Laughter. It’s No Laughing Matter.

Funnily enough, scientists study laughter now. A lot. And one of the key findings is that laughter has a buffering effect on mental and emotional struggles like Burnout and even PTSD!

In other words, laughter helps you to distance yourself emotionally from the stressful event(s) that just happened. When you step back and find even a glimmer of humor, it lends perspective and basically helps let some of the air out of the balloon.

Think Of Laughter Like Therapy

And actually, it’s almost exactly like therapy. Check this out, in case you haven’t gotten your daily dose of science-speak, here’s some word salad for you:

“Decentering, a central change strategy of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, is a process of stepping outside of one’s own mental events leading to an objective and non-judging stance towards the self.“

Your welcome, LOL.

Science-To-English Dictionary

The definition above just describes something called “de-centering”.

Basically, de-centering is when a person mentally steps back from the swirling, sloshing, stress-mess they find themselves in.

When they do that, it’s like they can see it all from the outside-in, they can be objective now, and so it doesn’t make them such a stress ball.

Make sense? Clear as mud?

The bottom line is (after you wade through all the words) that the fancy “de-centering” concept really does much the same thing as plain laughter.

Take back control

In the end de-centering and laughter are both powerful tools to give you a measure of control. Because when your teenager is making you crazy, and drivers make bone-headed decisions (RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU!), and the ref in your game 100% blows it, and your company computer gives you the “spinning wheel of death” yet again … you can feel totally powerless.

At this point, it honestly doesn’t matter whether you use de-centering or humor. In either case, just get the mental and emotional separation from the series of unfortunate events you just faced, to regain a sense of control as well as your internal peace.

If you know someone who needs a little laughter therapy from time to time, pls SHARE this with them.