Sophie Scott
speaker
374 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 2 Jul
Sophie Scott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Adrenaline is that fight or flight hormone that makes your heart start racing.
and you're scared.
And that is lower after you've been laughing than it was before you were laughing.
While you're actually laughing, it tends to go up because you're doing quite a lot of work.
It's quite stressful for your heart when you're laughing.
You also get a reduction in cortisol associated with laughter.
Cortisol is a stress hormone.
It's what wakes you up in the morning.
It's why waking up in the morning can sometimes feel a bit grim.
And it's also the hormone that runs at high levels when you are feeling stressed and you sleep badly and your appetite goes over and you don't feel right.
That's cortisol at work.
And high levels of cortisol running chronically is not good for your mental health.
It's not good for your physical health.
It has a slower lag than adrenaline, which works really quickly.
So it works much more slowly, cortisol.
But you find cortisol levels drop off when people have been laughing.
So you're feeling less stressed, you're feeling more relaxed.
There does seem to be.
So this has been studied less about laughter, but more about jokes.
But of course, the jokes are an attempt to get laughter going.
Showing 301–320 of 374 · page 16 of 19
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