindy 14:04
Gosh, you get to go around and like spread joy to everybody. I can’t even imagine like a better job. So So I heard you guys on clubhouse with my husband was laughing downstairs. And I was like, it didn’t sound like a real laugh. I was like, What is going on? It was really awesome. Because he does tend to be a more serious person. So I was like, Oh my god, what’s he laughing at? So I joined in and I had a couple of things that like my mind, you know, the monkey mind talked at me. One is like, well, this is stupid. Why am I doing this? I’m just being really transparent. It’s like, well, this is stupid. And then this is tiring. I’m tired now. And this doesn’t feel authentic. So help me understand. But now as I’m listening to you here, I’m thinking, well, it’s just like meditation. It’s just like exercise like this. If this is as good As we think it is for the human body, everybody should be doing it. And if we have to do it for 15 minutes a day, how do I build it into my routine where it starts to feel more fluid, and just natural.
Lauren Colbert 15:15
So Dr. Monday, you just brought up something so amazing. And thank you for being transparent. This is something that we even experienced before becoming laughter Yogi’s that that uncomfortable feeling. But as I mentioned earlier, this is only uncomfortable because we typically wait for a reason to laugh. If we were laughing at a joke, it wouldn’t feel uncomfortable to laugh. If we were laughing for happiness, it won’t feel uncomfortable. If we were laughing for satisfaction, it wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. But the thing is about laughter. And what we really teach and we empower people to laugh is that we don’t have to practice stress, right? We don’t have to practice anxiety, fair doubt, but we have to practice feeling good. And this is what laughter does. It reframes and interrupts your reaction to stress. Every friends interrupts your, your reaction to that logic, you’re telling yourself, actually, when you’re waiting to laugh, you’re telling yourself and you’re telling your body that if everything is okay, out here, that’s the only time I’m going to let you feel good in here. But what we want to what we want to share and empower people to do is to laugh, because it’s so good for you. So even when you’re experiencing challenging moments out there, that you can feel good. And here by just choosing to laugh, especially because you can fake. You can fake laugh. And those moments when you feel like you can’t, or you don’t want to is the most important times where you should a lot, because those are the times where it may be detrimental to your health, since the body always remembers that stress.
Alik Colbert 17:01
Those are the most needed terms to stress and you feel like you shouldn’t. Yeah, those are the times you absolutely need.
Lauren Colbert 17:08
Yes. So it does take practice. Yeah,
Dr. Mindy 17:10
so you probably probably just like yoga felt weird The first time I did it, and meditation felt weird. So if you do it more, does it come a lot easier.
Lauren Colbert 17:21
Yeah, cuz we don’t only do this as the business, we actually practice it in our personal life. This is why we’re so passionate about it as well is because it really improved our relationship with each other, those around us, but most importantly, with ourselves as individuals, we learn that through laughter, you can empower yourself to be in the present moment, no matter what’s going on. And it also resets your
Alik Colbert 17:51
emotional circuit breaker, okay, it resets all of your emotions, like you could be in the worst situation, you can be really stressed out, and you think it’s gonna last forever. But you just laugh. And you start to feel better, you realize all the moments in life that we thought were gonna last forever, are all temporary. All those moments we had yesterday, and 10 years ago, when you skinned your knee as a child, and you were crying, and it felt like it was gonna last forever. Those moments are old. And you laugh.
Dr. Mindy 18:21
Yeah. I interviewed a woman on this podcast who wrote a book called burnout. And she has a concept called completing the stress cycle, that you have to tell your body that the stressor is over, just because you had a hard day and you go inside doesn’t mean that your body knows it’s not running from a tiger anymore. So my, what I’m thinking as I’m listening to you guys is Oh my gosh. So if I came home at the end of the day, I was really stressed out. And I sat down and laughed for 15 minutes, it would be a way of completing the stress cycle. Is that have you guys used as a tool like that before?
Alik Colbert 19:00
Absolutely, absolutely witness it firsthand from we’ve had situations where, for instance, we had our own social media manager. And we had we had a session booked maybe 10 minutes before that asset before after that phone call. And the discussion got pretty heated. Yeah, we were upset. And we were talking together, and we were like, how are we going to do this? We’re upset. And I thought to myself, this is what we do. Right? Yeah. We started the lab. And you know, within moments of laughing, it was over.
Lauren Colbert 19:31
Yeah. And it felt good. And it was such a relief because laughter serves as an emotional relief. And what it does is it teaches you to own your emotions, so your emotions don’t own you. So you’re actually allowing yourself to feel what you need to feel in that moment. But not let not letting your emotions swallow you, especially when they don’t serve you when that stress doesn’t serve you or what laughter yoga taught me is that, you know, you’re going to experience stress And challenges still, however, you don’t have to internalize that. And I used to have very poor stress management before laughter yoga and now it’s it’s so empowering just to laugh. And it’s not always easy. And it’s
Alik Colbert 20:15
taught me to externalize not to internalize, keep it all on the outside and just be the observer of the most
Dr. Mindy 20:23
beautiful, beautiful, what part of the brain? Do you think it’s stimulated? You talked about the right and left hemispheres? Do we? Do you think you’re actually moving yourself to a different part of the brain? Like, I’m thinking stress and laughter don’t exist in the same part of the brain?
Lauren Colbert 20:40
Exactly. Oh, you’re giving your right brain some exercise. And this is where the creativity sits. This is why it’s good for not only personalized, but professionalized when we find when we hold black or yoga sessions with workplaces, that the employees report after the testimonials are, they’re telling us that, you know, the team is more creative. They had all these ideas after that session. And, you know, we don’t stimulate that side, often. And as children, we did, because we were so afraid we weren’t logical, analytical, judgmental, which is that left side that’s always going, going adults, and
Alik Colbert 21:20
that they are the humanizes humanizes the employees with their superiors and it bonds the co workers together it breaks up clips within the workplace where there may be on job bullying or may feel awesome isolate. It brings everyone together.
Lauren Colbert 21:36
Yeah, it’s a great way for bonding for families is strengthened this relationships and bonds for children children is a laughter is easily reinforce skill for children. So it’s just any anyone that’s human can laugh can use laughter in their lives or more laughter in their lives because it’s such a powerful but simple tool.
Dr. Mindy 22:02
Now in one of these sessions are do you guys teach different ways to laugh? Like, again, as I’m listening to you? I’m like, Okay, well, this could be really interesting to incorporate into my morning routine, because I’m already doing 20 minutes of meditation. I do 20 minutes of breathing. So what if I just put another 20 minutes on of laughing? So are there different ways to laugh? Do you want to laugh fast? Sometimes laugh laugh slow? Like, like yoga. There’s a lot of different things I can do. And Yoga is the same thing exists in laughter yoga.
Alik Colbert 22:35
Yes, you have many different breathing exercises and many types of laughter
Lauren Colbert 22:39
Yeah, cuz then laughter yoga, we’re just doing laughter exercises and deep yoga, breathing exercises. So these laughter exercises, Barry, we actually have like, a limited amount. So like,
Dr. Mindy 22:51
give me an example. Like, would it be like, everybody do it this style? And then everybody do a different style? Like, how what does that look like?
Lauren Colbert 23:00
So sometimes we have sessions, especially on Wednesdays, because we have this thing called we love the way you laugh. Wednesdays Where are laughter yoga sessions. When we have participants on Wednesdays, we usually share different types of laughter. We love slow Wednesdays because he loves sharing. He did actual research about different types of laughter. We do this laughter exercise where we
Alik Colbert 23:25
share different types of laughter amongst ourselves. Like you said, you have your own personal lab, where it’s like, Yeah, we do an echo where I’ll give my life. And then the whole group does that they imitate me. And we just laugh. And then each person takes a turn, and they display their own type of laughter. And we all do it. And I pick up different types of laughter from them.
Lauren Colbert 23:47
Yeah. And then the other laughter exercises type of exercises that we do are more structured. So say, if we’re doing it for corporate, maybe ob like, something more general, it won’t be like types of laughter. It’ll probably be something like Concord conflict resolution. laughter. So we’ll say something like we basically create a scenario. Imagine you’re having a conflict with your colleagues. And instead of spewing those negative words at each other, we’re going to laugh, and it looks like this. So we’ll demonstrate how it looks and
Dr. Mindy 24:28
you have to point your fingers does that help but know that? Yeah, you get real. Love it.
Alik Colbert 24:37
imitate that with instead of spewing negative words, replace all of that with laughter instead of
Lauren Colbert 24:42
Yes. And then we’ll come to resolution laughter. So some of it goes are strung are laughter yoga sessions are structured according to the participants, or like, we love the way you laugh Wednesdays or the day that it is. So it varies from time to time.
Alik Colbert 25:00
We do birthday.
Lauren Colbert 25:01
Yeah, there’s birthday laughter we have all types for children. Bad girl, good girl.
Dr. Mindy 25:09
I love that.
Lauren Colbert 25:15
And all of these exercises that we do these laughter exercise, stimulate different parts of our bodies, or organs. For aligning laughter it stimulates the thyroid gland. You’re sticking your tongue out or laughing. So there are so many even even what we do after every exercise is stimulate the acupressure point, your hands, clapping,
Alik Colbert 25:37
you’re stimulating the acupressure points in the palms of your hands and your fingertips. Okay, which they activate a large portion of receptors that are in your brain that are also responsible for healing. Yeah, so so we’re clapping and go. Very good. Very good. Yeah. You’re activating those pressure points, these acupressure points. Yeah,
Lauren Colbert 25:57
so and laughter yoga, after every one of our exercises, we typically go very good, very good. Yay. And that is happening. And what that also does, a lot of people may feel uncomfortable with that, because they’re like, we’re not very good. But there’s science behind that event. And this helps to create those childhood memories that trigger those childhood memories in our brain, where everything was free, and we were not so responsible for so many things at once. And
Alik Colbert 26:33
because emotion creates emotion,
Lauren Colbert 26:35
yes, the motion your body is in creates that emotion. So when we’re clapping our hands and lifting our arms up and
Alik Colbert 26:43
raising our head, your hands are in the celebratory state, we have your hands up and up high, you celebrate it when people are praising something, it triggers those memories. Yeah,
Lauren Colbert 26:51
so you’re tricking your body into feeling like, Oh, your cells are like, hey, it must be great things happening out there. So you’re activating all those happy chemicals. And the body feels really good. And you feel really good. And you’re just reaping the health benefits of laughter in the session.
Dr. Mindy 27:09
So I so what one of the things that I love to do on my podcast is really help bring the understanding of things that what I would call are a little woowoo. You know, they look like on the like on the fringe, they look like they wouldn’t mean anything. But when you actually unpack it through neuroscience, you realize, Oh, my gosh, they mean a lot. And I recently brought Bruce Lipton on and we talked about our subconscious programming. And one of the things that he said was that when we try to change our life from our what you guys are calling the like, the analytical mind. So he would call it the conscious mind, we get stuck because everything is blocked and controlled by our subconscious programming that was developed from the age of zero to seven. And so again, as I’m listening to you guys talk, I’m thinking, and so one of my comments to him was do affirmations work? And he said, Oh, yeah, they work. Because when you’re saying the affirmation, and you’re doing it over and over again, you are changing that old programming. So I’m curious if what kind of like life changes you’ve seen in people, if they do this on a regular basis. I’m curious if you’ve been able to see people overcome addiction, or to move out of limiting beliefs that hold them back from a great job or have you seen marriages get repaired? Because you’re you’re rewiring the brain with those affirmations. And then I love how you’ve put in the touch and everything. Like my neuroscience brain is like Oh, I bet it’s this part of the brain and this part of the brain. Okay, let’s talk about literally my new favorite sleeping hack, and it’s put out by chili pad. So I gotta tell you that when I first heard about chili pad, I was a little dubious. I didn’t quite understand how making my mattress cold was going to help me sleep better at night. But what I have since learned after trying chili pad out for several months, I’ve been consistently using it for the past six months is that two things are happening. One when you lower your body temperature, you need to get it down five degrees from when you’re what it is when you’re standing in your room. When you get into the your sheets and at you bring your body temperature down by five degrees. It actually helps you go to sleep, it will stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system. So when I get into bed with my chilli pad, I can control the temperature of my mattress, and I’ll put it down to like 67 get in bed it’s a little cold but the sheets are warm on top. And it is enhances my body’s and my mind’s ability to go to sleep. The second thing that I’ve noticed with the chili pad is getting up in the morning is easier. So check this out. When you raise the temperature of the bed in the morning it actually encourages you to get out of bed. So half hour before my alarm, I will set the chili pad temperature to go up so that everything in the bed is warming up. And as it heats up it naturally wakes me up and I’m not an obtrusive way like an alarm would it just gently wakes me up and it propels me out of bed. So on my whoop which I monitor my sleep all the time on I am seeing better recovery deeper sleep and I’m getting to bed quicker and when I wake up in the morning I’m more rested. So chilli pad you guys just nailed it I love this product. I got to tell you my husband was very dubious when I first said we were going to put this on our bed. And the cool thing about chilli pad is that both sides are different have different controls so your partner can control their side you can control your side everybody gets the temperature that they want. So check out chili pad, you can go to their website or you can go to Dr. Mindy Pels, calm and find a link there. And if you use resetter code 20 so that’s resetter 20, r e s e t t e r 20 they will give you a discount on the toy pod. amazing product I It is literally been a game changer for me for me to pause. So much so that I actually was starting to sleep in a different room for my husband to keep the temperature cold and the chilli pad brought me back into our bed. It’s been not only a game changer for my sleep, but of course for my marriage as well. I hope you enjoy it. What are what are some of the craziest stories you’ve seen with laughter that’s worked for people
Alik Colbert 32:02
we’ve witnessed even in our own personal lives, even people that think is woowoo but they might have been slightly depressed and just from hearing and being around us while we’re doing our sessions peripherally. their moods have improved, just from hearing us do what we do Very good. Very good day. The laughter stuff and now we get some people that never laugh. We’ll get phone calls now. Haha.
Lauren Colbert 32:28
Wow. So it really like it enlightens people to hear you laugh, because even if they think it’s Whoo, the what’s so interesting about that is that if we’re walking around stressed and tense in our face, people don’t think that’s woowoo they think that’s normal. But if you’re laughing
Dr. Mindy 32:47
Yeah, that’s Yeah. And it’s
Lauren Colbert 32:52
interesting to us because we are on our on a mission to normalize laughter normalized feeling does. It shouldn’t be strange to see us laughing or to see people laughing. If you hear people laughing, you know, something good has happened. Now, however, people are still taken back by it. They’re like, What’s going on there? They’re strange. Why are they laughing? For no reason? Like, you know, so we want to normalize laughter because imagine a world without it.
Dr. Mindy 33:21
Yeah, or imagine a world with it all the time. If everybody walked around, what if we turn on the news and all the the newscasters were laughing that way. And then they delivered the information to you. Like, I think it would be really interesting. And that was one of the things I learned from Bruce Lipton is when we talked about affirmations. I said, What if you’re saying something that you that you’re like, well, I’m saying it but I don’t believe it. And he’s like, you just fake it till you make it because what your brain doesn’t know the difference like you guys are saying between between what is reality and and what is not. So the repetition of the affirmation with the laughter is, is incredibly incredible.
Alik Colbert 34:05
Yeah. It is amazing. You can convince yourself to be stressed out, while studying for our laughter, yoga, and the information that they say an actor can be studying to be a stressful part and removing a role where they’re supposed to be angry or stressed. And they’ll physically take on the characteristics of someone who’s stressed just from playing a muscle. Your body can’t differentiate between real emotion and fake them. What was interesting, so when we go laughter we’re tricking the body into thinking it feels good. Yeah.
Dr. Mindy 34:36
What does it do for the immune system is Do we have any studies on I saw somewhere on your website? The antibody antibody production goes up? Do we have any research on immunity?
Alik Colbert 34:48
Yes, it is the production of killer T cells. Yeah, great. So
Lauren Colbert 34:52
it boosts your immune system. It definitely boost your immune system and it does so much for your health, like Physically, mentally, emotionally, it just does. It just covers all areas. And what’s so interesting about that is that we, we studied this. And when we’re taking our courses to become certified, however, through our life experiences, we actually saw this these benefits. Sorry, yeah, we actually experienced these benefits. And we’re like, Wow, it really works. It’s been times where I had a headache and I’m like, Oh, we have to do this session. I’m not sure how I’m gonna get through this. And I get through it and I the headache is gone.
Dr. Mindy 35:38
Crazy. What about blood sugar? I’m like such a fan. So we do a lot of wearables and measurements. So like, I’ve got a whoop on right now measures my sleep and my heart rate variability. We do a lot of putting continuous blood sugar monitors on people. Have we do have you do you have any first hand experience? Or if you have seen that 15 minutes of laughter? We’ll just bring the blood sugar down.
Lauren Colbert 36:04
Yes, we saw that improves on we research shows that it improves your breast sugar control. It decreases blood pressure, and improves your cardiovascular health overall. It? It does. It was so much so much we can go on right on there. Oh, man, I believe it.
Dr. Mindy 36:25
I and I’m wondering like, wouldn’t it be really cool because I’m kind of like a research brain? I’m like, What if you had like a group of people and you like, tested their blood sugar? You had them laugh for 15 minutes? And then you tested their blood sugar again, then oh, would that be neat? I mean, we’ll do it. In my group, well, we’ll have to find a way to do this. Because Oh, it would be really interesting to see and blood sugar. You know, I don’t know what you know about immune compromised people. But they’re saying right now that here in America, we have about 12% of Americans that are metabolically fit, which means they’re managing their blood sugar, okay, only 12%. So I’ve been on a mission to get people to manage blood sugar better. And when we think about blood sugar, we always go at food, or we go at fasting, but I’ve gone and gotten a massage before and done, like my blood sugar reading, then got the massage, and then did a blood sugar reading afterwards, and my blood sugar dropped dramatically. So with no change to my food intake, so I’m curious of laughing would do the same thing. So I did a study
Lauren Colbert 37:36
with scientific studies do show that it improves blood sugar control? And yeah, we would love to, to put that to the top. Yeah, let’s
Dr. Mindy 37:44
figure out a way to do that. Because that would be really fun. We could get a couple 100 people together and and do like a group class and have everybody measure pre and post. It could be it could be really interesting. Is there a time of day that laughter is best? Like if, and I’m curious if like if you want to control stress, I would think you know, definitely before you go to bed, because if you go to sleep in a stress state, but do we have any research on the time of day of laughter and what it would do for your overall health if you varied the time.
Lauren Colbert 38:16
So any time of the day is good to laugh, you can start your day,
Alik Colbert 38:22
it’s good to start today. And you start on an elevated mood right? Now, mid day after you’ve been impacted by the day. It’s good, too early to release whatever you’ve incurred, even encountered throughout the day and before bed, because then you go to bed with a more relaxed, but energized state.
Lauren Colbert 38:42
And also during the day, during your day when you’re experiencing that stressful moment. What’s so interesting about laughter is that like I can be experiencing a stressful moment right now. And if I can choose to laugh, because it is a choice. Even if it’s fake, I can fake laugh right now in this stressful moment. Or I cannot laugh at all. And I experienced this stressful moment fully, and then go to sleep. Wake up the next day. And even though I’m no longer that stressful moment, my body remembers that stressful moment. Now I’m driving and I experienced traffic, I’m stressed again. Then another stressor happens, another stressor. And this piles up this piles up. And then over time this creates disease in our body because
Alik Colbert 39:28
you’re in a constant state of distress. Yeah. So anytime pretty much is a good time because you’re encouraged stress all throughout your day. Yes. So it’s important
Lauren Colbert 39:37
to remember you can just give yourself a laughter break. I mean, it’s going to take practice, and we’re happy to help with the practice. But it takes practice to remember that you can always just choose Select and once you do it, we received so many feedback that you know so much feedback that people feel so empowered by that choice. So just laughing and they’re like, Thank you guys, like, thank you for making me like, we’re like we didn’t make you, you chose. Because we’re not telling any jokes, we’re not entertaining you, you tell us a laugh and you remember to do it. And you laughed without waiting on that condition. And it’s such a powerful choice because you’re empowering yourself to be in the present moment, to feel good, no matter what’s going on outside. And even though that challenge, or that stress may not disappear, at least you’re easing yourself into the next moment where your body isn’t taking that hit of that stressful moment, or that
Dr. Mindy 40:35
I, my, again, my neuroscience brain is like, this is brilliant. This is brilliant. It’s like fasting, you know, I love fasting because it’s free. And it’s powerful. And it taps into an old ancient energy system that we don’t get when we’re eating all day. And I love when I’m listening to you guys. I’m like this is this is genius. We have really given over the health to very complicated, making it very complicated and sophisticated, but we’re very primal humans. And we need very specific primal needs. And we just don’t give it enough credit. Because we haven’t had some big scientists show up with a, you know, white white lab coat to tell us you can do this now. So I’m curious, maybe we get Fauci to get up there and like, say something like, Hey, everybody needs to are laughing now. That would be that would then you’d just see a whole wave of difference in the world. That would be pretty awesome. Now. What if I only have like a minute or two to laugh? So like, what if I’m like, Okay, I’m listening to this podcast, I’m like, I’m stressed I need to laugh. I’m in my car, I’ve got five minutes, is that if I can’t go 15 will five work.
Lauren Colbert 41:46
Any any any laughter is good laughter we’ve definitely recommend laughing as much as possible throughout your day we, we encourage daily laughter take, don’t wait for the moment to choose you. Right, choose the moment to laugh, we always say and we encourage you as much as you can during the day. But we do strongly recommend that if you want to reap the health benefits of it.
Alik Colbert 42:12
The full benefits, you have to laugh about that sustained 15 a
Lauren Colbert 42:15
minute. Yeah. And you can probably only get that in the last Well, you can only get that in the lacquer yoga session, because how are you going? It’s gonna feel awkward. So we’re happy to like, help people to get more familiar with how to do this and how to lab for that same period of time. But yeah, if you got a minute to live, we’d say, Take as many laughter breaks as you can. If it’s for one minute. If it’s for a few seconds, just laugh as much as possible.
Alik Colbert 42:45
You can laugh during your daily routine while you’re getting ready in the morning while you’re showering. While you’re on your way to work. You can you incorporate laughter into all these these times in your day when you’re not doing something but you’re doing something which I still laugh
Lauren Colbert 42:58
about your favorite about the daily chores about a lot of
Alik Colbert 43:03
I hate doing dishes, and I can laugh. I can be upset because I’m doing the dishes. Or I can choose to live and do the dishes. They got to get done regardless. Yeah. Regardless, so why not? Why not do something to feel good while you’re doing?
Dr. Mindy 43:20
Yeah, yeah, I’m okay. I have five questions for you guys. And you can you can answer you can both answer or you can answer it singles, you know, one at a time. Is there a book like when you first discovered laughter Were there any books that you read about it or anybody that inspired you to learn from other than your own selves?
Lauren Colbert 43:42
Um, yeah, there’s this book by the founder, Dr. madonn Qatari called laughter yoga. And it’s it’s all about laughter yoga and the benefits and just great information about it. Okay. And
Dr. Mindy 43:59
yeah, people can find that on on Amazon. Yeah, okay. We’re okay, we’ll put the link in there. We’re big book readers in this group. Okay. Yeah. Okay, have you ever laughed so hard that you peed your pants and what were you laughing at?
Unknown Speaker 44:20
Now you got some laughter king and
Lauren Colbert 44:22
queen make sure that we we definitely empty our bladder before especially
Dr. Mindy 44:30
for women like eagles would be really you know your when your lap Yeah. You could actually stack your your hacks
Alik Colbert 44:38
what we’ve had some people actually do it. Yeah. Oh my gosh,
Dr. Mindy 44:45
I love it. I love it. Okay, have you ever had a time where you’re like, I don’t feel like laughing so you turn to a comedian or you turn to something to like help you get the impulse to laugh.
Lauren Colbert 44:58
Well actually, there’s has been many times where we felt like, well, especially me where I felt like I didn’t want to laugh. But instead of turning to comedy, because we’re always practicing being present in the moment, and instead of just like, oh, what should we watch really quick, it only takes one of us. So I usually turn to support. Yeah, and we give each other laughter support
Alik Colbert 45:24
and agenda can start at his feet. So the fake part, after a while, it becomes contagious. And I might laugh at myself how ridiculous I feel. Or she may look at me and be upset.
Lauren Colbert 45:35
Yeah, hit like, it looks like you look stressed. He’s like, come on, come on, haha. And after a while, I’m like, Ha ha ha ha ha ha, like, I don’t feel like doing this. But I do it. And then eventually it becomes real laughter. Or even if it doesn’t, I definitely feel a difference. I feel like the tension in my body is down and down your stress response. Yeah. And I’m able to, like, just communicate what was happening. Like, I’m like, you know, it improves our communication and our relationship as well. Because once that happens, it’s like, Okay, so what was that face about? Then I’m like, wow, I was overwhelmed. And, you know, and then also helps us to create other new laughter exercises. And those moments where experiencing life real life experiences created overwhelmed laughter Oh, wow. For me, having a week of feeling overwhelmed, like, every day, I was like, I’m just so overwhelmed. And, you know, we created that exercise. So we find, like, laughter exercises in our real life experiences that you share with others,
Alik Colbert 46:50
your life inspires the exercises, and the exercises can help you inspire your life. Yes, I
Dr. Mindy 46:56
love it. We call that living it to lead it, you know, I love the people that I bring on to this podcast, I just, it’s so important that they’re like living what their message is, we have too many examples of people delivering a message, and then they’re not doing it themselves. You know, a great example of this as many men not all, but many medical doctors will turn around and tell their their patients lose weight while they stay overweight. You know, it’s like, we need more congruent leaders. And this is this is incredible. So I love it. So okay, last question. If you had one message for the world that you could just get into everybody’s brain, like in one second, what would that message be?
Alik Colbert 47:42
What our favorite says sayings? We’re not happy because we laugh.
Lauren Colbert 47:46
We laugh because we’re, we’re not laughing? Because we’re happy. We are happy because we laugh. Yeah, I’d love it. I’d love it. So people always think we’re so happy. They’re like, Oh, you’re a happy couple. And although we really are a happy couple, we, this is my best friend. And, you know, we share so much together, we experienced so much together. And we’ve been through so much together. However, we still experienced challenges, we still experience tension, we still experience stress. And we appear very happy because we laugh. We choose to laugh, even when we’re experiencing a challenging moment. Whether it is individually or together. We laugh, and even if it’s fake, we laugh, and it helps.
Alik Colbert 48:34
It helps a lot. And it’s helped us to personal losses.
Dr. Mindy 48:37
Yeah, I bet I was thinking I wonder if you can use it as a tool in like a fight, you know, with with your spouse, like if you can be like, okay, let’s take a laughter break. And then let’s come back to this discussion. Have you ever tried it like that?
Lauren Colbert 48:52
Yeah, we actually have a couple’s laughter yoga sessions where we facilitate laughter you’ll go with couples, and there’s one of our favorites is argument. Laughter similar subcomplex laughter we’re not saying any negative words to each other. We’re just having argument. laughter. So we do all the motions of arguing, right? emotions, and you can even look angry while you’re doing it. But you’re saying everything with a high. And it’s
Alik Colbert 49:23
everything you’d have to say is still a sound. Right? But if you were playing those sounds with laughter, you do no damage. But you still have to say what you said.
Dr. Mindy 49:32
Yeah. So brilliant. I love that. And I
Alik Colbert 49:37
walk it back because you didn’t say anything. Right?
Dr. Mindy 49:39
Yeah. And I would think that it satisfies satisfies that part of your brain that wants to like point the finger or look bad, but the word. Like I’m thinking about that and thinking so you’re not just suppressing that you’re like, oh, but you’re laughing so your face could look mad. Your fingers could be pointing But laughter is coming out of your mouth. I’m gonna try it with my teenagers. I’ll let you know how it works.
Alik Colbert 50:05
Yeah, no, no argument is complete without forgiveness. Yeah.
Lauren Colbert 50:09
So after that we practice forgiveness laughter which we place our hands on our heart and we pour out forgiveness with laughter after that, so it’s not like we just do that argument that we get over it. Usually forgiveness laughter happens after we actually talk about what happened. So what we always What should I say? Well, we always highlight is that many people are like, Oh, so you guys are just like laughing and you’re not dealing with no, we actually this helps us to communicate better. Because once we are laughing the argument laughter exercise, we’re actually de stressing our bodies and actually owning our emotions and that argument laughter even though the sounds that are coming out with laughter, we’re still only we’re not laying those emotions, or those negative emotions to own us. But we’re being present that we’re laughing and then afterwards, we’re able to talk Yeah, cuz now the tension is not there. The the the anger is released, and it’s
Alik Colbert 51:11
not as roar. Yeah, yeah. There’s some time between the incident and the time that you come with the resolution.
Dr. Mindy 51:18
It’s like, Yeah, I love it.
Lauren Colbert 51:20
I love it. You’re able to like okay, well, that really bothered me when you and then after that, we, we talked about it. So it’s the way to increase your communication skills as well. Your emotional intelligence. Yeah. unemotional though. Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Mindy 51:37
Well, how do people find you, if they if I have a feeling we’re gonna have a lot of resellers reaching out to Looking for this? And I want to try to stack it with fasting and see what we can do and see if that helps people through fast. So how do people find you
Lauren Colbert 51:51
on www dot laughing lovebugs calm on our website, and we’re on all social media platforms at laughing love books. Awesome.
Dr. Mindy 52:01
And the name is so amazing that you know what I when I asked my husband what he was doing, he’s like, I’m listening to the laughing love bugs. I’m like, what’s that? So you guys are awesome. So Lauren, and ELeague. Just thank you guys so much for sharing your joy. Hey, resellers, I just want to start off by saying thank you so much for all your wonderful reviews. And those of you that have left me comments on iTunes. I just greatly appreciate your thoughtfulness and how much you guys are enjoying these episodes. And it seems like you’re enjoying them as much as I am enjoying doing them with the things that I’ve learned in just interacting with so many people is that we’ve really lost the art of deep conversations. And for me, the resetter podcast stands for having meaningful conversations with people who are thinking about health, about life about mindset in a way that we may not be getting on social media or in mainstream media. And so I just want to say give you guys a shout out and just say thank you for participating in this process with me. Because as much as I absolutely love delivering the information to you, I love even more knowing that it’s impacting your life. So please let us know if there’s anything we can do to make this podcast more customized to you to make it better. We are now officially in season two. And we are working to bring you the best conversations that health influencers have that mindset changers can give and to really deliver you something that you’re not able to get anywhere else. So from the bottom of my heart, as I always say my YouTube from the bottom of my heart. I am deeply appreciative of you. I am deeply grateful to be on this journey with you and let’s get healthy together.
// RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
- Feel the impact of Organifi – use code PELZ for a discount on all products!
- Chilipad use code Resetter20 on the Ooler
- Book: Laughter Yoga
- Podcast with Bruce Lipton
I enjoyed the laughter segment. I do need it because I am lonely. This seems to be a good resource.