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At Fred, we’re really keen on laughter. We’re also really keen on showing how important and beneficial play and laughter and silliness are to absolutely everyone, everywhere - and especially in the workplace. It can be a serious place to be, but there’s tons of evidence to suggest that play and laughter are powerful tools to improve all sorts of aspects of wellbeing. Amongst many other things, it can improve oxygen uptake, increase resilience to stress, help with clarity of thinking, and also promote teamwork and social bonds. All sorts of “happy hormones” are released, from dopamine to oxytocin: reducing pain, increasing feelings of connection to others, increasing optimism.
Vitally, for any managers out there wondering why this matters: all of this is shown to lead to improvements in productivity, improved staff retention and a generally happier workforce who do better, more creative work.
As part of Fred labs, we decided to investigate this with our own team, and booked a laughter yoga session with Helena Callow. We invited our core team, as well as some other Fred collaborators - all of whom are generally *fairly* silly, but still - it got sillier.
It was VERY VERY SILLY, and tons of fun. We danced, we rode pretend rollercoasters, and we clucked around like chickens. For an hour, Helena took us through these (sometimes ridiculous) exercises, encouraging everyone to let go as much as possible and throw themselves into the experience. Once the more physical activities were finished, Helena took us through a calm/cool-down. This was fantastic to allow the last remnants of laughter to get out (it took us a while to stop giggling), and gently calm ourselves from the high energy session so that we felt energised but not hyperactive when the hour ended.
We ran a feedback survey and discovered that during the session, people tended to be entirely focused on the experience and others in the room with them - it is simply so engaging that your brain doesn’t have the space to be thinking about work stress or having anxious thoughts about the future. There’s a gentle buzz, not dissimilar to that following an exercise session in the gym, but accompanied by a mental calm. It’s rather lovely.
What’s next?
We’re now collaborating with Lotte Mikkelsen, one of the most established Laughter Yoga practitioners and instructors in the UK, on developing our approach to using laughter yoga in the workplace and in schools, really understanding how and why it’s so good for us - and establishing how this understanding can influence other areas of our work.