Right now in a world with pandemics, racism and greed, we need humour, kindness and laughter. Humour helps build resilience and facilitates emotional, intellectual, social and physical wellness. Have you ever tried not to smile when someone is being funny or have you noticed how it is hard to feel negative emotions while laughing? Laughter promotes the release of endorphins and therefore helps reduce stress. Nothing like a good belly laugh to shake off the flat mood.
When going through challenging times, there are options, we can either choose to grow through the challenging times or learn to cope, or we suffer and don’t cope and/or learn. It is all a question of outlook. Happy people, with their positive attitude, choose to grow and learn and hold on to hope like it is their last breathe of air. This can seem so hard to understand for many. Changing your attitude and facing adversity head on is not easy, but it’s possible. Even if we find we cannot move though the adversity, we can still try to move through with some humour.
Humour is a change in a perspective; it jolts us out of traditional thinking and/or melancholy thoughts. Humour gives us a frame work, a lens, to see a funny side of how something could be different. Humour gives a person a snap shot of life that separates them from their routine and to feel something differently. It hold people’s focus until the joke is over and they return to their “life”. The act of being humorous is an intellectual activity. It expands ones’ knowledge on a topic or life event, it describes the use of skills and engages our creative brain.
Humour evokes humility; it teaches people to recognise flaws in people and systems and eases anxiety about topics and difficult issues. Humour can broaden the scope of focus and strip down arrogance, which enables people to engage with others and subsequently it reduces overwhelm. It enables rooms full of people laugh with each other at being human. Our energy increases while we are laughing which helps improves overall mood and functioning.
Humour can help find answers to problems; it assists us think outside the square and differently at issues. Laughter can increase our mood, and this shift in mood can change the way we think about issues. This enables us to adapt to challenges using humour differently. Examples might be fixing something unfixable.
Resilience building though the use of humour can be found in people who can laugh at adversity. They make jokes about their hardships. When faced with misfortune, a change in attitude can assist with a smile as it aids us staying hopeful. By having a positive outlook, it keeps us from focusing on the negative and we can focus on alternative viewpoints.
We can overcome and grow, accomplishing things we never thought we could. Research has shown that happy people really do prosper when faced with adversity. Instead of getting stuck in the negative cycle, positive people use hope as a way to brace and challenge the storm. Finding some humour in every day events can buffer against the negative thinking and inner critic. Try to find a little humour in your life, it helps harness your mental wellness.
