How Humor Can Help You Get through Hard Times

How Humor Takes the Edge off Hard Times

When life feels difficult, humor can be a coping mechanism that relieves stress and offers the breathing room to keep going, scientists say

By Meghan Bartels

Three psychologists walk into a bar to compose a witty toast to the power of humor. Or rather I picked up the phone and called each of them about the subject. (I’m just terrible at telling jokes.) But these psychologists do genuinely want people to understand the role that humor can play in helping one deal with stress, anger, fear, anxiety and other difficult emotions. Sometimes, that means purposefully embracing humor when things are going well, shoring up defenses against hard times to come. And sometimes it can mean spontaneously laughing when you want to cry or cracking an absurdist joke when it feels like the sky is falling and Earth is on fire.

“There is this autopilot, unconscious way that many people engage humor without thinking about it,” says Steven Sultanoff, a clinical psychologist and an adjunct professor at Pepperdine University. “It is a strategic coping mechanism, but it’s not a conscious one.”

To psychologists, a coping mechanism is any kind of behavior or thought someone uses to deal with stress, says Janet Gibson, a psychologist and a professor emerita at Grinnell College. Not all of these strategies are beneficial, she notes: drinking or binge eating, for example, are more dangerous coping mechanisms.

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But humor is indeed a powerful way of handling stressors, which “activate how we feel, how we think, how we act—and our physiology,” Sultanoff says. Humor does exactly the same things, just in a different direction.

Stress may make someone feel anxious or angry; humor replaces that feeling with a moment of joy, lightness, surprise or connection. In many situations, “when you’re experiencing humor, you cannot experience distressing emotions,” Sultanoff says. “These emotions dissolve.” Stress may also narrow someone’s thinking about a situation, whereas humor taps into creativity that can enable a perspective shift.

And of course, there’s the physical embodiment of humor: laughter. With it comes better breathing, muscle relaxation and a higher pain tolerance, potentially caused by the release of endorphins. “The stress is there; you just don’t feel it as much,” Gibson says.

Humor is, moreover, inherently social. “We crave connection, especially when we are feeling heightened levels of stress,” says Michele Tugade, a psychologist at Vassar College.

Of course, humor isn’t foolproof: making the wrong joke the wrong way is just as likely to increase stress and disconnection. “Mean-spirited or disparaging humor actually causes people to be further apart and increases division,” Tugade says.

Humor can arise during stress without a person making any effort to evoke it—or even necessarily understanding where it is coming from or why. But humor can also be cultivated, Sultanoff says, adding that he himself uses it as a conscious way of lightening the mood and building connections with people around him. He says that that he travels with a clown nose to facilitate finding fun in life’s mundane moments. “Joyful use of humor builds psychological antibodies,” he says.

Notwithstanding the occasional clown nose, embracing the power of humor doesn’t mean subscribing to toxic positivity. The point is not to never feel difficult emotions, Tugade says. “Stress is there for a reason, and it’s to call your attention to a problem that needs to be solved,” she says. “When you experience a negative emotion like sadness or anger or frustration, it’s important to recognize why that’s there.” Turning to humor too soon may prevent someone from processing emotions in a healthy way, increasing stress rather than decreasing it, she adds.

Instead consider expressing humor in moderation and as a moment of relief amid a seemingly constant onslaught of grim headlines and hard feelings. “You’re not denying that there is some trouble in the world and there’s great despair and grief,” Tugade says. “It’s giving yourself a break. And we all need a little break.”