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Archives for 2011

1 October, 2011 by Cris Popp

Laughter Yoga on 60 Minutes

Following our recent Laughter Yoga conference, 60 Minutes is running a story on happiness and featuring Laughter Yoga this Sunday 2nd October 2011. As we understand it, this 60 minutes program, running from 7:30pm to 8:30pm on channel 9, will cover the topic of happiness and the central role of laughter for wellbeing and thriving.

With increasing acceptance of the role of promoting individual health and wellbeing in the workplace more businesses are including Laughter Yoga or brief Laughter sessions at their conferences & team building days. As Australia’s premier corporate laughter leader, Laughter Works has been running components of Laughter Yoga since 2004 leaving a smile on the faces of thousands of employees, boosting the bottom line and relieving stress. Because of our corporate business background we can guarantee the effectiveness – and appropriateness – of our sessions. The many highly positive testimonials on our site are an assurance that your leadership team and your staff will thank you for calling us. We also run a range of other programs including resilience and Hi!-Performance.

For more information on Laughter Yoga, please contact us at info@laughterworks.com.au or call Kris Popp on 0438 54 56 07.

Filed Under: Happiness, Laughter World Tagged With: Health & Happiness, Laughter Works, laughter yoga, Wellbeing

17 August, 2011 by Cris Popp

1 Day Conference for more Happiness, Health and Wellbeing at Work

We are pleased to be supporting the 5th annual Happiness, Health and Wellbeing @ Work conference on September 14. Our very own Kris Popp (along with Joanna McMillian) will be helping participants identify and overcome some of the challenges to wellbeing at work. This is a great opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others and the wisdom of the experts. If you’ve never seen Kris speak – don’t miss out – he’s a great speaker. As well, Tony Grant, from the ABC’s ‘Making Australia Happy’ will present lessons learnt and explain how these ideas can be applied in Australian workplaces.

The conference is run out of Sydney University and features Australia’s leading experts on psychology, leadership and Human Resources with the latest research and strategies on workplace health and wellbeing programs.

It attracts around 100-150 HR Managers, OHS staff and Wellbeing Managers each year from both the private and public sector and is especially useful for those involved in implementing Wellbeing programs in the workplace.

It is also great for anyone who is looking for health and wellbeing ideas to take back to their workplace.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Kris, workplace happiness

4 July, 2011 by Cris Popp

Laughter at Happiness and Its Causes Conference 2011

This article might not mention us but it’s a photo of the laughter session I ran at the Happiness and Its Causes Conference which was held on 15 – 18 June 2011.  The conference is held annually in Australia and explores the amazing science and psychology of human happiness with the world’s leading thinkers.

You don’t need to wait till next year to have this much fun …  we can come to your conference or workplace and run a laughter session which will have your participants jumping for joy. We can combine laughter with a talk on resilience, wellbeing, happiness and/or Hi!-Performance.  Contact us if you’d like to have a laugh AND improve performance and health.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized

4 July, 2011 by Cris Popp

25% of Happiness due to Stress Management

by Marina Watson Pelaez from Time Magazine

A recent survey by psychologist and self-help author Robert Epstein found that 25% of our happiness hinges on how well we’re able to manage stress. The next logical question is, of course, how best can we reduce our stress?

Epstein’s data, which he presented last month at the Western Psychological Association meeting in Los Angeles, was intended to help answer that question. It involved 3,000 participants in the U.S. and 29 other countries, who responded to an online questionnaire. Participants’ stress-management skills were gauged by asking them to rate their level of agreement with 28 items, such as “I frequently use breathing techniques to help me relax.” The volunteers were also asked about how happy they were and how successful they were in their personal and professional lives.

The stress management technique that worked best, according to the survey: planning. In other words, “fighting stress before it even starts, planning things rather than letting them happen,” says Epstein. “That means planning your day, your year and your life so that stress is minimized.”

Epstein points to his former professor, the late Harvard behaviorist B.F. Skinner, as a master organizer. (Skinner is best known for his highly influential research on the effects of reinforcement on behavior.) “Skinner was amazing at managing stress. He was quite a planner. Not only did he plan his day every day, but he had a 10-year planner,” says Epstein.

Epstein’s survey was also able to track stress management with participants’ overall levels of happiness. “The association was very strong,” says Epstein, “suggesting that nearly 25% of our happiness is related to our ability to manage stress.” (Incidentally, he remembers his former teacher Skinner as having been a genuinely happy person.)

But the bad news is that, in general, people are really bad at managing stress. “The mean score on our test was 55%. In a course, that would lead to a failing grade: F,” says Epstein.

You don’t have to be scientist to know that excess stress can lead to a host of ill effects, psychologically and physically — including early death. According to the New England Centenarian Study carried out by Boston University School of Medicine researchers in 2010, longevity is 20%-30% determined by genes and 70%-80% attributable to the environment. And a major characteristic consistent among people who lived to 100, the study found, was the ability to manage stress. “Stress kills,” says Epstein. “Stress is not only daunting, it’s also an important factor responsible for the acceleration of the biological clock.”

“The most important way to manage stress is to prevent it from ever occurring,” by planning, says Epstein. Of course, for some people, the idea of making checklists and calendars, organizing and planning ahead sounds, well, stressful. So Epstein suggests a few other stress-management techniques, taken from his self-help book on stress, that might work better for you:

Relax. O.K., if you could do that, you wouldn’t have any stress to begin with. But you can learn to decompress. Epstein found that study participants who had received stress-management training — even just a yoga class — had higher happiness scores than people who hadn’t. The more hours of training, the higher their scores.

Getting relaxed can be as easy as deep breathing, meditating or practicing muscle relaxation. “It’s important to practice one or more of these techniques every day, before stress ever hits,” says Epstein. “That’s a way of ‘immunizing’ yourself against stress, so that it doesn’t hurt you so much when it occurs.”

One simple breathing technique: the cleansing breath, which consists of inhaling deeply, holding for a slow count of five and exhaling slowly.

Tummy Breathing. When you’re stressed, you breathe with your chest, so Epstein recommends learning to breath with your gut. Place one hand on your chest and another on your stomach and try to keep your chest still as you breathe more with your tummy. “Abdominal breathing relaxes muscles throughout the body and lowers stress levels,” says Epstein.

Double Blow. Another easy breathing technique. All you have to do is exhale fully, then when all the air seems to be gone, blow out forcefully — this helps fight the tendency to take shallow fast breaths when you’re stressed. “This gets rid of the air trapped in the lower lungs and refreshes the respiratory system,” says Epstein, noting that shallow breathing circulates carbon dioxide and other toxins through the bloodstream.

Epstein says he taught his daughter the double blow when she was just 3 years old. Now 5, when she gets upset, he says he tells her, “Do your blowing.” Epstein says it works every time: “She’ll do this huge ‘Pfff’ and try to blow my head off and then she’ll start laughing. She’ll go from borderline getting upset to absolute cheerful.”

In a previous study, Epstein found that parents’ stress management was the second most powerful predictor, after love and affection, in outcomes of parenting. “The tragedy is that we don’t teach these things to children,” says Epstein.

Reframing. Last but not least, Epstein says people can reduce stress by reframing, which means thinking about things in a neutral or positive way, instead of negatively. “We don’t have much control over the events around us, but we have almost total control over how we interpret them,” Epstein says.

Often, we make assumptions or blow things out of proportion, only to realize later that we were wrong. So, for instance, if your boss passes you in the hall looking surly without saying hello, don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that you’re about to get laid off. Rather, ask yourself whether he might have just received some bad news or was simply being absent-minded.

Would you like to build your resilience and innoculate you and your team from stress?  Contact us to find out about stress-management, Hi!-Performance and our ever popular Resilience Compass (c) programs.


Filed Under: Uncategorized

12 April, 2011 by Cris Popp

World Laughter Day 2011

 

Would you like a laugh and help world peace too?

Come along to World Laughter Day on Sunday the 1st of May.  Created in 1998 by Dr. Madan Kataria, founder of the worldwide Laughter Yoga movement, World Laughter Day is a positive manifestation for world peace and is intended to build up a global consciousness of brotherhood and friendship through laughter. Its popularity has grown exponentially with that of the Laughter Yoga movement now counting over 6000 Laughter Clubs in more than 65 countries.

World Laughter Day is celebrated on the first Sunday of May every year. This year the world will once again come together to laugh and spread the word of happiness and joy. This is a global initiative, that we at Laughter Works are very happy to support.  The idea is to unite entire mankind through unconditional love and laughter. It is a non-religious, non-racial and non-profit event committed to generating good health, joy and peace around the globe through laughter.
So join in, have some fun, do yourself a world of good and add to world peace. It’s already changed the lives of thousands of people (including us) and helped many to increase their wellness.  Bring your family and friends.

Details:

Melbourne
Sunday 1st May from 11:00am
St Paul’s Court Federation Square
http://www.onlymelbourne.com.au/melbourne_details.php?id=4702

Brisbane
Sunday 1st May from 12:00pm
Manly Park (Cnr Esplanade & Fairlead Cres, Manly)
Michelle Latimer | 0412 299 817

Perth
The WA Laughter Club Community is meeting in Kings Park at the Western Power Parkland (follow the signs down from Zamia Cafe) for a picnic and celebration of laughter.
Sunday 1st May from 12:00 midday – 2:00pm

Are you holding – or aware of – an event for World Laughter Day that we haven’t mentioned?  We’d love it if you would comment on this post and share it with all our readers.

Filed Under: Laughter World Tagged With: event, laughter, world laughter day

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