[Excerpted from, 9 Keys to Optimism: Positive Psychology ©2023]

Who doesn’t want more humor? And an ever-better sense of humor?

Humans love to laugh. When we do, our brains release endorphins, that feel-good chemical of our brain’s pleasure center. Laughing not only makes us feel good; it reduces pain via those endorphins too, an opioid-like natural substance meant precisely for pain mitigation. It also contributes to physical and psychological health, and our subjective sense of wellbeing.

Humor is one of positive psychology’s top three character strengths for wellbeing and health, in fact (Gander et al., 2022), and as it’s directly linked with optimism, all the better. The same study links it with pleasure (no surprise there), and with our virtue of humanity, within which we find qualities of social bondedness and compassion.

It’s not actually situated in the ‘humanity’ category, however, but tellingly, within the virtue of transcendence – those strengths that help us to reach our very best selves, achieving a sense of interconnectedness and meaning. Other character strengths in the transcendence category, several of which will appear as our keys to optimism, include appreciation of beauty and excellence, a sense of meaning and purpose, and gratitude, along with hope as we’ve already seen.

Some people think (or are told by others) that they have no sense of humor. It’s true that some of us are more serious-minded than others, and if faced with depression, anxiety, or a host of other conditions, or grieving a loss, we may find it rather difficult to find humor in life. There are also different types of humor, just as we may have various tastes, and what’s funny to one seems stupid to another – or we don’t get the joke.

Humor isn’t only our ability to be amused, and to perceive what’s humorous (or not). It’s also a common form of socialization and social bonding, as we laugh together with others, say or do something to amuse those around us, or defuse tension in a given situation. It’s about having a light heart and a positive mood, and is a clear coping method for stress management. Physical and mental health benefits have long been associated with humor, not only our own experience of it but that of stimulating laughter in others as well (Curran et al., 2021; Stiwi and Rosendahl, 2022).

In a study by Menéndez-Aller et al. (2020), humor was demonstrated to be a protective factor against anxiety and depression, a kind of preventive medicine that we’d all do well to take daily. And it’s not only preventive. In a broad analysis of the research, Berger et al. (2021) found support for humor and reduction of anxiety or depression, along with improved self-esteem and social skills; these benefits were seen in healthy individuals, elderly, and those with mental illness. Another large meta-analysis, including 85 studies with a total of 27,562 subjects across ages and cultures, was conducted by Jiang et al. (2020), and demonstrated that affiliative humor – laughing together, finding the same things amusing – boosted wellbeing, whereas aggressive humor did not; they found that neither age nor culture was a significant factor.

Humor has been directly associated with optimism by Sevari and Farzadi (2021), who found that the presence of both optimism and humor predicted one’s sense of meaning in life. Humor and optimism when associated were also found to be protective against the recent pandemic-related stress (Reizer et al., 2022). Wellbeing was enhanced by humor, in a study by Marrero et al. (2020), though more so in women than men and in those who were healthy; they further found that subjective (self-reported) wellbeing was mediated by the presence of optimism, while self-esteem was the mediator for psychological (measurable) wellbeing.

So how do we increase our sense and use of humor?

Laughter therapies do exist, and laughter yoga, and more. Or, we can seek out humor. It’s good to laugh uproariously at least once a day. We sometimes lose sight of its benefits, and get caught up in other interests and obligations – but just as medicine (as the saying goes), regular doses of laughter are a very good thing for health.

More, we want to develop our sense of humor – discerning what’s funny, and sharing that with others, too. We all know ways to laugh – watching amusing videos or movies, or stand-up comedy routines, for example – but to develop our humor as a character strength, we might want to branch out, to watch comedies or listen to comedians from cultures other than our own, to analyze what makes something funny, to write our own jokes as if we too were professional comedians (much like we might try writing poetry to exercise our creativity). We must stretch and grow our humor — and practice, practice, practice.

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Exercises:

Keep a humor journal. A professional comedian writes down everything that occurs in a day which might later be material for developing into a joke. Funny things occur all around us, every day – many of them not perpetuated by humans. (Animals are very funny, too – and situations, and events, and even weather.) Keep track of all those funny moments, when you might have found yourself laughing within.

Tell someone something funny at least once a day. Shared humor is the best, and humor a form of social bonding. Ask your friends to do the same for you. Hang out with amusing people who like to laugh together.

Join a comedy or humor group on social media – one that doesn’t just share funny memes and videos, but works to develop their own humor. Budding comedians, for example, or a ‘laughter therapy’ type of group.

Watch an instructional video on how to write your own comedy routines. Rather than it becoming a new job (or maybe so – who knows?), it’s a great way to discover how humor works – why things are funny, what makes something funnier, delivery and timing, and much more. The better we understand humor, rather than it coming to us only accidentally, the more developed our humor skill becomes.

Before you go to sleep each night, review your day – and remember at least 3 moments of humor. Once you begin looking for them, they’ll be there.

Place a few small items in spots around your home that only you know about – things that make you laugh every time you see them but wouldn’t be noticed or thought of as funny by others, because the secret of the joke is half the fun. Amuse yourself. Surround yourself with tiny bits of humor that just walking past or seeing out of the corner of your eye makes you smile or laugh.

Get a dog. Or a cat. You’ll be laughing more each day.

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References:

Berger P, Bitsch F, and Falkenberg I (2021). Humor in Psychiatry: Lessons From Neuroscience, Psychopathology, and Treatment Research. Frontiers in Psychiatry 12:681903. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.681903

Curran T, Janovec A, and Olsen K (2021). Making Others Laugh is the Best Medicine: Humor Orientation, Health Outcomes, and the Moderating Role of Cognitive Flexibility. Health Communication 36:4, 468-475. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2019.1700438

Gander F, Wagner L, Amann L, and Ruch W (2022). What are character strengths good for? A daily diary study on character strengths enactment.  Journal of Positive Psychology 17:5, 718-728. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2021.1926532

Jiang F, Lu S, Jiang T et al. (2020). Does the Relation Between Humor Styles and Subjective Well-Being Vary Across Culture and Age? A Meta-Analysis. Frontiers in Psychology 11:2213. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02213

Marrero RJ, Carballeira M and Hernández-Cabrera JA (2020). Does Humor Mediate the Relationship Between Positive Personality and Well-Being? The Moderating Role of Gender and Health. Journal of Happiness Studies 21, 1117–1144. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-019-00121-x

Menéndez-Aller Á, Postigo Á, Montes-Álvarez P et al. (2020). Humor as a protective factor against anxiety and depression. International Journal of Clinical Health Psychology 20:1, 38-45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijchp.2019.12.002

Reizer A, Munk Y, and Frankfurther LK (2022). Laughing all the way to the lockdown: On humor, optimism, and well-being during COVID-19. Personality and Individual Differences 184:111164. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2021.111164

Sevari K and Farzadi F (2021). Predicting Meaning of Life Based on Optimism and Humorous Styles. Positive Psychology Research 7:2, 49-60. https://doi.org/10.22108/ppls.2021.25942

Stiwi K and Rosendahl J (2022). Efficacy of laughter-inducing interventions in patients with somatic or mental health problems: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized-controlled trials. Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice 47:101552. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ctcp.2022.101552