How does your nervous system experience humour?
Is it tense and wound up or is it relaxed and free?
These can be helpful unexpected tools to manage anxiety as we notice how we experience laughter.
I understand (as someone who has lived with anxiety for their whole life) that simply ‘having a laugh’ when stuck in spirals of anxiety and maybe panic is not easy.
However could we be missing an important ingredient that can help readapt the nervous system and therefore reduce anxiety.
How can this help?
Many of my clients are neurodivergent and often come to me about managing their anxiety. Humour is often experienced in a different way for those of us wired differently. It can be an internal laughter, an internal smile but then there is the belly laughter that comes out of nowhere but is freeing.
When we laugh our nervous system is relaxed. We cannot be panicking and belly laughing at the same time.
How can we use this knowledge?
The science
Anxiety is a survival response and our nervous system adapts to being stuck more in that state over periods of time. What helps is building more flexibility into the nervous system, what better way than having more humour and laughter in our week.
I hear you, what is funny about being anxious? Nothing! However to manage anxiety we have to work on it. Bring in more experiences that provide different states. Laughter is definitely a different state and one that we can create.
We may all find different things funny. We all have a playful side that maybe hidden.
What if one of the tools for anxiety is laughter, what could that look like for you?
It would be fun to find out!
