Laugh your way to a healthier work place...

Laughter is good medicine for stress and workplace blues.

Good for you if you pulled a funny April Fool prank or two last week Friday. “A healthy dose of humour can make you more productive,” Natalie Rabson of Boston City Campus and Business College points out.

“The sound of a roaring laughter is far more contagious than any cough, sniffle or sneeze and we should actually bring humour into the workplace on regular basis.”

And we should make use of the only day that we are actually allowed to prank each other to bring some humour into the workplace.”

Being silly actually helps you to be serious, according to the experts. Laughter is good for your health, leaving your muscles relaxed for up to 45 minutes after a good giggle. It also produces endorphins – the body’s natural feel good chemicals – that promote a sense of well-being and can even relieve pain.

There’s lot more going on in your body than just the physical effects of having a good giggle. You are also experiencing a biochemical effect. Your body manufactures many amino acids, proteins and hormones based on certain needs, and distribute them throughout the body.

Insulin, the hormones associated with diabetes, is one that needs to get around. When you laugh your body and brains produces chemicals that would cost over R40 000 to buy over the counter at a pharmacy. You can create compounds like serotonin and immune-boosting interleukins for free – all you need is to have a good laugh.

When you laugh, the convulsions of your body aid in transporting lymph fluid around the body. It cleans out old, dead waste products from organs and tissues, strengthening your immune system. “So increase the laughing days at work and decrease the sick days off,” says Rabson.

You also take big gulps oxygen is a primary catalyst for the production of energy in the body, your body starts creating energy in the body, your body starts creating energy more efficiently after a good joke. Cancer cells and parasites cannot survive in a high-oxygen environment, so you’re also reducing your risk of illness.

The functioning of your body blood vessels improve every time you laugh, so years of accumulated laughing may actually protect you from heart attack. There are various ways to add some humour and lift the general mood in the office:

• An office bulletin board loaded with cartoons, one liners, jokes, and pictures is one way to invite humour into the workplace. A few moments of humour at work can lead to increased productivity as the newly energized employee returns to his or her task.
• Diffuse difficult situations by using humour to communicate a message that could potentially upset someone. Compliment a somewhat scatter- minded colleague, whose desk is always messy, with a note that says: “A creative mess is better than tidy idleness. “The message is clear, yet the communication is done in a light, and therefore, less stressful way.
• Use humour to politely insult someone you dislike – this is a tricky art but can work well.
• In a time when funny e-mails spread like wildfire, it would be expected that the workplace would be a happier place. This is necessarily so; you enjoy these jokes while sitting alone in front of your computer screen, rather than having five people huddling around a work station giggling together.
• All good lecturers and presentations should have a fair share of jokes, stories and anecdotes to command attention and energise the audience. Humour wakes up the audience and can be useful to communicate a difficult message, like bad news for the company’s employees. It has been found that people can better remember commercials and advertisements that convey a marketing message in a humorous way. Humour is a major career asset- as we increase our personal humour quotient and spread our humour to others; we will begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Make sure the joke is appropriate for the occasion, and should not be offensive in any way. Refrain from jokes that are sexist, racist, hurtful or discriminatory. And when in doubt leave it out.
  

Contact Boston on 011 551 2000, e-mail info@boston.co.za, visit www.boston.co.za

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