The Story of Cricket

Top of FormBottom of Form| | | | You are here: Home >> Sports & Recreation >>Cricket >>The Story of Cricket >> | | Topics| The Story of Cricket | | | | | The Story of Cricket Cricket grew out of the many stick-and-ball games played in England 500 years ago, under a variety of different rules. The word ‘bat’ is an old English word that simply means stick or club. By the seventeenth century, cricket had evolved enough to be recognizable as a distinct game and it was popular enough for its fans to be fined for playing it on Sunday instead of going to church.

Till the middle of the eighteenth century, bats were roughly the same shape as hockey sticks, curving outwards at the bottom. There was a simple reason for this: the ball was bowled underarm, along the ground and the curve at the end of the bat gave the batsman the best chance of making contact. How that early version of cricket played in village England grew into the modern game played in giant stadiums in great cities is a proper subject for history because one of the uses of history is to understand how the present was made.

And sport is a large part of contemporary life: it is one way in which we amuse ourselves, compete with each other, stay fit, and express our social loyalties. If tens of millions of Indians today drop everything to watch the Indian team playa Test match or a one-day international, it is reasonable for a history of India to explore how that stick-and-ball game invented in south-eastern England became the ruling passion of the Indian sub-continent. This is articularly so, since the game was linked to the wider history of colonialism and nationalism and was in part shaped by the politics of religion and caste. Our history of cricket will look first at the evolution of cricket as a game in England, and discuss the wider. culture of physical training and athleticism of the time. It will then move to India, discuss the history of the adoption of cricket in this country, and trace the modern transformation of the game. In each of these sections we will see how the history of the game was connected to the social history of the time.  | The Historical Development of Cricket as a Game in England  The social and economic history of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cricket’s early years, shaped the game and gave cricket its unique nature. For example, one of the peculiarities of Test cricket is that a match can go on for five days and still end in a draw. No other modern team sport takes even half as much time to complete. A football match is generally over in an hour-and-a-half of playing time.

Even baseball, a long-drawn-out bat-and-ball game by the standards of modern sport, completes nine innings in less than half the time that it takes to play a limited-over match, the shortened version of modern cricket! Another curious characteristic of cricket is that the length of the pitch is specified – 22 yards – but the size or shape of the ground is not. Most other team sports, such as hockey and football lay down the dimensions of the playing area: cricket does not. Grounds can be oval like the Adelaide Oval or nearly circular, like Chepauk in Chennai.

A six at the Melbourne Cricket Ground needs to clear much more ground than a lofted shot for the same reward at Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi. There’s a historical reason behind both these oddities. Cricket was the earliest modern team sport to be codified, which is another way of saying that cricket gave itself rules and regulations so that it could be played in a uniform and standardized way well before team games like soccer and hockey. The first written ‘Laws of Cricket’ were drawn up in 1744. They stated, ‘the principals shall choose from amongst the gentlemen present two umpires who shall absolutely decide all disputes.

The stumps must be 22 inches high and the bail across them six inches. The ball must be between 5 and 6 ounces, and the two sets of stumps 22 yards apart’. There were no limits on the shape or size of the bat. It appears that 40 notches or runs were viewed as a very big score, probably due to the bowlers bowling quickly at shins unprotected by pads. The world’s first cricket club was formed in Hambledon in the 1760s and the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) was founded in 1787. In 1788, the MCC published its first revision of the laws and became the guardian of cricket’s regulations.

The MCC’s revision of the laws brought in a series of changes in the game that occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century. During the 1760s and 1770s it became common to pitch the ball through the air, rather than roll it along the ground. This change gave bowlers the options of length, deception through the air, plus increased pace. It also opened new possibilities for spin and swing. In response, batsmen had to master timing and shot selection. One immediate result was the replacement of the curved bat with the straight one.

All of this raised the premium on skill and reduced the influence of rough ground and brute force. The weight of the ball was limited to between 5    to 5 ounces, and the width of the bat to four inches. The latter ruling followed an innings by a batsman who appeared with a bat as wide as the wicket! In 1774, the first leg-before law was published. Also around this time, a third stump became common. By 1780, three days had become the length of a major match, and this year also saw the creation of the first six-seam cricket ball.

While many important changes occurred during the nineteenth century (the rule about wide balls was applied, the exact circumference of the ball was specified, protective equipment like pads and gloves became available, boundaries were introduced where previously all shots had to be run and, most importantly, over arm bowling became legal) cricket remained a pre-industrial sport that matured during the early phase of the Industrial Revolution, the late eighteenth century. This history has made cricket a game with characteristics of both the past and the present day.

Cricket’s connection with a rural past can be seen in the length of a Test match. Originally’, cricket matches had no time limit. The game went on for as long as it took to bowl out a side twice. The rhythms of village life were slower and cricket’s rules were made before the Industrial Revolution. Modern factory work meant that people were paid by the hour or the day or the week: games that were codified after the industrial revolution, like football and hockey, were strictly time-limited to fit the routines of industrial city ife. In the same way, cricket’s vagueness about the size of a cricket ground is a result of its village origins. Cricket was originally played on country commons, unfenced land that was public property. The size of the commons varied from one village to another, so there were no designated boundaries or boundary hits. When the ball went into the crowd, the crowd cleared a way for the fieldsman to retrieve it. Even after boundaries were written into the laws of cricket, their distance from the wicket was not specified.

The laws simply lay down that ‘the umpire shall agree with both captains on the boundaries of the playing area’. If you look at the game’s equipment, you can see how cricket both changed with changing times and yet fundamentally remained true to its origins in rural England. Cricket’s most important tools are all made of natural, pre-industrial materials. The bat is made of wood as are the stumps and the bails. The ball is made with leather, twine and cork. Even today both bat and ball are handmade, not industrially manufactured. The material of the bat changed slightly over time.

Once it was cut out of a single piece of wood. Now it consists of two pieces, the blade which is made out of the wood of the willow tree and the handle which is made out of cane that became available as European colonialists and trading companies established themselves in Asia. Unlike golf and tennis, cricket has refused to remake its tools with industrial or man-made materials: plastic, fiber glass and metal have been firmly rejected. Australian cricketer Dennis Lillie tried to play an innings with an aluminum bat, only to have it outlawed by the umpires.

But in the matter of protective equipment, cricket has been influenced by technological change. The invention of vulcanized rubber led to the introduction of pads in 1848 and protective gloves soon afterwards, and the modern game would be unimaginable without helmets made out of metal and synthetic lightweight materials. Cricket and Victorian England  The organization of cricket in England reflected the nature of English society. The rich who could afford to play it for pleasure were called amateurs and the poor who played it for a living were called professionals.

The rich were amateurs for two reasons. One, they considered sport a kind of leisure. To play for the pleasure of playing and not for money was an aristocratic value. Two, there was not enough money in the game for the rich to be interested. The wages of professionals were paid by patronage or subscription or gate money. The game was seasonal and did not offer employment the year round. Most professionals worked as miners or in other forms of working class employment in winter, the off-season.

The social superiority of amateurs was built into the customs of cricket. Amateurs were called Gentlemen while professionals had to be content with being described as Players. They even entered the ground from different entrances. Amateurs tended to be batsmen, leaving the energetic, hardworking aspects of the game, like fast bowling, to the professionals. That is partly why the laws of the game always give the benefit of the doubt to the batsman. Cricket is a batsman’s game because its rules were made to favor ‘Gentlemen’, who did most of the batting.

The social superiority of the amateur was also the reason the captain of a cricket team was traditionally a batsman: not because batsmen were naturally better captains but because they were generally Gentlemen. Captains of teams, whether club teams or national sides, were always amateurs. It was not till the 1930s that the English Test team was led by a professional, the Yorkshire batsman, Len Hutton. It’s often said that the ‘battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’. This means that Britain’s military success was based on the values taught to schoolboys in its public schools. Eton was the most famous of these schools.

The English boarding school was the institution that trained English boys for careers in the military, the civil service and the church, the three great institutions of imperial England. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, men like Thomas Arnold, headmaster of the famous Rugby School and founder of the modern public school system, saw team sport like cricket and rugby not just as outdoor play, but as an organized way of teaching English boys the discipline, the importance of hierarchy, the skills, the codes of honor and the leadership qualities that helped them build and run the British empire.

Victorian empire builders justified the conquest of other countries as an act of unselfish social service, by which backward peoples were introduced to the civilizing influence of British law and Western knowledge. Cricket helped to confirm this self-image of the English elite by glorifying the amateur ideal, where cricket was played not for victory or profit, but for its own sake, in the spirit of fair play. In actual fact the Napoleonic wars were won because of the economic contribution of the iron works of Scotland and Wales, the mills of Lancashire and the financial houses of the City of

London. It was the English lead in trade and industry that made Britain the world’s greatest power, but it suited the English ruling class to believe that it was the superior character of its young men, built in boarding schools, playing gentlemanly games like cricket, that tipped the balance. The Spread of Cricket  While some English team games like hockey and football became international games, played all over the world, cricket remained a colonial game, limited to countries that had once been part of the British Empire. The pre-industrial oddness of cricket made it a hard game to export.

It took root, only in countries that the British conquered and ruled. In these colonies, cricket was established as a popular sport either by white settlers (as in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies and Kenya) or by local elites who wanted to copy the habits of their colonial masters, as in India. While British imperial officials brought the game to the colonies, they made little effort to spread the game, especially in colonial territories where the subjects of empire were mainly non-white, such as India and the West Indies.

Here, playing cricket became a sign of superior social and racial status, and the Afro-Caribbean population was discouraged from participating in organized club cricket, which remained dominated by white plantation owners and their servants. The first non-white club in the West Indies was established towards the end of the nineteenth century, and even in this case its members were light-skinned mulattos. So while black people played an enormous amount of informal cricket on beaches, in back alleys and parks, club cricket till as late as the 1930s was dominated by white elites.

Despite the exclusiveness of the white cricket elite in the West Indies, the game became hugely popular in the Caribbean. Success at cricket became a measure of racial equality and political progress. At the time of their independence many of the political leaders of Caribbean countries like Forbes Burnham and Eric Williams saw in the game a chance for self-respect and international standing. When the West Indies won its first Test series against England in 1950, it was celebrated as a national achievement, as a way of demonstrating that West Indians were the equals of white Englishmen.

There were two ironies to this great victory. One, the West Indian team that won was captained by a white player. The first time a black player led the West Indies Test team was in 1960 when Frank Worrell was named captain. And two, the West Indies cricket team represented not one nation but several dominions that later became independent countries. The pan-West Indian team that represents the Caribbean region in international Test cricket is the only exception to a series of unsuccessful efforts to bring about West Indian unification.

Cricket fans know that watching a match involves taking sides. In a Ranji Trophy match when Delhi plays Mumbai, the loyalty of spectators depends on which city they come from or support. When India plays Australia, the spectators watching the match on television in Bhopal or Chennai feel involved as Indians – they are moved by nationalist loyalties. But through the early history of Indian first-class cricket, teams were not organized on geographical principles and it was not till 1932 that a national team was given the right to represent India in a Test match.

So how were teams organized and, in the absence of regional or national teams, how did cricket fans choose sides? We turn to history for answers, to discover how cricket in India developed and to get a sense of the loyalties that united and divided Indians in the days of the Raj. Cricket, Race and Religion  Cricket in colonial India was organized on the principle of race and religion. The first record we have of cricket being played in India is from 1721, an account of recreational cricket played by English sailors in Cam bay. The first Indian club, the Calcutta Cricket Club, was established in 1792.

Through the eighteenth century, cricket in India was almost wholly a sport played by British military men and civil servants in all-white clubs and gymkhanas. Playing cricket in the privacy of these clubs was more than just fun: it was also an escape from the strangeness, discomfort and danger of their stay in India. Indians were considered to have no talent for the game and certainly not meant to play it. But they did. The origins of Indian cricket, that is, cricket played by Indians are to be found in Bombay and the first Indian community to start playing the game was the small community of Zoroastrians, the Parsis.

Brought into close contact with the British because of their interest in trade and the first Indian community to westernize, the Parsis founded the first Indian cricket club, the Oriental Cricket Club in Bombay in 1848. Parsi clubs were funded and sponsored by Parsi businessmen like the Tatas and the Wadias. The white cricket elite in India offered no help to the enthusiastic Parsis. In fact, there was a quarrel between the Bombay Gymkhana, a whites-only club, and Parsi cricketers over the use of a public park. The Parsis complained that the park was left unfit for cricket because the polo ponies of the Bombay Gymkhana dug up the surface.

When it became clear that the colonial authorities were prejudiced in favour of their white compatriots, the Parsis built their own gymkhana to play cricket in. The rivalry between the Parsis and the racist Bombay Gymkhana had a happy ending for these pioneers of Indian cricket. A Parsi team beat the Bombay Gymkhana at cricket in 1889, just four years after the foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885, an organisation that was lucky to have amongst its early leaders the great Parsi statesman and intellectual Dadabhai Naoroji.

The establishment of the Parsi Gymkhana became a precedent for other Indians who in turn established clubs based on the idea of religious community. By the 1890s, Hindus and Muslims were busy gathering funds and support for a Hindu Gymkhana and an Islam Gymkhana. The British did not consider colonial India as a nation. They saw it as a collection of castes and races and religious communities and gave themselves the credit for unifying the sub- continent.

In the late nineteenth century, many Indian institutions and movements were organized around the idea of religious community because the colonial state encouraged these divisions and was quick to recognize communal institutions. For example, the Governor of the Bombay Presidency while dealing with an application from the Islam Gymkhana for land on Bombay’s seafront wrote: ‘ … we can be certain that in a short time we shall get a similar application from some Hindu Gymkhana … I don’t see how we are to refuse these applicants; but I will… refuse any more grants once a Gymkhana has been established   by each nationality’, (emphasis added).

It is obvious from this letter that colonial officials regarded religious communities as separate nationalities. Applications that used the communal categories favoured by the colonial state were, as this letter shows, more likely to be approved. This history of gymkhana cricket led to first-class cricket being organized on communal and racial lines. The teams that played colonial India’s greatest and most famous first-class cricket tournament did not represent regions, as teams in today’s Ranji Trophy currently do, but religious communities.

The tournament was initially called the Quadrangular, because it was played by four teams: the Europeans, the Parsis, the Hindus and the Muslims. It later became the Pentangular when a fifth team was added, namely, the Rest, which comprised all the communities left over, such as the Indian Christians. For example, Vijay Hazare, a Christian, played for the Rest. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, journalists, cricketers and political leaders had begun to criticize the racial and communal foundations of the Pentangular tournament.

The distinguished editor of the newspaper the Bombay Chronicle, S. A. Brelvi, the famous radio commentator A. F . S. Talyarkhan and India’s most respected political figure, Mahatma Gandhi, condemned the Pentangular as a communally divisive competition that was out of place in a time when nationalists were trying to unite India’s diverse population. A rival first-class tournament on regional lines, the National Cricket Championship (later named the Ranji Trophy), was established but not until Independence did it properly replace the Pentangular.

The colonial state and its divisive conception of India was the rock on which the Pentangular was built. It was a colonial tournament and it died with the Raj. The Modern Transformation of the Game  Modern cricket is dominated by Tests and one-day internationals, played between national teams. The players who become famous, who live on in the memories of cricket’s public, are those who have played for their country. The players Indian fans remember from the era of the Pentangular and the Quadrangular are those who were fortunate enough to play Test cricket.

C. K. Nayudu, an outstanding Indian batsman of his time, lives on in the popular imagination when some of his great contemporaries like Palwankar Vithal and Palwankar Baloo have been forgotten because his career lasted long enough for him to play Test cricket for India while theirs did not. Even though Nayudu was past his cricketing prime when he played for India in its first Test matches against England starting in 1932, his place in India’s cricket history is assured because he was the country’s first Test captain.

India entered the world of Test cricket in 1932, a decade and a half before it became an independent nation. This was possible because Test cricket from its origins in 1877 was organised as a contest between different parts of the British empire, not sovereign nations, The first Test was played between England and Australia when Australia was still a white settler colony, not even a self-governing dominion. Similarly, the small countries of the Caribbean that together make up the West Indies team were British colonies till well after the Second World War.

Decolonization and Sport Decolonization, or the process through which different parts of European empires became independent nations, began with the independence of India in 1947 and continued for the next the Half century, This process led to the decline of British influence in trade, commerce, military affairs, international polities and, inevitably, sporting matters, But this did not happen at-once; it took a while for the relative unimportance of post imperial Britain to be reflected in the organization of world cricket.

Even after Indian independence kick-started the disappearance of the British empire, the regulation of international cricket remained the business of the Imperial Cricket Conference Ice The Ice, renamed the International Cricket Conference as late as 1965, was dominated by its foundation members, England and Australia, which retained the right of veto over its proceedings. Not till 1989 was the privileged position of England and Australia scrapped in favor of equal membership.

The colonial flavor of world cricket during the 1950s and 1960s can be seen from the fact that England and the other white common wealth countries, Australia and New Zealand, continued to play Test cricket with South Africa, a racist state that practiced a policy of racial segregation which, among other things, barred non-whites (who made up the majority of South Africa’s population) from representing that country in Test matches.

Test-playing nations like India, Pakistan and the West Indies boycotted South Africa, but they did not have the power in the ICC to debar that country from Test cricket, That only came to pass when the political pressure to isolate South Africa applied by the newly decolonized nations of Asia and Africa combined with liberal feeling in Britain and forced the English cricket authorities to cancel a tour by South Africa in 1970.

Commerce, Media and Cricket Today  The 1970s were the decade in which cricket was transformed: it was a time when a traditional game evolved to fit a changing world. If 1970 was notable for the exclusion of South Africa from international cricket, 1971 was a landmark year because the first one-day international was played between England and Australia in Melbourne. The enormous popularity of this shortened version of the game led to the first World Cup being successfully staged in 1975.

Then in 1977, even as cricket celebrated 100 years of Test matches, the game was changed forever, not by a player or cricket administrator, but by a businessman. Kerry Packer, an Australian television tycoon who saw the moneymaking potential of cricket as a televised sport, signed up fifty-one of the world’s leading cricketers against the wishes of the national cricket boards and for about two years staged unofficial Tests and One-Day internationals under the name of World Series Cricket.

While Packer’s ‘circus’ as it was then described folded up after two years, the innovations he introduced during this time to make cricket more attractive to television audiences endured and changed the nature of the game. Coloured dress, protective helmets, field restrictions, cricket under lights, became a standard part of the post-Packer game. Crucially, Packer drove home the lesson that cricket was a marketable game, which could generate huge revenues. Cricket boards became rich by selling television rights to television companies.

Television channels made money by selling television spots to companies who were happy to pay large sums of money to air commercials for their products to cricket’s captive television audience. Continuous television coverage made cricketers celebrities who, besides being paid better by their cricket boards, now made even larger sul! 1s of money by making commercials for a wide range of products, from tires to colas, on television. Television coverage changed cricket. It expanded the audience for the game by beaming cricket into small towns and villages. It also broadened cricket’s social base.

Children who had never previously had the chance to watch international cricket because they lived outside the big cities, where top-level cricket was played, could now watch and learn by imitating their heroes. The technology of satellite television and the world wide reach of multi-national television companies created a global market for cricket. Matches in Sydney could now be watched live in Surat. This simple fact shifted the balance of power in cricket: a process that had been begun by the break-up of the British Empire was taken to its logical conclusion by globalization.

Since India had the largest viewer ship for the game amongst the cricket-playing nations and the largest market in the cricketing world, the game’s centre of gravity shifted to South Asia. This shift was symbolized by the shifting of the ICC headquarters from London to tax-free Dubai. A more important sign that the centre of gravity in cricket has shifted away from the old, Anglo-Australian axis is that innovations in cricket technique in recent years have mainly come from the practice of sub-continental teams in countries like India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Pakistan has pioneered two great advances in bowling: the doosra and the ‘reverse swing’. Both skills were developed in response to sub-continental conditions: the doosra to counter aggressive batsmen with heavy modern bats who were threatening to make finger-spin obsolete and ‘reverse swing’ to move the ball in on dusty, unresponsive wickets under clear skies. Initially, both innovations were greeted with great suspicion by countries like Britain and Australia which saw them as an underhanded, illegal bending of the laws of cricket.

In time, it came to be accepted that the laws of cricket could not continue to be framed for British or Australian conditions of play, and they became part of the technique of all bowlers, everywhere in the world. One hundred and fifty years ago the first Indian cricketers, the Parsis, had to struggle to find an open space to play in. Today, the global marketplace has made Indian players the best-paid, most famous cricketers in the game, men for whom the world is a stage.

The history that brought about this transformation was made up of many smaller changes: the replacement of the gentlemanly amateur by the paid professional, the triumph of the one-day game as it overshadowed Test cricket in terms of popularity, and the remarkable changes in global commerce and technology. The business of history is to make sense of change over time. In this chapter we have followed the spread of a colonial sport through its history, and tried to understand how it adapted to a post-colonial world. | | Home  |  Contact Us  |  Add to Favorite|  Submit Article |  Terms & Conditions  |  Privacy Policy  |  Site Map| © 2007.

BestToFind. Com| | | | * Home * Short Stories Blog * Happy Photos * Self Motivation Tips * e-Book————————————————- The Stories * Animal Stories * Family and Kids * Kids Stories * Funny Stories * Latest stories * Happiness * Laughter * Love and Friends * Money * Positive Attitude * Positive Quotes * Success * Work * Egypt————————————————- Inspirational Products * Store————————————————- Your Stories * Interviews * YOUR stories * Story Starters * Guest

Book————————————————- Writing Tips * Essay Writing * Website building————————————————- Info * Contact * E-zine * Disclaimer * Privacy Policy * Facebook * Positive Blog * About Me[? ]Subscribe To This Site * * * * * | Laughter Is the Best Medicine – Facts So are there any facts to back up the claim that laughter is the best medicine? Does it heal, really? Below are some facts about laughter (not to be taken as a medical advice, but simply as interesting information about the benefits of laughter) A Pill of Laughter Each Day Drives the Doctor Away | When was the last time you burst into a roaring laughter? It certainly felt good, right? People love to entertain and to be entertained because laughter feels good. On the average, a person laughs about 17 times in a day. Because of this, the entertainment industry has made a good living out of making people laugh. Many people do not mind spending a few dollars just to have a good time chuckling, giggling, or guffawing while watching a stand-up comedy or a funny movie. Besides its entertainment value, humor is also known for its therapeutic effects on people’s physical, mental, and emotional well-being.

The more ha-ha-has and hee-hee-hees you have in a day, the better it is for your health. Laughter, which is the body’s response to humor, is an effective way to treat many ailments. It may not be regarded by medical professionals as the best medicine, but the best thing about laughter is that it is totally free and has no side effects. This priceless medicine can definitely improve a person’s quality of life. Effects of laughter on the bodyA good hearty laugh provides a wide range of health benefits. As a person laughs, a number of changes occur in the body.

The muscles in the face and body stretch and the rate of heart beat rises. Laughter also causes a person to breathe faster, which in turn brings more oxygen to the tissues. Helping the body fight certain diseases, laughter reduces health problems connected with strokes, high blood pressure, ulcer, and arthritis. The following are the 10 physical benefits of laughter:Laughter Is the Best Medicine / Benefit 1: Good work out for the bodyLaughter is comparable to a mild exercise because it can burn calories. In fact, a study found that 50 calories are burned with 10 to 15 minutes of laughter.

This is equivalent to a couple of minutes on the exercise bike or rowing machine. Laughter works by moving the muscles in the abdomen, lungs, diaphragm, face, back, and legs. Aside from massaging the abdominal organs, laughter can boost the strength of the muscles that secure the abdominal organs in place. Digestion is also improved with the help of laughter, which tones the functioning of the intestines. Laughter Is the Best Medicine / Benefit 2: Normal blood flowPeople who laugh more often have normal blood flow, meaning their blood vessels easily expand and contract.

But those who don’t tend to have a restricted blood flow. Laughter Is the Best Medicine / Benefit 3: Reduced blood pressureIf you always have a good laugh, your chance of having a high blood pressure is lower than most people. When you have a hearty laugh, your blood pressure goes up at first. But then it goes down below normal levels. As a result, your breathing becomes deeper and faster, sending oxygen-rich blood throughout your body. Laughter Is the Best Medicine / Benefit 4: Lower blood sugar levelLaughter can also help diabetic people decrease their blood sugar levels.

This claim is supported by a study conducted on people with diabetes that determined the effects of exposure to humor on blood sugar levels. Laughter Is the Best Medicine / Benefit 5: Improved immune responseLaughter effectively activates the immune system, which is mainly responsible for protecting the body against disease-causing elements such as viruses and bacteria. According to studies, laughter increases the body’s much-needed antibodies that fight infection.

Laughter Is the Best Medicine / Benefit 6: Reduced pain and faster healing processThe most obvious benefit of laughter is its ability to reduce pain, which can result in a faster healing process. Various studies conducted on people in discomfort show that pain did not bother them much when they were laughing. Experts say that laughter is an effective distraction from pain such as headaches, back pains, and arthritis. More often than not, people who are sick focus their energies on their pain, causing their muscles to become tensed.

When these people are distracted by laughter, their muscles relax and their body is relieved from pain. Laughter Is the Best Medicine / Benefit 7: Enhanced brain activityDid you know that laughter can help improve memory and learning? Laughter stimulates the brain and keeps it alert, helping people retain more information. Laughter Is the Best Medicine / Benefit 8: Relaxed muscles and lower stress levelsAs a person laughs, the muscles that are not involved with laughing tend to relax. Once the laughter has finished, the muscles involved in the laughter begin to relax as well.

Because laughter can ease tensed muscles, it is also known to relieve people from stress. Laughter Is the Best Medicine / Benefit 9: Improved respiratory functionLaughing frequently is beneficial for people with respiratory diseases such as emphysema. Laughter has a cleansing effect on the lungs—it empties the organ of more air, leading to a deeper breathing. Laughter Is the Best medicine / Benefit 10: Reduced risk of heart diseaseWhen it comes to protecting your heart, you could say it could be considered that laughter is the best medicine.

In fact, a study found that people suffering from heart ailments were less likely to laugh in various daily life situations than those without heart disease. Just how laughter works to protect the heart is not yet confirmed by experts, but some of them explain that laughter causes the muscles in the diaphragm to move, which is good for the heart. Laughter can also induce in the brain the release of hormones such as endorphins that produce positive effect on the arteries. To ensure the optimal health of your heart, medical experts recommend that you laugh for 15 minutes everyday and work out thrice a week.

Mental and emotional benefits of laughterLaughter does not only benefit the body, it also improves a person’s emotional and mental well-being. A good sense of humor serves as an effective emotional medicine that reduces stress. When faced with tough and exasperating situations, people can uplift their mood simply by using humor. The ability to laugh at yourself can turn difficult problems into more manageable ones. Also, humor gives people a good feeling and a chance to relate to like-minded individuals. According to mental health experts, humor helps people cope with stressful situations.

Here are several benefits that laughter can provide to a person’s mental and emotional health. – Humor helps people connect with others. People with the same kind of humor are more likely to bond and enjoy each other’s company. – Humor improves a person’s ability to interact with others. Being able to laugh often leads to the ability to talk more and to make more eye contact with other people. – When you experience humor frequently, chances are your negative feelings such as depression, hatred, guilt, and anxiety will be replaced with positive ones. Laughing more often can definitely make you feel good, thus helping you develop a positive outlook in life. Humor therapy: laughter that healsAlthough laughter does not directly cure diseases as medical experts believe, humor therapy has been used to treat serious diseases such as cancer. As early as the 13th century, doctors used humor as an anesthetic to relieve patients from the pain caused by surgery. Nowadays, a lot of hospitals and treatment centers throughout the United States have certain rooms filled with humorous materials such as books, sound recordings, puzzles, and games.

These materials help patients keep their anxieties, fears, and discomfort at bay. In addition to that, volunteers visit patients and provide them with humor items such as rubber chickens and water pistols. Volunteers give patients a reason to laugh and enjoy life despite the harrowing conditions they experience. There are also cancer treatment centers that use humor therapy to treat their patients aside from the usual treatments. How to develop your sense of humorNow that you are aware of the physical, mental, and emotional benefits of laughter, you might be thinking of ways to use your sense of humor in your everyday life.

Finding humor in any situation is easier than it seems. If you find it hard to chuckle once even for just one day, here are a few tips to help you start laughing your way to a healthier life. – Smile—it is where laughter starts. A smile is just as infectious as laughter. You can smile even if you do not find something funny in a situation. Smiling is very easy; you just flash your teeth while thinking of any pleasant thing. Practice smiling whenever you see a pleasant person or thing. – Seek out any laughter that you hear. Usually, laughter and humor are not private among a small group of people.

When you hear laughter, do not hesitate to approach the group and ask what is funny. Oftentimes, people are willing to share a funny joke or story since it gives them the chance to laugh again. – Rid yourself of negative thoughts. Make a list of good things that have happened to you, and be thankful for those positive things. Avoiding negative thoughts is a good start in developing your sense of humor. – Spend more time with people who have a great sense of humor. Humor and laughter are contagious, and it’s great to be surrounded by people who love to laugh.

These people take a positive view on life, thus they do not take things too seriously. These people may influence your outlook and your humor. Also, it is advisable to spend less time with overly serious people. – Lighten up and loosen up! Being too serious can only weigh you down and make it hard for you to see the brighter side of things. Never be ashamed to laugh at yourself. Sharing your funny and embarrassing moments to others can send you and others in a roaring laughter. It is one of the best ways to take yourself less seriously.

Rather than grumble about every frustrating situation, it is healthier and more enjoyable to find humor in the situation and laugh at it. Soon, you will realize that your mood becomes lighter each day. – Another great way to develop your humor is to try to be like a child. Children, unlike adults, take life lightly and see things in an uncomplicated manner. Moreover, children laugh a lot. Childlike innocence is what many serious people lack, and that makes them even more prone to stress. Try to act and think a bit like a child, and you will find yourself enjoying the perks of a hearty laughter. Find ways to cope with stress. Stress is a major barrier to laughter and humor. If you allow stress to get the best of you, you are in for a miserable, depressing, humor-free life. There are a lot of ways to deal with stress. You can do some relaxation exercises or learn a new sport. Having enough sleep and a balanced diet can help you recover from stress easily. Do every means to relax yourself so that you can ease your tension. That way, it will be easier for you to laugh. – Make it a habit to laugh everyday. That does not mean you should force yourself to laugh—you just need to make an extra effort to laugh.

Here is how to do it: go to a quiet and private place and then laugh out loud for a few minutes twice a day. You will feel silly and awkward at first, but keep practicing until you get comfortable with it. You will surely benefit from the stimulating effects of laughter. – Like reading and writing, humor can be learned. Take your cues from comedy TV shows and movies. Read comic books, visit comedy clubs, and listen to comic radio programs while driving. Find every opportunity to expose yourself to laughter-inducing moments.

You may soon pick up some funny lines that you can use to amuse your friends and coworkers. – Finally, practice your sense of humor. Your friends will definitely appreciate that. Share a hilarious situation you encountered on the street or a funny anecdote or joke that you have read from the newspaper. When having conversations, ask people about the funniest moments they recently had. For sure, they will be more than glad to share their own funny stories to you. The sound of your friends’ laughter may be enough to send you into a non-stop laughing fit.

All in all, laughter offers a wide array of health benefits without costing you a single penny (so laughter is the best medicine in that respect that it is free! ). Aside from being safe, laughter lessens your chance of getting sick and allows you to enjoy life fully. So laugh hard and do it more often! | | | | | | | | | | | | | Laughter the Best Medicine: A Laugh-Out- … | | | | | $4. 99| 12h 51m | | | | | | | | | | | | | Bennett Cerf’s Bumper Crop~V2 Good For A … | | | | | $3. 99| 13h 11m | | | | | | | | | View all 41 items on eBay| disclaimer| | | | | |

So do you think laughter is the best medicine? At least it has many benefits to your health – but never forget to consult your doctor! I feel that in making life easier and more joyful to live, laughter IS the best medicine. With a little humor we get enough strength to raise our eyes and see life from a broader perspective. Not to mention that laughter is catching. If you really laugh heartily, others usually start laughing too and laughter makes everyone feel better. You might even say that in connecting people laughter is the best medicine also. Or what do you think?

Subscribe to Inspirational Short Stories NewsletterTop of Form Enter your E-mail Address| | Enter your First Name (optional)| | Then Don’t worry — your e-mail address is totally secure. I promise to use it only to send you Inspirational Short Stories. | Bottom of Form Back to Homepage from Laughter Is the Best Medicine – Facts Back to Laughter is The Best Medicine Didn’t find what you were looking for? Use this search feature to find it. Top of FormBottom of FormCustom Search | | | Read more: http://www. inspirational-short-stories. com/laughter-is-the-best-medicine-facts. html#ixzz2SPSCfWu8