The power of laughter

Many people find themselves feeling embarrassed when they look back on mistakes they’ve made, even in childhood. Although social missteps and well-intentioned mistakes are common and virtually unavoidable over the course of one’s lifetime, many of us beat ourselves up over the embarrassing things we’ve done in the past. This can be a significant source of stress, particularly for those who experience some level of anxiety, particularly social anxiety. Many people have found solace with the simple idea that, “someday we’ll look back on this and laugh.”

When we become able to laugh about the embarrassing things we’ve done in the past, we take the shame out of the memory and replace it with camaraderie, or at least a good measure of humor. This can de-stress the experience and the memory of it. Finding a group of friends, or even just one good friend, who can share the burden of embarrassment by sharing a good laugh, can be transformative. Learning the skill of being able to look at memories this way can enable us to be more forgiving with ourselves and others. It can even enable us to react less with embarrassment and more with good humor to mistakes we make in the present, particularly if we imagine that the “someday” when we’ll be laughing about this, can be today.

Laughing at what stresses or embarrasses us is an inborn ability for some, but can be a learned skill for others. You can also enhance your ability to do this, so it becomes a habit that comes much more easily and automatically. If you’d like to expand your ability to laugh at stressful situations, the following tips can help you to further develop this skill.

One of the main goals of finding the humor in a stressful situation is to use the humor to create distance between yourself and the stress you are experiencing. Laughing at the humorous aspects of a stressful situation can help you to keep things in perspective and remind yourself that what you experience may not be the worst thing you can possibly face. If you are having trouble finding the humor in your situation, it could help to approach things from a different angle: instead of using humor to find perspective, put things in perspective to allow yourself to more easily see the humor. If you rate your stress on a scale from 1, which represents “not at all stressful” to 10, representing “as stressful as this can be,” you can often remind yourself that this isn’t the most stress you have faced and that things could be worse. This puts space between you and the situation, and that space can also add some much-needed levity to the situation, and make it easier for you to see the humor where possible…

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