Laugh With Me! A LIGHTHEARTED APP We’ve all heard that laughter is the best medicine, and it turns out that human physiology supports this claim. When we laugh, our body releases a flood of feel-good chemicals and neurotransmitters. Our blood flow increases, and our production of cortisol, a hormone associated with stress, decreases. Oh, and laughing also burns calories! beneficial as the real thing because the body can’t tell the difference between the two.
Collaborating with this wife, Madhuri, Kataria combined common yoga warmups and breathing techniques with facilitated laughter to create the form of laughter yoga that is practiced worldwide today. If you’re interested in trying laughter yoga for yourself, then you’re in luck. Laughter yoga clubs exist across the United States and the world. Videos on YouTube can teach the basics, but laughter yoga tends to be most beneficial in a group setting. Just think about the last time you found yourself in a fit of giggles with a group of friends or during a comedy show. Didn’t it feel great? Rather than wait for a silly situation to trigger laughter, use laughter yoga to promote laughter and alleviate stress on any day at any time.
The feel-good, endorphin-inducing benefits of laughter are exactly what prompted Dr. Madan Kataria to develop laughter yoga in 1995. Laughter yoga incorporates breathing, stretching, clapping, and of course, laughing. Kataria developed the initial idea after coming across research into the benefits of laughter on overall health and well-being. He began to put the research into practice by telling jokes to his patients, and after seeing the positive effects, he took his material to a local park. Parkgoers, who were initially skeptical, joined in on the practice, and the first laughter yoga club was born. The laughter meetup had everyone in high spirits — until the group ran out of jokes. Unsure of what to do next, Kataria found another medical book suggesting the group didn’t need jokes to laugh. Fake laughter is just as
WHAT IS A SEWER POPPER? And Should I Have One?
A t Plumb Smart, we do a lot of drain cleaning and sewer pipe repair. In our area, we think of the ground being rather stable. However, it actually moves a lot. The fluctuation between hot and cold and dry and wet weather, the ground settling near a home foundation, and most commonly, the growth of tree roots can cause the ground beneath our feet to shift drastically. Roots look for the easiest routes to take when they grow, and in soft or wet soil, they don’t face a lot of resistance. Roots will follow along backfilled ditches where sewer and water lines have been buried. This soil there is softer and moister than the surrounding hard packed earth. Roots can actually break pipes by squeezing them. All they need to do is find microscopic cracks in pipes, and they’ll start burrowing in. Once one tiny root gets into a pipe, it starts getting bigger and bigger on the inside, feeding on the constant moisture inside a drain pipe. If you have a main sewer blockage out in your yard, it can back up in your house and cause some serious damage. Fortunately, a device can be installed on your home’s outside sewer clean out pipe. It’s called a Sewer Popper. The Sewer Popper replaces the cap that screws onto the clean out pipe.
If your sewer backs up for some reason, the Sewer Popper will float out of the clean out pipe and the sewage will spill out onto the ground outside
your house instead of spilling out into your tub, shower or toilet. The Sewer Popper will work on 95% of the homes in our area. I have a Sewer Popper at my house and it has saved me from sewer blockages backing up into my house from my septic tank. In my opinion, it’s one of the best things you can get for your sewer pipe.
If you know where your clean out pipe is, you can easily install a Sewer Popper yourself. Unscrew the cap, screw in the adapter that comes with the Sewer Popper, and drop the Popper into the adapter. If you don’t have a clean out pipe or can’t find it, give us a call and we can help you find it or install one.
2
www.BePlumbSmart.com
404.427.0302
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker