How Humour Can Enhance Resilience (With Tips)

Most of us love a good joke as it makes us laugh and helps us relax and relieve tensions. But humour may have a more important role in our mental health and wellbeing. A key aspect of our mental wellbeing is resilience. Research in humour psychology has shown that humour can enhance resilience. There are four cross-cultural styles of humour, some of which tend to facilitate our wellbeing while others may have an opposite effect.

Here we’ll take a closer look at the four types of humour, how they impact resilience, and some tips for using humour to build resilience in everyday life.

What is resilience and why is it important?

Resilience, or resiliency, is a person’s ability to utilise their inner resources to cope with and overcome stresses and trauma. Here’s a formal definition by Gill Windle from the Institute of Medical Social Care Research, Bangor University, UK:

The process of effectively negotiating, adapting to, or managing significant sources of stress or trauma. Assets and resources within the individual, their life and environment facilitate this capacity for adaptation and “bouncing back” in the face of adversity.

In other words, resilience is a mental coping mechanism that helps us manage external stresses, so we don’t become overwhelmed. It’s an important personal quality as it enables us to withstand the pressure from stressors or traumatic events, especially when solutions may not be immediately available. Resilience is crucial for success in various aspects of personal and professional life, including recovering from setbacks in an intimate relationship or performing crisis management at work.

What are the four humour styles?

There are four styles of humour that are found in cultures across European, North American, Eastern, and Middle Eastern cultures, according to several studies. They have different impacts on our wellbeing and our ability to foster positive relationships,with those having positive impacts considered ‘adaptive’ and those having negative impacts ‘non-adaptive’.

Notably, the Humour Styles Questionnaire developed by Rod Martin et al. assesses these four styles, and is frequently used for assessing humour styles in both adults and teenagers:

• Affiliative: Individuals who score high on affiliative humour tend to tell jokes or share witty banter with others to facilitate social relationships. This is an adaptive humour style, which facilitates a person’s adaptation to the stresses from his environment.
• Self-enhancing: People who have a high score in self-enhancing humour are more able to see the absurdities of life as amusement and to maintain a humorous perspective even in the face of adversity. This is also an adaptive style that helps a person retain or even enhance their positive outlook on life.
• Self-defeating: This humour style involves excessively disparaging oneself, or ‘laughing at oneself’ to amuse others. Contrary to earlier research that suggests negative impact of this humour style on psychological health, a more recent study by researchers from the Mind, Brain and Behaviour Research Centre of the University of Granada has demonstrated higher levels of psychological wellbeing, such as happiness, and, to a lesser extent, sociability.
• Aggressive: This is the type of humour that disparages others, such as sarcasm, teasing, and ridicule. Examples include jokes that alienate certain groups of people, such as sexist or racist jokes. It’s sometimes even used to imply threat to other people. This humour type is typically non-adaptive, as it’s associated with anger, hostility, and aggression.

How does humour enhance resilience?

As one of the top positive character strengths in positive psychology that contribute most to life satisfaction, humour can enhance resilience in the following ways, according to psychologist Nicholas Kuiper:

1. Creates mental distance between stressors and positive emotions
   Humour helps separate our positive emotions from the negative emotions created by stressors and trauma by creating mental distance between the two. This was confirmed in an experiment that studies conjugal bereavement in 34 older widows, which found that increased use of humour during the period following bereavement enhanced the widows’ emotional resilience. Those who used more coping humour experienced fewer depressive symptoms.
2. Helps reappraise a stressor as a positive challenge
   Humour can help us reappraise and transform a stressor or traumatic event into a positive challenge, which motivates us to act and overcome the challenge. For example, a study has found that people with high levels of humour demonstrate less stress and anxiety than those with low levels, even though the two groups reportedly experienced the same number and type of everyday problems. This is because the high-humour group was able to reappraise a stressful situation as a positive challenge instead.

Tips for using humour to build resilience in everyday life

You don’t have to be a standup comedian to use humour in your everyday life to build resilience. It’s something that you can learn and practise for the benefit of your mental health and wellbeing. Here are some tips you can try out:

1. Create ambiguity with puns
   Many jokes are funny because of their use of puns. A pun creates ambiguity by exploring the different possible meanings of a word or phrase, or the meanings of different words with similar sounds. For example, during my brief chat with a former colleague about our families in the office pantry some years ago, the colleague learned that I had no siblings. She said, ‘It’s interesting that your parents didn’t want more children.’ I replied, ‘Maybe they had enough.’
2. Introduce surprises using opposites
   Another factor that makes us laugh at jokes is their element of surprise. You can create surprise by replacing the standard meaning of a word or phrase with an opposite meaning. I once worked with a colleague who often began her questions in a meeting with the phrase ‘I’m sorry if I may be asking a silly question here…’ She said it again during a meeting with an external consultant, who responded, ‘Oh, I’m not sure if I’d know how to answer that.’ This was a witty twist of the phrase ‘silly question’ to give it the opposite meaning of an intelligent question.
3. Practise visualising positive alternatives to absurdity and adversity
   You can learn to use more humour by practising visualising positive alternatives to an absurd situation or adverse event. This is especially helpful for cultivating self-enhancing humour, which enables us to amuse ourselves with the absurdities and adversities of life. For example, some years ago I was chatting with some former colleagues about the age limit for the shingles (Herpes Zoster) vaccine in Hong Kong—an infectious skin disease with painful blisters and rashes—so that people aged below 50 aren’t allowed to receive the vaccine even if they’d been diagnosed with it before. One of them responded, ‘Well, finally something to look forward to in ageing!’
4. Learn from humorists or highly humorous people
   You can pick up different ways of using humour by learning from humorists or people with high levels of humour. In this age of the Internet, it’s easy to access a large number of funny talk shows, jokes, or memes on websites and social media platforms. Read or listen to the jokes of people who are or were famous for their humour. A classic example is former US Republican President Ronald Reagan’s question to his surgeons in the operating room after he had been seriously wounded by a gun shot, ‘Please tell me you are Republicans.’

Key takeaways

1. Humour is an important personal quality and coping mechanism that helps enhance our mental resilience. It achieves this by creating mental distance between stressors and our positive emotions, and helping us reappraise an adverse event as a positive challenge.
2. There are four humour styles across different cultures: affiliative, self-enhancing, self-defeating, and aggressive. The affiliative and self-enhancing humour styles are ‘adaptive’ and are conducive to resilience and wellbeing, while more recent research has also shown the benefit of self-defeating humour for psychological health. The aggressive humour style is ‘non-adaptive’, and is linked to negative mental health traits such as anger, hostility, and aggression.
3. You can learn to use humour to build resilience in everyday life by creating ambiguity with puns, introducing surprises with the use of opposites, practising visualising positive alternatives, and learning from humorists or people with a high level of humour.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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