2 contagious things that are good for you

by | Jul 24, 2024 | Featured blog post, Lifestyle

It’s not a joke—it’s more. Yes, there are things that can be contagious and are good for you. What are they?

Laughter

Whether it’s a joke that cracks you up or a situation that makes you giggle, laughter is good for you. There is a reason why they say that laughter is the best medicine. It leaves your muscles relaxed for up to 45 minutes and can help boost your mood, immune system and even your longevity. That’s right! There are even studies that suggest that it can help guard against heart attacks.

An experiment at the University College London found that laughter is indeed contagious. The premotor cortical region in our brain responds to the sound of laughter and prepares our facial muscles to respond to the sound in a positive way. When presented with positive and negative sounds, the experiment found that the response to positive sounds, such as laughter, was much higher than to negative triggers. In addition, laughter, mainly as smiling and grinning, is even more contagious than yawning.

Finnish and British researchers came to a similar conclusion when they studied contagious social laughter. Their study revealed that laughter releases endorphins in certain areas of the brain (thalamus, caudate nucleus and anterior insula), signaling safety and promoting a sense of togetherness. “Laughter is highly contagious, and the endorphin response may thus easily spread through large groups that laugh together”, said Robin Dunbar, professor or evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford.

In fact, we’re 30 times more likely to laugh when we’re around others—often because laughter is also used as a tool used in social bonding.

How contagious is it, really? The Tanganyika laughter epidemic in 1962 is probably the most famous example when a school had to be closed due to contagious social laughter. Mind blown!

Happiness

The British Medical Journal published a study on the 3 degrees of separation of happiness. Here’s an excerpt from a ResearchGate article (February 2008):

“A friend who lives within a mile … and who becomes happy increases the probability that a person is happy by 25% (95% confidence interval 1% to 57%). Similar effects are seen in coresident spouses (8%, 0.2% to 16%), siblings who live within a mile (14%, 1% to 28%), and next door neighbours (34%, 7% to 70%). Effects are not seen between coworkers. The effect decays with time and with geographical separation. People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon.”

In other words, each happy person increases the happiness of others up to 3 degrees of separation. And each happy person in your life makes you happier. People with the most social connections were found to be the happiest.

What’s also interesting is that happiness is more contagious than unhappiness. A happy friend increases the likelihood that you’ll be happy by 15%. An unhappy friend increases the likelihood that you’ll be unhappy by 7%.

In addition, happiness is also linked to pain reduction, immunity benefits, better cardiac function and longevity, so increasing collective happiness can help create healthier societies.

And that’s not something to laugh about. Oh, wait, it is…

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Image by Design Ecologist, Unsplash

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