Here is the full transcript of author Paul Osincup’s talk titled “Why You Should Take Yourself Less Seriously” at TEDxMontanaStateUniversity 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Power of Humor
I was going to do a talk on the power of optimism and positivity, and then I thought, “What good will that do?” But what if I told you there is one habit that anyone can develop that actually can make you more optimistic and more positive, and reduce your stress and enhance your resilience? It’s called a humor habit. And I’m going to show you how you can rewire your brain to develop your sense of humor into a powerful and strategic mindfulness tool.
I mean, after all, they say, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” right? Have you ever had lemonade made from just lemons? That makes things better. There’s a cold glass of citric acid.
No, to make lemonade, you need a sweetener as well. And humor is life’s sweetener. Developing a humor habit, specifically using humor to cope with life’s struggles, actually can lead to a decrease in stress. It can lessen the impact of even traumatic events.
It can increase overall life satisfaction, even job satisfaction, and lead to a greater sense of resilience and psychological well-being. But it’s not always easy at first. I speak and study on the topic of applied humor, and I get caught up in taking my work and myself and my life too seriously.
The Business Card Blunder
I remember early on in my career, I had this great opportunity to speak at this conference, and there was going to be all these big wigs of corporate industry there, so I was dialed in with my business cards in my pocket, and I was like, “I am going to network like nobody’s networked before.” Anyone who remotely made eye contact with me, they were getting a business card from my pocket. I was like, “Hey, my name’s Paul. I’d love to do business with you. Hey, my name’s Paul.”
“Give me a call sometime.” And I remember I was speaking with this one executive, and as he started walking away, I go, “Hey, wait.” And I reach in my pocket, and I go, “Give me a call sometime,” and I hand him my hotel room key. And he was like, “Oh, that escalated quickly,” and I was like, “Oh, God, no, no.”
And my face got red. My neck got red. I was so embarrassed. And I was beating myself up over it, and it was no big deal.
He was a nice guy, and he kept our room clean, but it was clearly a funny moment, but my brain was telling me a different story. My brain was making it out like I was the lead actor in some drama, and I had just ruined my big shot, and I had ruined everything. I think sometimes I suffer from a condition where my brain doesn’t produce enough of that humor sweetener so that I can see the humor in real time in life.
Chronic Seriousness
And the more I’ve done this work, the more I’ve realized that there are millions of other people who suffer from the same condition. It’s a condition that I call chronic seriousness, and there’s a massive subsection of people across the globe suffering from chronic seriousness, and those people are called adults.
So if you or someone you know is an adult or may become an adult, then chronic seriousness could be impacting your life as well, but you’re not alone, because in Gallup’s survey of over 1.4 million people across 166 countries, they found that our propensity to laugh just nosedives about the time we hit age 23, and we don’t start getting those laughs back again until we’re nearly 80. It’s over 50 years of chronic seriousness, over a 50-year drought of humor and laughter.
We’re literally limiting our own access to a resilience tool that’s built into the human psyche. It’s like for some reason, sometime between our adolescence and our first new employee orientation, we lose the ability to find humor in something. As we start transitioning from soccer practices to best practices and playground slides to PowerPoint slides and teddy bears to TED Talks, all of a sudden it’s like, “We have jobs now. Everything has to feel crucially serious,” and we start sucking down quad shot lattes and wheatgrass smoothies, and even the way we talk about work gets super serious, and we’re like, “Hey, I’ve got to jump on a call because I’ve got a hard stop. So shoot me an email.”
“We’ll tackle that, drill down, hammer out the details. We’ve got a lot of balls in the air and irons in the fire, so we’ll cast a wide net, run up the flagpole, take a deep dive, see if we can move the needle. So keep grinding, hustling, crushing it and killing it, and we’ll all circle back while we zoom.” It’s exhausting.
It’s exhausting. And suddenly our life starts to feel much more like an intense drama than a comedy. But we can combat chronic seriousness with humor.
The Benefits of Humor
I mean, there’s plenty of research out there about how good humor is for us, and we’ve all heard the advice of, “You just need to take things less serious, be able to laugh things off.” But the problem is, no one ever tells us how to do that. How do I develop my sense of humor? When am I supposed to laugh things off?
When I’ve locked the keys to my rental car in the trunk before returning it to the airport? Life, I’m silly. No, I’m freaking out. Right?
But there are numerous humor interventions that you can learn to rewire your brain to see the humor and absurdity and joy in life more often. So, for example, this week, seven days straight, write down three things each day that you found funny or amusing.
Researchers at the University of Zurich found that people who did this just for a week increased their overall happiness and decreased depressive symptoms for up to six months. And it doesn’t have to be something that made you laugh out loud.
Maybe it just made you think, “Oh, that’s pretty funny.” And what’s more is doing something like that actually starts training your brain to look for the funny moments throughout your day. Eventually, what will happen is you’ll be doing this exercise and something will occur during your day that normally would agitate you, get you upset, annoy you, and you’ll think to yourself, “I’ll be writing this down later.” And that’s when you know your brain has made the connection that like, “Hey, hold on. Even though you’re not laughing yet, there might be humor in this situation,” taking that potential freak out from a nine to a seven.
Another humor intervention is called humorous reappraisal. We know that cognitive reappraisal, reframing negative, stressful, even traumatic situations more positively is a great resilience tool. But humorous reappraisal, reframing these same situations using humor can actually lead to an even greater increase in positive emotions and an even greater decrease in negative emotions. So you can try humorous reappraisal using a game called the “What I Could Have Said” game.
A lot of times stressful things happen and we don’t really, humor doesn’t come to us in the moment. And later, we kind of think what we could have done or said. That’s a great tool.
So start with everyday stressors, anything that could happen. You’re in an important meeting at work with the leadership team where you work and you go to make a brilliant point, but you spill your coffee all over the table. And now you’re just embarrassed. You’re apologizing profusely.
“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” You didn’t even get to make the great point you were going to make. And later on, you’re thinking, “Man, I don’t know why I got so flustered. I wish I could have handled that with some levity or some humor.”
Well, go with it. What would you have said? What would you have done?
Maybe you spill your coffee and you go, “It’s okay. It’s just half and half, half on the table, half in my lap.” It doesn’t even matter if what you come up with makes you crack up right away. Because you’re just training your brain to associate those negative experiences, those stressful experiences with humor.
And what will happen is you’ll think to play the “What I Could Have Said” game a couple days later. And then you’ll think to play it a day later. And then a few hours later until eventually your brain is making those humor connections closer to real time than retrospect. So there are a lot of humor interventions that people can do.
Layering Humor with Comedy Techniques
And it can be really difficult to do them and mine your struggles for nuggets of humor at first. But you can take these humor interventions and you can layer them with some of the timeless techniques of comedy. So for example, heightening or exaggeration. You just take your stressful situation and you just heighten it to a ridiculous extreme until it becomes silly or funny to you.
Let’s say your car breaks down and you’re starting to get stressed out. You send a text home like, “Car broke down, I’ve been waiting for a tow for two hours. I’ll be home as soon as I can.” And stress level’s rising, you’re starting to freak out.
Heighten it, exaggerate it, make it ridiculous. Send another text. “I’ll be home as soon as I can. Tell the kids I love them. Wish them luck in college.”
“Text me photos when they produce grandchildren.” This absurd exaggeration provides immediate perspective on the relative importance of that moment in time. In a workshop we were having on humorous reappraisal, there was a woman who was recalling a situation at work where everyone was going to go out to a team lunch and an email went out with a new location for the team lunch and went out to everyone but her. She ended up eating lunch by herself at a restaurant across town with the rest of her colleagues, had a fun lunch together.
And she remembered that she was wanting to think it was no big deal because everyone was really apologetic and they were very nice about it and she knew it wasn’t on purpose. But her brain made it into a drama. Her brain wouldn’t let it go until her hold on to that grievance. She went back to the office and gave her colleagues the silent treatment.
She said she wished she could have just laughed it off, handled it with some levity, maybe even made a joke when she came back to the office. So her humor reframe, her “What I Could Have Said” game she came up with was coming back to the office and saying, “It was great, that’s the first hour I’ve had to myself in 20 years.” Or “Made splitting the check a lot easier.” There are tons of mindfulness strategies that help us reduce stress or enhance well-being like breath work, yoga, meditation, but for some people those just aren’t enough or aren’t the right fit or require too many essential oils.
Humor is a Habit
It’s been almost 10 years now since I accidentally gave that hotel room key to that executive and believe it or not, me and that guy never spoke again. I wish I could have wrapped this up in a happy little bow for you, but it’s not a Hallmark movie. It’s life and sometimes we just screw things up and it’s fine, even funny, but our brains try to tell us a different story and make it out to be some big dramatic moment, some big dramatic fail or misstep in our lives when really it’s just a funny footnote.
Just like learning a musical instrument or a foreign language, your sense of humor can be developed. Like any new skill, humor is not a talent. Humor is a habit. By developing a humor habit, you can train your brain to see the absurdity and fun in life more often and learn to experience humor not just by chance, but by choice.
Don’t choose to live your life as an actor in a drama just to reach the end to find out you were the director and it could have been a comedy. Thank you.