Humor is a powerful strategy to lower your stress level, dissolve anger and give you new ways to view situations and thus new ways to respond. Often mood is elevated just in the process of striving to find humor in difficult and frustrating situations. Laughing at ourselves and the situation helps reveal that small things are not the earth-shaking events they sometimes seem to be. Looking at a problem from a different persepctive can make it seem less formidable and thus more solvable.
Humor shifts the ways in which we think and thus opens opportunities to be more “response-able” in dealing with whatever is triggering our anger, without being overwhelmed by it. As Henry Ward Beecher observed: “A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It is jolted by every pebble on the road.”
Are you humor challenged? Here are some tips that will help:
1. Nurture your sense of humor and feed it with funny movies, books and songs.
2. Sart collecting amusing (but tasteful) jokes that youc an use to help brighten the moment.
3. Take anger situations and flip them to see the funny side. Give these issues a spin and learn to laugh at them. Example: a man was reading the paper at the dinner table paying no attention to his frustrated wife who finallyu said: “Honey, would you mind stomping your foot once for “yes” and twice for “no”? This immediately broke the ice as they both started laughing and then communicating.
