By K J Foxhall 
Recommended reading: Ha! The Science of When We Laugh and Why by Scott Weems
We have all heard the adage that laughter is the best medicine. It sounds like a pleasant platitude, the kind of advice you find on a greeting card, but beneath the cliché lies a profound neurobiological truth. When you are steeped in sadness or anxiety, laughter doesn’t just offer a momentary distraction; it executes a complex, chemical override of your brain’s stress circuitry.
The hard bit comes when you are at a low point and you want to laugh, but can’t.
To understand how a simple laugh can pull us out of the dark, we have to look deep inside the temporal lobe at a tiny, almond-shaped structure called the amygdala.
The Brain on high alert
The amygdala is like your brain’s emotional sentinel. Its primary job is to scan your environment for threats and process emotional responses, particularly fear, stress, and sadness.
When you are having a terrible day, maybe you are dealing with grief, a stressful project, or a string of bad news, your amygdala is running the show. It becomes hyperactive, sounding the alarm and signaling your hypothalamus to release stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.
Your heart rate might increase, your focus narrows to the negative, and your body physically prepares to endure a threat. In this state, the brain is quite literally wired for misery.
The cognitive pivot
Then, something unexpected happens. A dog trips over its own paws, a friend makes a perfectly timed sarcastic comment, or you remember an absurd memory.
Before you smile, your prefrontal cortex, the logical, executive part of your brain goes to work. Humour is largely based on incongruity; it is the brain recognising a pattern, seeing that pattern broken in a surprising way, and resolving the absurdity. When your prefrontal cortex ‘gets the joke,’ it acts as the spark.
The chemical override
Once the joke is processed, your brain initiates a massive shift in power. The prefrontal cortex signals your mesolimbic system, which is the brain’s primary reward pathway.
Suddenly, your brain is flooded with an arraignment of feel-good neurotransmitters:
- Dopamine1: We have all heard of this one before. It creates a surge of pleasure and reward.
- Endorphins: The body’s natural painkillers, which promote a sense of mild euphoria.
- Oxytocin: Often released if you are laughing with someone else, fostering social bonding and trust.
The amygdala stands down
So, what happens to the hyperactive, stressed-out amygdala while this is all going on?
It gets physically dialed down. The influx of dopamine and endorphins from the reward system, combined with signals from the prefrontal cortex, acts as a neurological ’all clear’ siren. They send inhibitory signals directly to the amygdala, effectively telling the sentinel to stand down.
As the amygdala’s activity drops:
- Stress hormones halt: The flow of cortisol and adrenaline is cut off.
- Muscles relax: The physical tension in your jaw, shoulders, and chest dissipates.
- Perspective widens: With the amygdala no longer forcing you into ‘survival mode,’ your prefrontal cortex regains control, allowing you to see your problems from a broader, more rational perspective.
This sequence of events takes less than a second. In the span of a single belly laugh, your brain shifts from a defensive, heavily guarded posture into a state of safety, reward, and connection. This is why laughing when you are unhappy feels so incredibly relieving.
It is not a denial of your sadness. It is a kind of biological reset button. The amygdala is forced to drop its defenses, proving that while we can’t always control the circumstances that make us unhappy, we do carry the antidote to the resulting stress inside our own heads. But sometimes it is hard to find.
Can you train your brain to find humour?
You absolutely. Even when your amygdala is trying to drag you into a stress response. The brain is plastic; the neural pathways you use most frequently become the strongest. If your default response to a setback is panic or frustration, that pathway is paved like a superhighway.
Training your brain for humour means intentionally blazing a new trail until it becomes the path of least resistance.
In cognitive behavioral psychology, this is known as cognitive reframing. This is a cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) method, which takes a situation that triggers a negative emotion and deliberately shifts our perspective to change how we feel about it. When applied to humour, it is called a comedic reframe.
Below is an example of how you can systematically train this pathway:
The ‘What’s absurd?’ drill
When you are stressed, your brain gets tunnel vision from the negative impact. To break this, force your prefrontal cortex to look for the incongruity, or the core ingredient of humour.
The action: The next time a minor inconvenience happens (you spill coffee on your shirt, you miss a train, your computer crashes during a presentation), stop and ask yourself: ‘What is ridiculous about this?’
The Mechanism: This forces your brain to step outside the immediate emotional threat and engage executive functioning. You aren’t laughing at the stressor; you are highlighting the absurdity of the timing, your own reaction, or the sheer bad luck of the universe.
The difficult part here, is the timing. If you cannot engage this timing, then you will not be able to accomplish the action.
Exaggerate to the point of parody
Anxiety thrives on catastrophic imagining the worst possible outcome. You can hijack this natural tendency by pushing it so far past reality that it becomes a cartoon.
The Action: If you are stressed about an upcoming meeting, instead of worrying, ‘what if I mess up?’ Imagine the absolute most spectacular, theatrical failure possible. Picture yourself tripping, accidentally pulling the fire alarm, and an actual circus elephant walking into the boardroom.
The Mechanism: By taking your fear to a ridiculous extreme, you strip it of its power. Your amygdala cannot sustain a legitimate threat response to an elephant (or in my case, a hippo) in a boardroom. The tension breaks, and the reward pathway engages.
Consume ‘targeted’ humour
You cannot output what you do not input. If you want your brain to default to humor, you need to immerse it in comedic structures.
The Action: Actively build a library of things that genuinely make you laugh, for example specific comedians, podcasts, or shows. Crucially, turn to this library before the stress peaks. If you know you have a stressful week coming up, front-load your commute with a comedy podcast instead of the news.
The Mechanism: This primes your mesolimbic system. By keeping dopamine and endorphin levels elevated baseline, you raise your threshold for stress. It takes a much stronger negative stimulus to trigger the amygdala when your brain is already saturated with reward chemicals.
This interactive tool walks you through the mechanics of a cognitive reframe. You can practice taking a stressful thought and running it through the process to find the ‘comedic pivot’.2
The trick is to start small. Do not try to find the humor in a major life crisis immediately. Start by reframing the minor annoyances, the traffic jams and the burned toast. As you strengthen this neural pathway on low-stakes stressors, your brain will automatically start reaching for that comedic pivot when the stakes are higher.
It is always good to note that mindset changing is different for everyone, so please do not stress if you cannot find what works for you quickly. It takes time to change the habits whether they are new or from a lifetime.
- The dopamine released in the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA) travels to the Nucleus Accumbens to process the feeling of pleasure. This is the exact circuit that humor hijacks to make you feel good. ↩︎
- The goal isn’t to be a stand-up comedian or to ignore genuine problems. The goal is cognitive flexibility proving to your brain that you have the power to view a situation from more than one angle. ↩︎
Editor