You never know the benefits Laughter Yoga can bring.
During a recent Laughter Yoga session, one participant revealed to me that after she had acquired a brain injury, she had stopped yawning. After I introduced her to a yawning laughter exercise, she started yawning for the first time in two years.
Yawning is usually associated with boredom or being tired, but new research suggests there’s far more to this behaviour than meets the eye. We do it involuntarily, like breathing, and it starts even before we’re born (as early as 11 weeks after conception).
Yawning may be an evolutionary old process of great social significance, a behavior that is thought to indicate a capacity for empathy. A theory for why we yawn revolves around its social, rather than its physiological, effects. It is known, for instance, that yawning is contagious among humans, chimps and even dogs.
Recent studies by a Princeton University researcher, Dr. Andrew Gallup and his colleagues, suggest yawning performs the important function of cooling your brain.
“Brains are like computers… They operate most efficiently when cool, and physical adaptations have evolved to allow maximum cooling of the brain.”
It is theorized that the influx of cool air that occurs when you yawn helps cool and increase blood flow in your neck, face, sinuses and head, which together acts like a radiator to cool your brain.
New research on humans showed that more people yawned when it was winter compared to when it was summer (45 percent versus 24 percent, respectively), which supports Gallup’s theory that people should yawn more in cold weather because the cool air you inhale helps regulate your brain temperature.
This finding is in line with previous research that shows brain temperatures increase when you’re sleep deprived, which may be one reason why exhaustion triggers excessive yawning.
Gallup also suggests that excessive yawning may even be a symptom of health conditions that increase brain and/or core temperature, such as central nervous system damage or could be a sign of a heart problem and should be checked out by your health care provider. Excessive yawning may also occur before a seizure in people with epilepsy, or prior to the onset of a migraine, so keep this in mind if you suffer from either.
An exercise that you can do on your own, to activate the many benefits of yawning is to over exaggerate a yawn several times and then breathing out with a long, loud loving AWWWW laughsigh, till you start yawning involuntarily.
So keep on yawning.. and of course, laughing.