At many of the Laughter Yoga sessions I deliver, I ask participants to complete a before and after questionnaire about how they feel using scores between 1 to 10 (1 being worst and 10 being best) to describe the level that they feel. The results invariably move towards the higher numbers for the ‘after’ questionnaire.
The topics covered are as follows:
Enthusiasm
Energy level
Mood
Optimism
Stress level (how ‘stress free’ do you feel)
Level of friendship with group members
Level of awareness about your breathing
Level of muscle relaxation
Level of mental relaxation
Ability to laugh without a reason
As I’ve been able to run more ‘in-person’ sessions this year I have been able to collect quite a lot of data to create meaningful charts. There is clearly an upward trend with participants benefitting from the sessions.
Amongst the many Laughter Yoga sessions – in-person and online during 2024 – I have created a compilation from data received from 7 evaluations to give an overall picture, confirming the benefits – even from some sessions lasting just 30-minutes:
Here are some individual examples:
25 March 2024 Kaleidoscope Plus Group:
5 May 2024 World Laughter Day:
11 June 2024 MenoTalk Group:
Over the past 9 years I have collected quite a lot of data that is demonstrating the positive effects of Laughter Yoga. I changed the wording of the ‘stress’ question in 2016 as I felt the wording was giving opposite ratings to what was evident through the other questions. Here in the UK, if we put a high number against the stress questions, people associate it as a high level of stress, i.e. feeling at their worst. Hence my change in the wording.
Below are the annual charts, showing very similar trends for ‘Before’ and ‘After’ the sessions:
Since the COVID Pandemic when ‘in-person’ Laughter Yoga sessions were not allowed, I continued to run Laughter Yoga sessions online via Zoom. However, I did not feel it was conducive to collecting the feedback data I’d used previously.
In-person sessions resumed in 2022 and beyond and during 2023 I was able to collect data from three in-person sessions. I changed the format of the chart to make it more easily understood so here is the chart for 2023 for 47 participants. The blue columns relate to before the sessions and the Orange to afterwards. I feel that the chart speaks for how beneficial the sessions were and continue the trend from earlier years:
Below is the previous evidence and chart pre-COVID with more complicated charts:
2019
These graphs clearly show that in most cases there is a significant ‘push’ towards the higher number scores ‘after’ the Laughter Yoga session. There are always a few anomalies but then everybody is different and Laughter Yoga doesn’t suit everybody.
Here are the graphs for are graphs of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ breakdown for 2019 – from January to December, evidence has been taken from 6 sessions with a total of 49 participants:
Before:
After
These two graphs for 2019 can be seen in more details here
To see the breakdown for each of the 10 data areas, please click here