Using Humour To Tackle Anxiety and Stress – Anxiety Relief with Laughter:
One of the things I’m really enjoying about having an Alexa at home is asking it to tell a joke each day. There’s nothing that lifts the mood like a good joke is there? Or to be honest, even a bad joke that makes you grin and moan about how awful it is can lift the mood too.
The other day this was the joke of the day…’What’s blue and smells like red paint?……….Blue paint!’ That actually made me laugh out loud and I enjoyed it so much I’ve told it to dozens of people (I got a typical groan from my kids about how it’s a ‘dad joke’!). Come on: it’s funny really!
And yesterday I was talking to a client about how we can use humour and laughter to reduce anxiety and stress. After all, if we are laughing (or even mildly chuckling) it’s very hard to be anxious and stressed at the same time. And whether that simply lifts our mood for a while or makes those anxious thoughts seem a bit silly and so we get a change of perspective, making humour part of your coping strategy can really pay beneficial dividends.
Finding humour in things (or in general) can help us get a sense of perspective on our problems and issues as well as physically providing a release for tension and stress. In fact there is even a Coping Humour Scale which seeks to measure and understand how you use humour to handle problems (it asks you to rate on a scale things like: ‘I have often found that my problems have been greatly reduced when I try to find something funny in them’ and ‘It has been my experience that humour is often a very effective way of coping with problems.’).
