Laughing all the way

If this year has taught us anything, who knows what 2022 will bring? This last year has brought significant challenges to almost all of us, including fear, sadness and sorrow.  We have all been challenged, in a way never seen in our lifetimes, to sit with degrees of uncertainty.  As a rule, us humans do not sit well with uncertainty as we are a pattern-seeking species and tend to be forward-thinking, even more so in developed economies where we tend to be goal driven.  We don’t like it when the goal posts move and when they simply disappear, we are filled with unease. 

But it hasn’t all been bad.  Amazing things have happened in a short space of time.  There has been admiration, gratitude and appreciation of all the incredible contributions and sacrifices made by the NHS team and other key healthcare workers. Their fundamental importance to many of us has been underscored during the pandemic.  Health and ill-health has been centre stage for us all with many people taking the opportunity of working from home to explore their local area in more depth, to be more deliberate in their exercise habits.   

For us at Laughter Lab, establishing a business during COVID 19 hasn’t been straightforward, but then establishing a business is never simple or easy.  We envisioned working face to face with people delivering our innovative approach to wellbeing through laughter, which unfortunately has not been possible.  Like so many businesses we have adapted and during lockdown we were able to reach hundreds of people with our twice-weekly laughter yoga sessions.   

We have delivered seventeen free webinars on various topics associated with laughter, including the physical and psychological health benefits of laughter, laughter yoga research, laughter as a super-connector, laughter in the workplace and laughter for wellbeing.  We have been delighted to have engaged with over 400 people and we enjoyed the discussions and meeting people afterwards. 

The first lockdown provided an important opportunity for me to focus and get down to the serious business of cutting down my 16,226-word dissertation submission into a 6,000-word article format.  Spending week after week at my desk allowed me to do this and in January 2021 our article “No laughing matter: qualitative study of laughter yoga suggests stress inoculation” was published.” One of the greatest achievements in 2021 was improving our global understanding of laughter through our own academic research. 

2021 has been fantastic for us and we would love to thank the thousands of people who have connected with us over last year. We have worked with multinationals and their teams all over the world, start-ups, NHS teams all over the country, carers groups, charities and forward-thinking individuals.  Jane and I look forward to developing our work sharing our passion for laughter and exploring the huge variety of applications of the benefits of laughter.  Our mission is to contribute to personal and collective wellbeing – simply; making people feel better by understanding more about laughter and using it more. With this in mind and since over 80% of our work has been voluntary, we are becoming a community interest company in 2022. 

We would love to hear from you to talk about how we can work together bringing more laughter and levity to life. 

Anna