It’s a Monday night and Em Peyton, 59, of Putney, Vermont is in a room full of strangers in the basement of Forbes Library in Northampton where everyone is acting silly and laughing hard.

Peyton curls her fingers into claws and bares her teeth as she roars at the woman next to her, Debbie Win, 47, from Greenfield. Win roars back.

A few minutes later, everybody starts swaying their arms in the air and gyrating their hips like hula dancers.

“Halooohahahhah,” calls out Peyton, her soft voice swallowed up in the chorus of laughter around her.

Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and wearing a frizzy blond wig and visor, Mark Sherry, 68, is leading the festivities.

“It is literally like a power, energy shot when you laugh,” says Sherry, who calls himself the laughter pharmacist.

He is running a class in what he calls laughter yoga. But there is no stretching or posing involved in this monthly session where the admission fee is whatever you want to donate. The important muscles here are those used to laugh.

Many people find it feels like an energizing workout, says Sherry

No hocus pocus

The class is based on the idea that voluntary laughter gives people the same physiological and psychological benefits as spontaneous laughter, like increasing the excretion of endorphins, hormones in the brain that make people feel happy, and decreasing the stress hormone cortisol, when people feel relaxed.

“This is not hocus pocus,” says Sherry, as he gives the group of 12 participants an introductory speech. “When you laugh, things biochemically change in your body, that to me is just amazing.”

Sherry gets the class going with role-playing games, some based on mundane activities like mowing the lawn or out of the ordinary ones, like pretending to be a hula dancer in an airport.

Sometime in the middle of the class he passes out wacky hats and wigs. Peyton grins as she slips on the red Santa hat he hands her. Her partner, Tom Simon, who she coaxed into coming to the class, pulls on a curly black wig. 

Peyton looks like she is having a blast, but she came to the session for serious reasons. She read about laughter yoga online as an alternative treatment for her high blood pressure.

“You can find cases where people have cured serious disease by submitting to a remedy of comedy,” she says.

Since learning about laughter yoga a few years ago, she has tried to have a more positive outlook and laugh more in her daily life.

She drives nearly an hour from her home in Putney to be here and since coming to Sherry’s class for the first time in June, she has been practicing his methods at home. She’s also changed her lifestyle to minimize stress by cutting back on time spent watching the news and working fewer hours on her small hemp farm.

A recent test showed that her blood pressure dropped for the first time in close to 30 years, she says.

“I’ve been getting progressively happier, so also my blood pressure is down,” she says. 

While there is no telling if laughter or even just having a sunnier disposition made a difference for her, it certainly doesn’t hurt, she says. 

“It’s a simple way to be joyous. If we can find a way to be joyous, then we have really overcome the worst of our problems.”

What the researchers say

On the scientific side, cardiologists at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore have found that laughter may help protect against heart attack. They discovered that people with heart disease were 40 percent less likely to laugh in a variety of situations compared to people of the same age without heart disease.

Researchers admit that they don’t know yet why laughing seems to protect the heart, but they do know that stress is associated with impairment of the endothelium, the protective barrier lining blood vessels. This can cause inflammation that leads to fat and cholesterol build-up in the coronary arteries and ultimately to a heart attack, according to the study. 

“The old saying that ‘laughter is the best medicine,’ definitely appears to be true when it comes to protecting your heart,” Dr. Michael Miller, director of the Center for Preventive Cardiology at the University of Maryland Medical Center, says in a press release. 

Another study at Loma Linda University in California found that laughter, specifically watching a funny video for only 20 minutes a day, can reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol in older adults. They also found that laughter prevents damage to the hippocampus, the part of the brain which aids in learning and memory. 

Laughter even has been proven to burn calories. A study from Vanderbilt University found that laughter increases energy expenditure and heart rate by up to 20 percent above resting values, which means that 15 minutes of laughter each day could burn up to 40 calories. 

“It doesn’t even matter why you laugh, your body interprets it the same way,” says Sherry. “The more people laugh — by far the healthier they get.”

Indian origin

Laughter yoga was developed about 20 years ago by an Indian physician, Madan Kataria, who traveled the globe promoting laughter as a remedy for just about any ailment. Since then the practice has spread, with laughter yoga instructors cropping up in many major cities throughout the world. 

Sherry, who used to offer an interactive educational program for children called Mad Science, studied laughter yoga through a certification program at Yogaville, a spiritual center in Buckingham, Virginia. He had happened upon a laughter yoga class in Amherst while seeking an improv group to join nine years ago. 

“There aren’t any prerequisites other than your own ability to carry it through,” Sherry says of becoming a laughter yoga instructor. But “for a lot of people, it is hard for them — it takes a lot of initiative and the willingness to put yourself out there.”

During the class, Sherry never looks self conscious. He says he’s always loved to laugh, after all it is a natural instinct.

Laughter is a very early sound made by infants, he points out. At that tender age it’s not someone telling them funny jokes that makes them laugh. It’s a response to anything that delights them. “It’s something that they are born with.”

But Sherry says he didn’t understand the health benefits of laughter until he stumbled upon that class in Amherst.

“I never had any inkling that laughter was anything more than something God gave us for us to enjoy,” he says. “I never really connected the fact that laughter could have a physiological effect on your body and it really does.”

When the laughter yoga teacher in Amherst moved on, Sherry took over. 

“I got into what I am doing now kind of serendipitously. I love it. I love to laugh. It gives me the opportunity to really have a great time,” he says. “I also enjoy bringing joy to other people, it just makes me feel good.”

If that is his goal, he succeeded with at least two of his students that recent Monday night.

Peyton and Simon were satisfied customers as they left the library at the end of the hour-long session.

“We went in there with a little bit of a grumpy attitude,” Peyton said, “and we came out totally happified.”  

Lisa Spear can be reached at Lspear@gazette-net.com.

How to connect

Laughter Yoga is held on the second Monday of every month at 7 p.m. at the Forbes Library, 20 West St. Northampton. The next class is Aug. 14. There is a suggested donation of $5. 

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