By: Steven M. Sultanoff, Ph.D.
Just as our physical immune system protects us from toxins in our environment, our “psychological immune system” protects us from the toxins generated from psychological stressors we experience in the world around us. Research has shown that humor strengthens both our physical and psychological immune systems; it helps to sustain the psychological immune system by altering how we feel, think, and behave.
Cognitive Benefits
Humor helps break rigid thinking resulting in our ability to perceive the world more “realistically” and without distortions. Our emotional state is greatly influenced by our perception of the events around us. A stressor is not inherently stressful. The intensity of stress we experience is directly related to the way in which we perceive the stressor.
Shakespeare stated, “Nothing is good or bad. It is thinking that makes it so.” Because one person’s view of a particular stressor influences the impact of that stressor, a variety of people experiencing the same stressor may have vastly different reactions, depending on the meaning they place on the stressor.
For example, someone who feels excessive anger often believes that the world must treat him “fairly,” and when it does not treat him so, he becomes angry. Humor helps adjust this particular belief system by providing a more realistic perspective on an “unfair world.”
Someone who experiences excessive anxiety often believes that she must perform well to be accepted or valued. When an environmental stressor challenges her performance, she experiences anxiety.
Humor, again, can provide a clearer perspective, placing her “performance” in a healthier relation to the specific environment so that the individual changes her thinking pattern from “I must perform to be okay” to “I would like to perform well, but I’m okay even when I don’t do as well as I hoped.”
Emotional Benefits
Humor not only relieves distressful feelings, but it also helps teach us that we have the ability to “manage” our emotional states. One can’t experience distressing emotions such as anger, anxiety, depression, guilt, or resentment and experience humor at the same time. You may have heard someone who is very angry say, “Don’t make me laugh. I want to be angry.” You cannot maintain a high level of anger and laugh at the same time.
When I asked one of my clients (who was very “dedicated” to her depression) what upset her about my humorous interventions, she replied, “When you make me laugh, I do not feel depressed.” My humor momentarily relieved some of her depression, which she seemed committed to maintaining! Humor and distressful emotions cannot occupy the same emotional/psychological space.
Since the experience of humor affects our emotions, we can learn to manage our emotional distress through humor. While humorous interventions may not remove chronic depression, they can – for a few moments, at least – relieve emotional upset, teaching us experientially that depression and other distressing emotions can be lessened or temporarily relieved when we experience humor.
Understanding the Elements of Humor
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