Your heart pounds. Your palms sweat. Your mind races through catastrophic scenarios. You’re about to give a presentation, or meet someone new, or face a difficult conversation—and your body has decided this is a life-or-death situation. Welcome to the stress response, that ancient survival mechanism that served our ancestors well when facing saber-toothed tigers but now activates just as intensely when we’re facing a crowded elevator or an unanswered text message.

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health condition worldwide, affecting approximately 301 million people globally. The fear of public speaking—glossophobia—is so prevalent that studies suggest it affects 40 percent of the population, making it more common than the fear of death itself. And in our modern world of constant connectivity, comparison culture, and cascading uncertainties, the number of people experiencing significant anxiety continues to rise.

But here’s an intriguing possibility: what if one of our most powerful tools for managing anxiety has been hiding in plain sight all along? What if the very experience of finding something funny—that moment of unexpected delight, that involuntary release of laughter—could help short-circuit the anxiety response before it spirals out of control?

This chapter explores the growing body of research showing that humor isn’t just a pleasant distraction from our worries. It’s a legitimate intervention that works on multiple levels—neurological, physiological, psychological, and social—to reduce anxiety and build resilience against future stress. Understanding how humor achieves these effects can transform it from an occasional happy accident into a deliberate practice for mental health.

The Biology of the Stress Response

To understand how humor interrupts anxiety, we first need to understand what anxiety does to the body. The stress response is orchestrated by two primary systems: the sympathetic-adrenal-medullary (SAM) system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.

When you perceive a threat—real or imagined—your amygdala, the brain’s alarm center, springs into action. Brain imaging studies have shown that the amygdala responds to fearful stimuli within 88 milliseconds, before conscious awareness even registers the threat. This rapid response served our ancestors well; you don’t want to consciously deliberate when a predator is lunging at you.

The amygdala then triggers a cascade of responses. Your hypothalamus signals the adrenal glands to release adrenaline (epinephrine) and cortisol, the primary stress hormones. Your heart rate increases. Blood pressure rises. Breathing becomes rapid and shallow. Blood flows away from digestive organs and toward your muscles—preparing you to fight or flee. Your pupils dilate. Your palms sweat. Your mind narrows its focus to the perceived threat, ignoring everything else.

This is the fight-or-flight response, and it’s extraordinarily effective for actual emergencies. The problem is that modern life creates countless situations that trigger this response without providing the physical outlet it was designed for. You can’t fight a work deadline or flee from a traffic jam. The stress hormones flood your system with nowhere to go.

Chronic stress—when the stress response is activated repeatedly or never fully turns off—takes a devastating toll. Sustained high cortisol levels have been linked to anxiety disorders, depression, weight gain, cardiovascular disease, and impaired immune function. As the body enters what researcher Hans Selye termed the “exhaustion stage,” symptoms include burnout, fatigue, reduced stress tolerance, and compromised health across multiple systems.

This is where humor enters the picture—not as a band-aid, but as a genuine intervention that can interrupt and reverse the stress response at multiple points along this cascade.

How Humor Interrupts the Stress Response

Cortisol Reduction: The Hormonal Evidence

The most direct evidence for humor’s anti-anxiety effects comes from studies measuring stress hormones. A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis published in PLOS ONE examined interventional studies evaluating the impact of spontaneous laughter on cortisol levels. Pooling data from eight studies with 315 participants, the researchers found that humorous interventions reduced cortisol levels by an average of 31.9 percent compared to control conditions.

Remarkably, the meta-analysis found that the duration of laughter didn’t significantly impact the reduction in cortisol—brief exposure to humor was nearly as effective as longer sessions. This suggests that even a quick laugh can meaningfully lower stress hormone levels.

A particularly elegant study published in Scientific Reports in 2021 examined whether a short humorous intervention could protect against subsequent stress. Participants watched either a humorous or neutral movie, then underwent a stress-inducing task. Those in the humor group showed significantly lower psychological stress levels and lower salivary cortisol levels after the stressor, compared to the control group. Crucially, the protective effects of humor didn’t impair cognitive performance—the humor group performed just as well on attention tasks as the control group.

The researchers concluded: “A short humorous intervention shields against subsequent psychological stress leaving cognitive performance intact, thus making it highly applicable to improve mental and physical health in everyday life situations.”

Beyond cortisol, laughter has been shown to suppress other stress-related biomarkers, including epinephrine and 3,4-dihydrophenylacetic acid (a major dopamine catabolite). At the same time, it enhances the activity of neurotransmitters associated with positive mood—dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins. This dual action—suppressing stress chemicals while boosting feel-good ones—creates a rapid shift in the body’s neurochemical state.

The Parasympathetic Activation

Your autonomic nervous system has two branches that work in opposition: the sympathetic nervous system (responsible for the fight-or-flight response) and the parasympathetic nervous system (responsible for the “rest and digest” response). Anxiety represents sympathetic dominance—the accelerator stuck down. Recovery requires activating the parasympathetic system—pressing the brake.

Laughter is a remarkably effective brake pedal. When we laugh, our breathing pattern shifts: we exhale longer than we inhale, which directly stimulates the vagus nerve, the primary pathway of the parasympathetic system. The vagus nerve accounts for approximately 75 percent of the parasympathetic nervous system and connects the brain to the heart, lungs, and digestive tract.

A study published in BioPsychoSocial Medicine examined the effects of hearing laughter on the autonomic nervous system after stress. Participants who heard laughter after completing a stressful task showed significant increases in heart rate variability measures associated with parasympathetic activity—specifically, the high-frequency component that indicates vagal tone. Their subjective stress levels also decreased significantly more than control participants.

The physical mechanics of laughter itself contribute to this effect. A hearty belly laugh engages the diaphragm and abdominal muscles—the rhythmic contractions massage internal organs and create the kind of deep breathing that naturally activates parasympathetic responses. Following intense laughter, muscle tension decreases and the body enters a more relaxed state that can persist for up to 45 minutes.

As Chelsea Long, an exercise physiologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery, explains: “Even a 5-minute comedy video that gives you a deep belly laugh—whatever makes you feel positive energy reinforces the parasympathetic nervous system.”

The Cognitive Dimension: Reframing Through Humor

While the physiological effects of humor are impressive, equally important is its impact on how we think about stressful situations. Anxiety isn’t just a physiological state—it’s a cognitive one, characterized by threat-focused attention, catastrophic thinking, and rumination. Humor intervenes at this cognitive level through a process psychologists call cognitive reappraisal.

Cognitive reappraisal involves changing the meaning of an emotion-eliciting situation to alter its emotional impact. If you’re anxious about a presentation, for example, you might reappraise the situation by thinking: “This is an opportunity to share ideas I care about” rather than “Everyone will judge me.” This shift in interpretation genuinely changes the emotional response.

Humorous reappraisal is a particularly effective form of this strategy. When we find something funny about a stressful situation, we’re implicitly reinterpreting it—seeing an absurdity, an irony, or an unexpected angle that makes the situation seem less threatening. The core of humor involves perceiving incongruity—recognizing that something doesn’t fit our expectations—and then resolving that incongruity in a surprising way.

Research by Andrea Samson and James Gross has shown that humorous reappraisal can be more effective than non-humorous reappraisal for regulating negative emotions. In one study, participants who generated humorous reinterpretations of negative images showed greater reductions in negative emotion and increases in positive emotion compared to those who generated serious reappraisals. The humor group also showed better memory for the images later—suggesting that humor doesn’t work by suppressing or avoiding difficult material, but by genuinely transforming how it’s processed.

A recent play-mirth theory of humor articulated by researchers describes humor as involving a “playful turn”—a rapid cognitive shift from something viewed as serious to something viewed as less serious or more playful. This shift is exactly what anxious minds need: a way to step back from the intense seriousness with which we’re viewing our problems and see them from a lighter perspective.

Importantly, this isn’t the same as minimizing or denying problems. As researchers note, humor that simply avoids difficult feelings can become maladaptive. Effective humorous reappraisal acknowledges the difficulty while finding something genuinely amusing within it or about it. The stressor is still real; our relationship to it has shifted.

Brain Circuitry: Prefrontal Cortex Meets Amygdala

The neurological story of humor and anxiety involves a fascinating interplay between two brain regions: the prefrontal cortex (associated with executive functions, reasoning, and cognitive control) and the amygdala (the brain’s emotional alarm system).

Neuroimaging studies have shown that emotion regulation strategies aimed at reducing negative emotions engage cognitive control regions of the prefrontal cortex, which then modulate amygdala activity. A meta-analysis of fMRI studies examining emotion regulation found that successful down-regulation of negative emotions was associated with increased connectivity between the amygdala and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.

Humor processing engages many of these same prefrontal regions. When we “get” a joke, the prefrontal cortex is involved in detecting the incongruity, holding multiple interpretations in working memory, and arriving at the surprising resolution. This engagement of higher cognitive functions may help to modulate the amygdala’s alarm signals.

Particularly intriguing is research on humor creation and the amygdala. A study published in Scientific Reports used fMRI to examine brain mechanisms during the generation of humorous ideas. The researchers found that generating funny (versus typical) ideas was associated with increased activity in the amygdala—but that this increased amygdala activity was inversely related to connectivity with prefrontal regions. In other words, when people successfully generated humor, there was a kind of “release” of the amygdala from prefrontal control.

The researchers describe this as “antagonism” between prefrontal and limbic regions during humor creation—a temporary relaxation of the usual inhibitory relationship. This may help explain why humor can feel liberating, especially for anxious minds that are often characterized by excessive prefrontal control and monitoring.

Humor Styles: Not All Laughs Are Created Equal

When it comes to anxiety reduction, the type of humor matters enormously. Rod Martin’s influential Humor Styles Questionnaire identifies four distinct ways people use humor: affiliative (using humor to enhance relationships), self-enhancing (maintaining a humorous outlook on life’s difficulties), aggressive (humor at others’ expense), and self-defeating (putting oneself down to gain acceptance).

Research consistently shows that affiliative and self-enhancing humor are associated with lower anxiety and depression, higher self-esteem, and greater psychological well-being. Martin and colleagues found that higher levels of affiliative and self-enhancing humor were linked to lower depression and anxiety, higher positive affect, and higher self-esteem. People who use these adaptive humor styles report less stress and current anxiety than those who don’t, despite experiencing similar numbers and types of everyday problems.

The mechanism appears to involve cognitive appraisal. High-humor individuals appraise less stress in their lives and use more positive reappraisals when encountering stressful events. A study by Geisler and Weber found that using humor helped individuals cope more positively with poor performance on a self-threatening task, by increasing external appraisals for failure.

Self-defeating humor, in contrast, shows the opposite pattern. While it might seem like laughing at yourself would be harmless or even humble, excessive self-defeating humor is associated with higher anxiety, lower self-esteem, and increased loneliness. This type of humor often reflects a futile attempt to gain others’ approval at the expense of positive self-regard, and may actually mask rather than address underlying anxiety.

The research carries a practical implication: cultivating adaptive humor styles—finding things genuinely funny about life’s difficulties (self-enhancing) and using humor to connect with others (affiliative)—may be more beneficial for anxiety than simply trying to laugh more. Quality matters as much as quantity.

Humor as Therapeutic Intervention

Given the evidence for humor’s anxiety-reducing effects, researchers and clinicians have begun incorporating humor more deliberately into therapeutic settings. A 2023 integrative literature review published in Brain and Behavior examined 29 studies with 2,964 participants to evaluate the impact of humor therapy on anxiety and depression. The review found that various forms of humor therapy—including medical clowns, laughter therapy, and laughter yoga—significantly relieved anxiety across diverse populations.

The evidence is particularly strong for children facing medical procedures. Eight studies in the review found that medical clowning significantly reduced anxiety in children undergoing surgery or anesthesia, with measurable decreases on standardized anxiety scales. The presence of medical clowns throughout medical procedures helped transform children’s perception of the hospital experience.

In adult populations, a separate systematic review in Frontiers in Psychiatry examined humor interventions specifically within psychotherapy for depression and anxiety. While the authors noted that empirical research remains limited, the studies that do exist show promising results. One meta-analysis found that laughter therapy reduced anxiety symptoms by 15 percent across 10 studies.

The integration of humor into cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a growing area of interest. CBT works by identifying and changing maladaptive thought patterns—exactly the kind of cognitive shift that humor naturally produces. Albert Ellis, the founder of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, argued that “human disturbance is mainly based on the exaggeration of the importance of the seriousness of things,” and recommended humor as a way of “ripping up the exaggerations by humorous counter-exaggerations.”

Humor may be particularly valuable for challenging the distorted thinking patterns common in anxiety—catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, and excessive self-focus. By finding something funny about these thought patterns, clients may gain perspective without feeling criticized or invalidated.

Mindfulness and Humor: An Emerging Synthesis

An intriguing recent development is the integration of humor into mindfulness-based programs. Researchers have developed a “humor-enriched mindfulness-based program” (HEMBP) that systematically incorporates playfulness and humor into meditation practice.

The theoretical foundation for this integration, articulated in what researchers call the “mindful humor filter model,” suggests that mindfulness and humor share key psychological mechanisms. Both involve a kind of decentering or “reperceiving”—stepping back from immediate experience to see it from a different perspective. Both reduce identification with thoughts and emotions. Both can transform our relationship to difficult experiences without requiring that those experiences disappear.

A randomized controlled trial comparing the humor-enriched program to standard mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) found that both programs produced similar increases in mindfulness that persisted for up to six months. However, the humor-enriched program was particularly effective at increasing psychological well-being, while standard MBSR was more effective at stress reduction—suggesting that the two approaches may work through partially different pathways.

Psychologist Adam Dorsay has observed: “Comedy and mindfulness have a lot in common. When you laugh, you are fully present. You aren’t thinking about anything except the joy. Same with meditation: It’s about being fully present.” This observation points to why humor might be such an effective intervention for anxiety—a condition characterized by projection into an imagined future, rumination about the past, and difficulty being present in the moment.

Laughter meditation, developed as part of laughter yoga, takes this integration further. Research from Loma Linda University found that laughing generates gamma frequencies in the brain in a similar way to meditation, helping synchronize neuronal activity. The practice involves periods of intentional laughter (even if it starts as fake laughter) followed by periods of silent meditation—combining the physiological benefits of laughter with the focused attention of traditional meditation.

Humor in Specific Anxiety Contexts

Social Anxiety and Performance Fear

Public speaking anxiety is so common that it has its own name—glossophobia—and affects an estimated 40 percent of the population. The underlying fear involves judgment and negative evaluation by others, which can trigger intense anticipatory anxiety before events and rumination afterward.

Humor can intervene at multiple points in this cycle. Before a speech or presentation, finding something genuinely amusing about the situation—the absurdity of everyone sitting in rows facing forward, perhaps, or the universal human fear of saying the wrong thing—can help break the grip of catastrophic thinking. During the event, humor builds connection with the audience and reduces the sense of judgment. After the event, humor can help reframe perceived failures.

Research on public speaking anxiety emphasizes that even elite performers experience nervousness. Winston Churchill reportedly became physically ill before major speeches in Parliament. Celebrities including Harrison Ford, Beyoncé, and Lady Gaga have spoken about managing performance anxiety. What distinguishes effective speakers isn’t the absence of anxiety, but their ability to channel it—and humor can be part of that channeling.

Importantly, experts caution against opening with jokes unless you have excellent comedic timing. “Humor is some of the toughest material to deliver effectively because it requires an exquisite sense of timing,” notes one communication textbook. “Nothing is worse than waiting for a laugh that does not come.” The goal isn’t to become a comedian, but to maintain a light internal perspective that helps regulate your own anxiety.

Worry and Rumination

Worry (future-focused repetitive thinking) and rumination (past-focused repetitive thinking) are central features of anxiety and depression. These patterns of thought maintain negative emotional states and predict the onset and course of psychological disorders.

Humor may help interrupt these patterns by redirecting attention and changing cognitive processing mode. When we’re finding something funny, we’re necessarily engaged in a different type of thinking than when we’re worrying—detecting incongruities, making unexpected connections, experiencing surprise. The cognitive demands of humor are largely incompatible with the repetitive, narrow focus of worry.

Research on depression has found that humor—including funny memes related to one’s own struggles—can improve mood in people with depressive symptoms. One study found that individuals with more acute depressive symptoms actually rated depression-related humor as more effective at improving their mood compared to humor about unrelated topics. This suggests that humor doesn’t need to distract from our problems to be helpful; it can engage directly with them.

Building a Humor Practice for Anxiety Management

The research points to several practical applications for using humor to manage anxiety:

Seek out humor before stressful situations. The study showing that a short humorous movie protected against subsequent stress suggests that “pre-loading” with humor—watching funny videos, reading amusing content, or having a laugh with friends—can buffer you against upcoming stressors. Consider building humor into your preparation for anxiety-provoking events.

Practice humorous reappraisal. When facing an anxiety-provoking situation, try asking: “What could be funny about this?” or “How would my funniest friend describe this situation?” You’re not denying that the situation is difficult, but finding an additional perspective on it. Research shows that almost everyone is capable of generating humorous reappraisals, even when experiencing negative mood or high perceptions of threat.

Cultivate adaptive humor styles. Pay attention to how you use humor. Are you finding things genuinely funny about life’s difficulties (self-enhancing), or are you putting yourself down to gain acceptance (self-defeating)? Are you using humor to connect with others (affiliative), or to mock them (aggressive)? The former styles in each pair are associated with lower anxiety; the latter with higher.

Use laughter to activate your parasympathetic system. When you notice anxiety building, deliberately seek out something that makes you laugh—a funny video, a humorous memory, a friend who makes you smile. Even just remembering to smile can begin to shift your nervous system state. The physical act of laughing naturally deepens and slows breathing, which stimulates the vagus nerve and activates the rest-and-digest response.

Consider laughter yoga or laughter meditation. The body cannot distinguish between fake and real laughter at the physiological level—both produce the same stress-reducing effects. If you struggle to find things funny when anxious, the practice of voluntary laughter can still activate beneficial pathways. Laughter yoga groups provide a structured setting for this practice, with the added benefit of social connection.

Build humor into daily life. Keep funny photos, cartoons, or videos accessible for quick mood shifts. Follow social media accounts that make you laugh. Schedule time with friends who bring out your sense of humor. Create a “humor first aid kit” you can turn to when anxiety rises. The more accessible humor is, the more easily you can deploy it when needed.

Bring lightness to mindfulness practice. If you practice meditation, experiment with approaching it with a lighter touch. When recurring thoughts arise, try greeting them with gentle amusement rather than frustration. The mindful-humorous perspective research suggests that this combination can enhance both the benefits of mindfulness and the cultivation of adaptive humor.

Cautions and Limitations

While humor shows genuine promise for anxiety management, several cautions are in order:

Humor should complement, not replace, professional treatment for clinical anxiety disorders. When anxiety significantly impairs daily functioning, evidence-based treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy and, where appropriate, medication remain the first-line interventions. Humor can be a valuable adjunct, but it’s not sufficient on its own for serious anxiety conditions.

Humor used to avoid or deny difficult emotions can become maladaptive. The research distinguishes between humor that helps us engage with difficulties from a lighter perspective and humor that shields us from engaging at all. If humor consistently serves to deflect from important issues, it may be maintaining rather than reducing anxiety in the long run.

Not all anxiety is inappropriate. Sometimes anxiety signals genuine problems that need to be addressed, not reframed. The goal isn’t to laugh away all concerns, but to develop a more flexible relationship with anxiety so it serves as useful information rather than a tyrannical master.

Humor that comes at others’ expense (aggressive humor) doesn’t show the same benefits and may actually increase social anxiety by damaging relationships. The anxiety-reducing benefits are specific to adaptive humor styles.

Finally, the research base, while growing, has limitations. Many studies are small, use different methodologies, and measure different outcomes. The integrative review of humor therapy for anxiety noted inconsistencies, particularly in anxiety outcomes. More rigorous research is needed to fully understand when, how, and for whom humor interventions work best.

Conclusion: Laughter as Liberation

Anxiety narrows our world. It focuses our attention on threats, real or imagined. It activates ancient survival systems designed for physical emergencies and deploys them against modern psychological challenges. It keeps us vigilant, tense, and often miserable.

Humor opens our world back up. It allows us to see the same situations from different angles. It activates our parasympathetic nervous system, signaling safety. It reduces cortisol and increases endorphins. It shifts our cognitive processing from narrow threat-focus to flexible pattern-recognition. It connects us to others through shared laughter.

An editorial in the American Journal of Psychology over a century ago observed that humor’s “largest function is to detach us from our world of good and evil, of loss and gain, and to enable us to see it in proper perspective. It frees us from vanity, on the one hand, and from pessimism, on the other, by keeping us larger than what we do, and greater than what can happen to us.”

This remains a remarkably accurate description of what modern research is finding: humor helps us step back from our anxieties and see them in perspective. It doesn’t eliminate challenges, but it changes our relationship to them. It doesn’t make us immune to stress, but it makes us more resilient in the face of it.

In a world where anxiety disorders are the most common mental health condition and stress is ubiquitous, the ability to find things genuinely funny isn’t frivolous—it’s adaptive. The next time you feel anxiety rising, remember that somewhere in that moment, there may be something worth laughing about. And if you can find it, you’ll have accessed one of the most ancient and effective stress-reduction strategies our species has developed.

Your nervous system will thank you.

Sources

Research Studies:

Froehlich, E., et al. (2021). A short humorous intervention protects against subsequent psychological stress and attenuates cortisol levels without affecting attention. Scientific Reports, 11, 7284.

Grossman, S.R., et al. (2023). Laughter as medicine: A systematic review and meta-analysis of interventional studies evaluating the impact of spontaneous laughter on cortisol levels. PLOS ONE, 18(5), e0286260.

Braniecka, A., et al. (2022). Differential effects of stress-related and stress-unrelated humor in remitted depression. Scientific Reports, 12, 8374.

Sun, X., et al. (2023). The impact of humor therapy on people suffering from depression or anxiety: An integrative literature review. Brain and Behavior, 13(9), e3108.

Sarink, F.S.M., & García-Montes, J.M. (2023). Humor interventions in psychotherapy and their effect on levels of depression and anxiety in adult clients: A systematic review. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13, 1049476.

Papousek, I., et al. (2019). Humor creation during efforts to find humorous cognitive reappraisals of threatening situations. Current Psychology.

Fink, A., et al. (2021). Antagonism between brain regions relevant for cognitive control and emotional memory facilitates the generation of humorous ideas. Scientific Reports, 11, 10082.

Morawetz, C., et al. (2017). Effective amygdala-prefrontal connectivity predicts individual differences in successful emotion regulation. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(4), 569-585.

Martin, R.A., et al. (2003). Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation to psychological well-being: Development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality, 37(1), 48-75.

Kuiper, N.A. (2012). Humor and resiliency: Towards a process model of coping and growth. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 8(3), 475-491.

Torres-Marín, J., et al. (2020). Humor as a protective factor against anxiety and depression. Anales de Psicología, 36(1), 129-138.

Yim, J. (2016). Therapeutic benefits of laughter in mental health: A theoretical review. Tohoku Journal of Experimental Medicine, 239(3), 243-249.

Hayashi, K., et al. (2018). Hearing laughter improves the recovery process of the autonomic nervous system after a stress-loading task: A randomized controlled trial. BioPsychoSocial Medicine, 12, 22.

Kastner, S. (2024). A lighthearted approach to mindfulness: Development and evaluation of a humor-enriched mindfulness-based program in a randomized trial. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1324329.

Kastner, S. (2025). Mindfulness interfused with humor: Insights from a randomized controlled trial of a humor-enriched mindfulness-based program. Mindfulness.

Samson, A.C., & Gross, J.J. (2012). Humour as emotion regulation: The differential consequences of negative versus positive humour. Cognition and Emotion, 26(2), 375-384.

Books:

Martin, R.A., & Ford, T. (2018). The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach (2nd ed.). Academic Press.

Tan, C.M. (2016). Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within. HarperOne.

Kataria, M. (2002). Laugh for No Reason (2nd ed.). Madhuri International.

McGhee, P.E. (2010). Humor as Survival Training for a Stressed-Out World: The 7 Humor Habits Program. AuthorHouse.

Organizations and Resources:

Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor (AATH): www.aath.org

Laughter Yoga International: www.laughteryoga.org

Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu

Mayo Clinic: Stress Management and Humor: www.mayoclinic.org

National Social Anxiety Center: www.nationalsocialanxietycenter.com