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A free workshop at the Student Health and Counseling Center encourages students to laugh as a form of therapy and stress reduction.
Workshop leader and student counselor Kathleen Schindler-Wright said the workshop, Laughter Yoga, promotes laughter, which increases oxygen intake, in turn encouraging relaxation, and can even be considered a type of exercise. She said it’s crucial that stressed college students find ways to relax, and that this class is a great way to do that.
“It’s like an aerobic workout when you laugh,” she said. “It’s also fun way to use breathing to reduce anxiety.”
Participants spend the class doing poses and activities that induce laughter, including making noises and behaving like farm animals until everyone starts to laugh. Participants are also asked to think of a situation or place they were in where laughing may have seemed inappropriate.
Schindler-Wright said the class provides a safe environment for people to be as silly as they want — there’s no judgment, participants just go to have fun. She said students’ responses to the class have been overwhelmingly positive and that many people find the class surprisingly relaxing.
“Your life is easier when you learn to laugh at yourself and know you don’t have to be perfect all the time,” she said.
Laughter yoga was started by Indian doctor Madan Kataria in the ‘90s and is now popular around the world.
Schindler-Wright said people can practice laughter yoga regularly at the “laughter clubs” in Albuquerque. People can also go to the laughter clubs to train to be a laughter yoga instructor. She said stress is an intrinsic part of college life, but that relaxation isn’t just a luxury — it’s a necessity.
In addition to teaching laughter yoga, Schindler-Wright runs a test-anxiety workshop to help students with study skills and time-management and a four-session general anxiety/stress clinic to help develop coping skills.
According to SHAC, the center offers 13 workshops during the fall semester, including an academic success workshop, anger management workshop and an ADHD coping skills workshop. Other workshops include a Rewiring Your Brain workshop, which aims to understand how the brain is wired to form habits and how to reconfigure your brain to change habits, and a sleep hygiene workshop, which aims to improve sleeping habits by teaching students how to avoid activities that interfere with sleep.
All workshops are free to UNM students.
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SHAC student counseling director Stephanie McIver said taking an alternative approach to stress reduction is important to ensure that students stay healthy.
“The goal of every workshop is to give concrete skills that can be applied right away,” she said. “It’s just up to the students to apply them.”
For more information about workshops, including registration and a schedule of workshops, please visit shac.unm.edu
or call (505) 277-4537
