It was a cold, wet January evening in Victoria — the kind where you arrive home grateful for four walls and a warm fire. Our wood stove had been going all day, and the living room was warm and cozy in that particular way that makes you want to do nothing at all.
As I came through the door, I noticed a black and grey lump on the shaggy sheepskin rug in front of the fireplace. I assumed it was one of our two tabby cats – sisters named Who and Two – but it looked less like a cat and more like a small, melted puddle. I tiptoed closer to investigate.
Now, Who and Two are nearly identical in appearance. The easiest way to tell them apart is by personality: Who is sociable and affectionate; Two is skittish, cautious, and generally suspicious of the world. So when I leaned down and saw a cat lying flat on her back, legs hovering in the air, belly fully exposed, eyes wide as dinner plates and staring off into what appeared to be another dimension entirely – I naturally assumed it was Who.
Then I looked more carefully. It was Two.
Two. The anxious one.
Something about that — maybe the sheer absurdity of it, maybe the exhaustion of too many sleepless nights – cracked me wide open. I laughed. Really laughed. Not politely, not briefly, but the kind of deep, helpless laughter that takes over your whole body. And for those few minutes, something remarkable happened: the anxiety that had been sitting on my chest for weeks was just… gone.
Laughter and Anxiety Cannot Occupy the Same Space
I’ve thought about that moment many times since. Not because a stoned cat is a particularly profound anxiety cure – though I’m open to further research — but because of what it revealed about the relationship between laughter and the nervous system. When you laugh genuinely, your body undergoes a cascade of physiological changes. Muscle tension releases. Cortisol — the primary stress hormone — drops. Endorphins flood the system. Breathing deepens and slows. Your nervous system receives a clear, unmistakable signal: you are safe.
In other words, laughter activates many of the same pathways as the mindfulness and breathing practices I’ve spent decades teaching. It’s just considerably less likely to be recommended at the end of a yoga class.
What’s particularly striking is how quickly and completely laughter can interrupt the anxiety cycle. Chronic anxiety survives partly through momentum. One anxious thought triggers another, the body tightens in response – which the mind interprets as further danger – and the loop continues. Genuine laughter breaks that loop not by reasoning with it, but by shifting the entire physiological state from which it operates.
Research has confirmed what most of us know intuitively: laughter measurably reduces stress hormones, improves immune function, and increases pain tolerance. One study found that even anticipating something funny – simply knowing that a joke was coming – was enough to lower cortisol and adrenaline levels. We don’t even have to laugh yet! The expectation of joy begins the healing.
The Problem with Anxious Seriousness
One of the more insidious features of chronic anxiety is the way it insists on its own importance. Anxiety is not a casual presence. It is earnest, urgent, and utterly convinced that everything it points to – every worry, every worst-case scenario, every imagined catastrophe – deserves your full and undivided attention.
Living with chronic anxiety means living in a kind of permanent high-stakes drama, where your nervous system treats the minor turbulence of daily life as though it were a genuine emergency. The result is exhaustion, constriction, and a gradually shrinking world. Humor, by its nature, refuses to take things quite that seriously. And this is not a trivial quality – it is, in fact, a profound one.
When we meet our anxious thoughts with absolute gravity — this is real, this is dangerous, this matters enormously – we amplify them. We hand them authority they may not have earned. But when we can hold those same thoughts with even a small degree of lightness – there goes my brain catastrophizing again, how predictable! – something shifts. We create a little distance. And distance, in the context of anxiety, is everything.
The Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh spoke often about the practice of smiling at your fear. Not mocking it. Not dismissing it. But meeting it with a kind of warmth and lightness that prevents it from becoming the whole story. This is not toxic positivity. It is a sophisticated and compassionate act – the recognition that you are larger than your anxiety, that you can hold it without being consumed by it.
The Difference Between Humor That Heals and Humor That Hides
I want to be careful here, because there is an important and often overlooked distinction.
Many people who live with chronic anxiety are genuinely funny. The ability to find humor in difficult situations, to see the absurdity of life clearly, to make others laugh – these are real gifts. But for some of us, that humor has also become a kind of armor. A way of deflecting, of keeping people at a safe emotional distance, of signaling “I’m fine” when we are very much not fine. I know I’ve used it that way.
This kind of humor doesn’t heal. It’s a sophisticated form of avoidance – and avoidance, as we know, is one of the primary mechanisms that keeps chronic anxiety in place. When we use laughter to bypass difficult emotions rather than process them, we are doing the same thing as overworking, over-exercising, or scrolling endlessly through our phones: staying at the surface, keeping the depths safely out of reach.
The laughter that heals is qualitatively different. It’s the laughter that comes after you’ve felt something – not instead of feeling it. It’s the ability to look back at a hard experience and find something genuinely absurd in it. It’s not taking your own narrative quite so seriously. It’s the kind of lightness that’s only possible when you’ve already done the harder work of actually being present with your experience.
The distinction, simply put, is this: healing humor arrives with openness. Avoidant humor arrives with closure.
What This Might Look Like in Practice
Cultivating healing humor isn’t about forcing laughter or performing cheerfulness when you feel none. It’s subtler than that – more like developing a gentle, affectionate relationship with the ridiculous aspects of being human.
It might look like noticing when your anxious mind has constructed an especially elaborate catastrophe and allowing yourself a small, internal smile at its creativity. It might look like finding a friend or show that genuinely makes you laugh – not as a distraction, but as a deliberate act of physiological care. It might look like being able to tell stories about your own difficult experiences with a lightness that neither minimizes them nor is crushed by them.
It also means being honest when humor is being used as armor. When you notice yourself making a joke to deflect rather than connect, that’s worth pausing to acknowledge. Not with judgment – but with the kind of curious, compassionate attention that is the foundation of all good healing.
A Different Kind of Medicine
For years, I approached my anxiety as a serious problem requiring serious solutions. More meditation. Better breathing techniques. More rigorous self-examination. And while all of those things mattered – they still matter – I was missing something.
I was missing the profound, physiological, nervous-system-resetting power of simply laughing. Of finding something genuinely, helplessly funny. Of being reminded, in the most visceral way possible, that life contains not just difficulty but absurdity – and that there is something deeply healing in allowing yourself to be delighted by both.
Two is still, by most measures, an anxious cat. But that evening in front of the fire, she had managed to completely let go. Flat on her back, legs in the air, utterly surrendering to the warmth and the moment, looking for all the world like she had never heard of worry.
I’m still learning, still taking notes.
David Procyshyn is a writer, speaker, yoga and meditation teacher, and founder of DoYogaWithMe, who blends ancient practices with modern science to help people heal from chronic anxiety.
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