Stress Off-Switches: Simple Laugh Resets You Can Use Anytime to Calm Anxiety and Tension in Seconds

It might come over the garden fence on a Sunday afternoon, a child next door laughing so hard she can barely get her words out, or from the next room after lights out. You stop, tea towel in hand, and wonder when you last laughed like that yourself.

On holiday the laughs came easily, at long lunches that ran into the afternoon and over nothing much, a wrong turning or the look on a waiter's face. Since you came back they have thinned out, squeezed between the school run and an inbox that has refilled by ten. In a complicated week most of us wait for a laugh to arrive by itself, and it seldom does, though you can also reach for one on a heavy day.

Laughing eases the body's tension, and a recent review found that cortisol, a stress hormone, was lower after people had a good laugh. It can work even when nothing is funny, because you can start a laugh on purpose: a review of laughter therapies found that the ones based on laughing for no reason did at least as well as those based on humour. Laughing also comes far more easily with someone else, which is why one of the resets below is a phone call.