The reason I chose this topic was because I wanted to make people feel better and enjoy their experience during the Monday Wellness assignment. I soon found that laughter would be the perfect topic to use for my Monday Wellness as laughter would cheer up the class and took a major role in my everyday life. My whole goal with choosing the topic was to make the class’s Monday better. When I chose this topic, I expected there to be only mental health benefits. However, as I researched the function of laughter I soon found that it took a far greater role. This role was, in summary, to keep our hormones in balance. Finding out that laughter was a hormonal buffer was probably the most interesting fact I found during my research.
Laughter connects to our unit in health in many ways. For instance, I found that laughter affects the main three healths in our body: mental, physical, and social. As I said earlier though, laughter's most notable role in our body is a hormonal buffer. By this I mean that if there is more cortisol in our blood stream, laughter will help to lower the secretion of this hormone. By lowering the amount of cortisol in the blood stream, blood vessels can dilate and pump more oxygen to the organs. You may think that cortisol is just one hormone and doesn’t control much. However, during my research of laughter, I also researched the vast effects of cortisol on the human body and other hormones as well. For example, cortisol not only affects the amount of stress we feel but also affects the size of blood vessels in the cardiovascular system. Laughter not only affects cortisol levels, but beta-endorphins as well. These beta endorphins are neurohormones that help us to perceive pain. Essentially, laughter helps us to reduce pain. The way laughter affects mental health is in how we deal with stress. Laughter has been shown to help improve conditions of post traumatic stress disorder. Socially, laughter helps us to make a social tension reliever. These are just some of the many incredible benefits of laughter.
If I were to rate myself on a one to ten grading scale I would probably grade myself as a 9.5. I would give myself this grade because I was the first one of my class to present and did two people’s worth of work in the same amount of time, probably even less. Now that I think about it I probably should have gone last. Anyways, I feel as though my delivery of the speech could have been much better. I say this because I often slurred my words together and forgot certain aspects to my slides. If I were to do this assignment again I would likely partner up with someone so that I wouldn’t have to do all the work. Not only would having a partner during this project help workload wise, but would also help comfort me when it’s my turn to present. Ultimately, I believe that I did a fair job on the project, but I could have much better if I had more time, a partner, and sleep.
P.s. Other things that sparked my interest during this project included:
- the anatomy of the larynx and epiglottis
- the physiology of the larynx
- the hypothesis of how laughter developed during evolution
- how laughter affects humans in such a small (hormones) way, but has such a huge impact (relaxation of muscles).
Link to Presentation) https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16ly_56PMxn4wImYWnlPQ-OGIFj68nsafMeMFp-KoqJI/edit#slide=id.g666b793a3_0_354
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