No matter how you look at it, humor really is good for you. From a physical, mental, and emotional perspective, it’s important to laugh lots and laugh often.

Not only does laughter reduce stress and anxiety, but it also boosts your immune system and helps you connect with other people around you.

What’s more, by reducing the amounts of the stress hormone cortisol in your body, laughter can help older adults tackle memory deficiencies.

This happens because cortisol can damage the hippocampus neurons and impair learning and memory.

Furthermore, laughter also improves creative thinking and hopefulness.

There’s a lot of luck involved in any content going viral. However, there are lots of things that you can do to improve your chances that a meme or post of yours will get more attention.

According to one study, “virality is driven, in part, by activation and arousal.” What this means is that high-arousal emotions tend to be more viral. That applies both to positive emotions (for example, awe), as well as negative ones (for instance, anxiety or anger).

Meanwhile, content that “evokes low arousal or deactivating emotions tends to be less viral.” So, topics that make the audience sad may not go as viral as ones that make people happy or angry.

Other traits that favor virality include practical value, emotionality, surprise, and interest in the topic.

In other words, if you make your content interesting and valuable and evoke strong emotions in your audience, you increase the chances of it going viral online.

It’s also helpful if you carve out a niche for your content. In essence, you want your audience to know what they’re in for because it helps build your brand and image. So, you might focus on topics like animals, relationships, work, parenting, etc. Or you might post a bit about everything, in which case your followers are there for random content that might involve recent events.

From a practical perspective, you need to spend some time editing and polishing your content to truly make it shine. For example, one thing that you should definitely do is use high-quality photos or images as the base of the meme.

On top of that, you want to use an easily readable font. You have only a moment to capture a social media scroller’s attention, so visual clarity is key here.

Picture quality, font, and colors aside, the captions you use are also incredibly important for connecting with your audience. In this day and age, with so much content and information flooding the internet and people’s social media feeds, brevity is key.

So, concise captions that capture the essence of the joke or insight are preferable to humongous walls of text.

Very few people have the patience or energy to read paragraph after paragraph just to ‘get the joke.’ On the other hand, snappy and punchy captions can instantly connect with the audience and make them laugh.

Of course, coming up with those witty captions is hard work. Often, it’s far harder to write less than to write more. The real challenge is expressing a relatable thought that matches the visuals of a picture in the fewest words possible.

Which of these memes made you smile the widest and laugh the hardest? Were there any that you instantly wanted to send to your friends, dear Pandas? What types and genres of memes do you personally enjoy the most?

If you had to guess, how many memes do you send your family and friends every single day? We’d love to hear from you! Share your thoughts in the comments below.