I learned to be funny before I learned it was a survival skill.
Growing up in a tense, unpredictable household, I figured out early that a well-timed joke could shift the energy in a room. If I became the funny one — the class clown, the kid who made everyone laugh before things got bad — I could redirect what was coming. I absorbed a lot of what my siblings didn't have to, and humor was one of the tools I used to do it.
I didn't have language for this at the time. I just knew it worked. It wasn't until my adult years, deep into therapy and healing, that I learned there was actual science behind what I'd been doing instinctively since childhood.
What the Research Actually Says
Humor isn't just a personality trait. It's a physiologically measurable stress response.
When we laugh, our bodies release endorphins — the same chemicals triggered by exercise and physical pleasure. Cortisol levels drop. Heart rate and blood pressure regulate. The nervous system, which in moments of stress is running a full threat-assessment, gets a signal that it's okay to stand down.
Research published in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine found that individuals who use humor as a coping strategy report lower levels of perceived stress and greater resilience in the face of adversity. A separate study from the University of Oxford found that laughter — particularly the social, shared kind — activates the brain's opioid system, the same system involved in pain relief.
Put simply: laughing at hard things isn't avoidance. It's regulation. It's your nervous system using one of the tools available to it.
The Difference Between Humor and Avoidance
This is where it gets nuanced — and where I think humor gets an unfair reputation in wellness spaces.
There is a difference between using humor to process something and using humor to never feel it at all. The first is healthy. The second is a defense mechanism that eventually stops working.
What distinguishes them is whether the laughter coexists with the feeling, or replaces it.
In my experience — and in what I see in the community I've built around my mental health brand — the people who use humor most effectively are also the ones doing the deepest work. They're in therapy. They're journaling. They're having the hard conversations. The humor isn't instead of the healing. It's alongside it.
When someone wears a shirt that says I Unpack Trauma Like It's Amazon Prime — they're not minimizing what they've been through. They're saying: I've been through enough that I can laugh at it now. And that's its own kind of progress.
Three Practical Takeaways
1. Let yourself laugh at the hard stuff — with intention. The goal isn't to make everything a joke. It's to notice when humor naturally surfaces around something painful, and to let it, rather than shutting it down because it feels inappropriate. That laugh is information. It often means you've created enough distance from something to start looking at it differently.
2. Seek out communities where dark humor is safe. One of the most healing things about the mental health community online is the shared language of trauma humor. Finding people who laugh at the same things you do — not because they're dismissing the pain, but because they've survived enough of it to find it absurd — is genuinely therapeutic. You feel less alone. Less broken. More human.
3. Notice when the humor stops feeling funny. This is the check-in. If the joke starts to feel hollow — if you're using it to deflect rather than to connect — that's a signal worth paying attention to. Humor works best as a bridge to feeling, not a wall against it.
Why I Built a Brand Around This
I am genuinely one of the funniest people I know. And I say that knowing it's directly correlated with how much I've survived.
When I launched Self-Care Shirts after losing my federal career on April Fools' Day 2025, I drew what I needed to hear. Some of those designs were tender and affirming. Some were darkly, specifically funny — because sometimes that's the most honest thing you can put on a shirt.
The response told me I wasn't alone in this. The people who connect most with the humor-forward designs are almost always the ones who've been through the most. And they're also, almost always, the ones actively doing the work of healing.
Laughter didn't save me. But it kept me company while I was saving myself. And I think that counts for something.