Humor: One of Our Greatest Assets
Having humor in your life is an essential component to maintaining sanity through difficult times
One of the most powerful tools in our life is the ability to not take our situation so seriously. Regardless of how miserable our circumstances may feel, being able to reduce the heaviness with even the slightest degree of laughter can go a long way towards lightening our load.
Humor cuts through some of the worst emotions, serving as both a release valve for built-up emotional pressure as well as a mechanism to shift our perspective on our current predicament. Cracking a joke in the face of a stressful or uncomfortable scenario provides much-needed breathing room to exist without feeling trapped within our reality.
Being able to laugh at ourselves not only lightens our load, but it serves as a powerful shield against those who may use our circumstance against us. If we take ourselves too seriously, we are vulnerable to external criticisms and likely to react negatively if such critiques occur.
A tool for coping and relating to others
Growing up, I dealt with a large amount of social awkwardness and anxiety. This was especially apparent in my interactions with the opposite sex, as my extreme self-awareness crippled my ability to communicate assertively and win the affection of those I was attracted to.
An awkward moment can feel like an eternity when we are incapable of acknowledging the situation. In fact, I dealt with plenty of absurdly uncomfortable situations by succumbing to my own hyper-awareness. One solemn thought would feed the next, and before I knew it I was a bumbling mess, barely capable of formulating sentences, let alone holding a genuine and engaging conversation.
My awkwardness forced me to find a strategy that reduced discomfort and put both myself and the other person at ease as opposed to falling down the inevitably clumsy social death spiral I often wound up in. I stumbled into humor, somewhat unwittingly, as a way to bridge the social awkwardness gap. It allowed me to be humble, honest, and (sometimes) clever all at once.
Instead of becoming paralyzed by an uncomfortable interaction or situation, I could now utilize the undesirable circumstance as a tool to display my positive attributes. Without even being aware of stoic philosophy at the time, I was nevertheless abiding by the stoic principle of turning obstacles into launching pads.
Resiliency in laughter
Humor taps into the human spirit better than almost any other mental method, providing a way to rise above the fray and alleviate the intensity of feelings, regardless of how objectively terrible they may be. Allowing the gravity of a situation to envelop our mind and body without any sense of comic relief is a recipe for unending suffering.
Humor won't necessarily change or fix a particularly tragic situation, but it can be a helpful way to stay resilient and make the grieving process more bearable. You can't realistically joke your way out of a tragedy, but you can at least break up the tears of sorrow with a few drops of joy.
Getting through this life without losing our mind often means we need to lose the part of our ego that makes us believe everything needs to be so damn serious all the time. We have the choice to choose life's genre.
And a comedy, even of the dark variety, is much more preferable to a horror show.
All uncredited pictures from pixabay.com or my personal account
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nice article! There is nothing better to go through life with a good sense of humor, though I never thought of it as an way of self-protection..
What a wonderful article, thank you for sharing