Secret About Stress

When you’re organising a function it’s important to make sure the music you book suits the occasion, that’s pretty obvious. However, it’s easy to get this wrong and when you do it makes for an evening of cringing for you and your musicians. Here’s how to make sure that doesn’t happen to you!

Some time ago the band I play in was booked for a gig at a golf club. We were told the club wanted an evening of easy listening, which at the time is exactly what we played as we were essentially a swing band. We arrived, set up our equipment and started the gig.

For the first 30 minutes we were well received, some people even ventured onto the floor for a gentle foxtrot. We finished a song, people applauded and we moved onto the next.

About 50 minutes into the gig we began to sense a slight unease, people were becoming less receptive and the dance floor didn’t even play host to a passing tumble weed, all was not well. Eventually a rather large chap walked over to the stage and asked if this was the only type of music we were going to play, his point being people wanted to ‘boogie’.

I’ll skip over the rest of the evening but suffice to say we were glad to see the venue in our rear view mirror!

The thing is, nobody was at fault. We were a swing band and we played swing music, they wanted a boogie band so they could shake their flab around the floor (yes I’m still bitter) unfortunately the difference between the two is no doubt pretty clear.

I can’t stress enough, when you are booking a band for your function, or wedding, make sure there’s no ambiguity about what you want and what the band play, if the two things don’t match look elsewhere! It’s not fair on the band or your guests!

Laughing has a ton of benefits. The benefits of laughter are virtually endless.

Laughter may decrease cravings of unhealthy food. Yes that’s correct, next time you are hungry for those peanut butter cups or ice cream, watch a comedy or search for funny videos on YouTube, it will keep your food cravings at bay. Even more interesting, there is a budding discipline called “humor therapy”. Humor therapy is said to help people heal quicker.

Many people are worried in today’s world. Laughter is thought to be stress-reducing.

There are hormones in the body that stimulate stress. Laughter is thought to reduce stress-causing hormones in our body. One such example is cortisol. Not only that, it increases endorphin levels in our bodies. Laughter may actually be the best medicine: studies show that it can boost our immune systems as well. What does this mean? It means with each laugh, we can get a healthier body and a stronger immune system and less stress.

Laughter provides an effective physical-and chemical release. If you need a good laugh, I suggest hanging around someone who makes you laugh, or even simpler-look at some silly videos online or something of the sort.

Also: how to work your abs? Laughing hard. Laughing increases bloodflow throughout the body: more oxygenated blood flows to your organs and muscles leaving you feeling refreshed and healthy.

When you laugh, you seem to become present in the moment and seemingly forget about your stresses and problems.

The following story happened to me. Currently, I am teaching English in South Korea. Seoul to be exact. And the Korean people like to do things at the last possible moment. Well, one minute before one of my classes, they told me that my class had been changed and I was to see double the amount of students I was used to. So now I had roughly a minute to process this. I started to laugh because I thought that it was kind of funny. I think my attitude helped because the class went good.

A benefit of laughter is that in brings people together. There is nothing more beautiful than sharing a laugh with another human being. So live, laugh, and love!