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Seeing humor in stressful situations allows people to alleviate their frustrations and redirect their energies toward more positive dispositions.

Laughter is the best medicine.

This is an age-old quote that people can easily recite in unpleasant and humorous situations. People love to laugh. Between crying and laughing, they would unhesitatingly choose the latter unless the former involves joyous reasons. In a world of setbacks and troubles that catch people off guard, the capacity to find positivity and laugh things off is powerful.

Finding humor in stressful situations is valuable. Laughter may seem carefree and often careless, especially in reaction to severe circumstances. However, it requires a specific strength to turn frowns upside-down and make situations beneficial to individuals.

How Laughter Helps

The connection between laughter and stress is evident. It’s as simple as understanding how calmness helps in overwhelming circumstances and how water stops the fiery and hottest fires. Finding humor in stressful situations helps people reduce any physiological effects. Even if it’s a laugh consciously and forcefully pushed off one’s lungs, humor can trick the brain into thinking everything’s fine.

Humor in these situations gives people ample space to process and develop necessary solutions. It doesn’t entail avoidance or neglect of reality. Instead, this temporary relief prevents people from getting overwhelmed and spiraling into hopelessness or despair.

… As A Coping Mechanism

Humor is a cost-free means of reducing anxiety and stress and improving mental health.

Its strength is found in seeing positivity even amid the most terrible circumstances. Humor in stressful situations allows people to skim and find light in the situation. It will enable them to see the whole and find a way out rather than focusing on one aspect and falling victim to rumination.

A good laugh lightens how people perceive situations, a positive coping mechanism that unburdens them.

To draw a better picture, let’s utilize age and life’s uncertainties as motivations. These are among the top sources of people’s woes, haunting their minds with endless questions and pessimism.

Seeing positivity in these massive adversaries can be tricky, but Renee’ Servello provides an effective way out. In her book Humor All The Way, Renee draws a path of lightness amid these matters that her readers have appreciated and found refreshing. They found the author’s words and humor effective in alleviating stress and anxiety about the issues discussed in the book.

Developing Humor In Stressful Situations

Like Renee’s book, humor can diminish people’s tendency to ruminate and overthink. It allows them to focus on another, brighter perspective of things. Humor in stressful situations is a means of warding off feelings of remorse and concern. It’s an emotion-focused coping mechanism in contrast to any stressful emotion.

Laughing makes serious matters light, relieving their heavier emotional effects. Once things lighten up, people can then take the opportunity to find resolutions for the situations. Now, the question is, how do people cultivate humor in stressful situations?

It All Starts With A Smile

A simple smile already goes a long way. Like laughing, it can trick the mind into thinking that everything is alright, releasing feel-good chemicals to the body. So, when faced with stressful situations, people must try smiling through them and see how this changes things.

It’s also worth mentioning that faking a smile can break into a genuine smile, which helps cultivate a hearty laugh and alleviate stress more efficiently. A smile is easy to pull off, and faking it doesn’t take much energy or effort either.

Surround Oneself With Fun

People’s environment highly influences their energies. If they surround themselves with fun, entertainment, and funny people, this energy will rub off them, making them more optimistic. Even when facing frustrating situations, if they’re with people who can find humor in stressful situations, they can laugh about these while solving them.

In a world filled with uncertainty and problems that can come at any time, a healthy environment can boost one’s mental strength to overcome whatever it throws. Hence, instead of sitting and becoming overwhelmed with negativity, people must consciously look for happiness from the people around them or the materials they consume.