Laughter...will this happy man live longer than you?

By Dr Adepeju O Adeniran

So you have seen the smile on his face and wondered what he knows to make him so pleased. His smile might be the exact opposite of how you feel today, or how you often feel, coping with your day to day activities.

You are sleeping too little, you are often tired, and the hours still do not add up enough to make you feel justified about how you spend your time.

You eat too little or too much, and your weight, either too much, or too little, is yet another reason why you worry all the time.

Welcome to the modern day stress picture.

According to STATISTICS, many adults in today's working world, experience some form or the other of stress-related ailments.  As you might know, stress is well related to conditions like exhaustion and the burn-out syndrome, is a contributory factor to weight disease, cardiovascular conditions, hormone level irregularities, infertility and so on.

The list of all the bad things that stress does is nearly endless. So, stress is something we know that we do not want to subject the body to.

While we are on the topic, do you even KNOW what stress is? Most people seem to think that the definition of stress, is simply the sum total of the things that happen to us externally. This is only a half definition, and for the most part misleading.

Stress is not just what happens to you, rather, it is the way that your body HANDLES what happens to you. Improper processing of the events that happen around us, will be read by our bodies as stress, and will be processed in a way that increases our blood rate, messes up the metabolism, plays havoc with our hormonal balance, and just knocks us off our calm, steady state. Which tunes our bodies to further process normal, everyday stimuli, like horns blaring in traffic, babies crying, TV sounds, bright lights etc, into stress stimuli.

The cycle is very vicious.

So, by now you understand how bad for you stress is, but why will your body not heed and start to function differently?

Perhaps you need to know a bit more about the advantages of being on the other side of the stress divide, what it means to live healthier just by changing yours attitude.

The biggest secret you could learn this year about stress and a healthier emotional state is that a certain Hormone might hold the key to a better handling of stress within our bodies.

Learn this word. EN-DOR-PHIN. (pronounced en-do-fin)

What is endorphin? It is a hormone that helps you to feel happy. That is the short definition. It can help you feel calm, appreciated, loved, at peace and have a general sense of well being.

Endorphins are generally released by a gland in the brain in response to "good stress" situations, like excitement, exercise, sexual orgasm and in some cases if you eat spicy or highly flavored foods.

It has been greatly shown to counter the negative effects that "bad stress" has on the body, and therefore can be employed to heal the body from these harmful effects.

Endorphins have also been shown to be natural pain-relievers.

In my books, I would consider it a magic hormone.

So, how does one get this magic hormone? Click the next page