If you really stop to think about it, most of us spend more time with our co-workers than we do with our own family, so finding ways to have humor in the workplace is critical. Humor helps us to be more resilient and it helps us regroup and re-prioritize.
According to researchers who study the brain, there are three parts of your brain that light up when you laugh at a joke:
In many ways, humor is an attitude and a set of skills you can develop as a coping mechanism. When you face problems with a sense of humor, you can more easily deal with the ups and downs of life. When you learn how to essentially lighten up, life becomes much more bearable. Laughter can help you ride those turbulent waves that life throws you and it can help you heal and even help you tap into your creativity by helping you think differently. Humor can help you maintain your sanity by helping you remember not to take life so seriously.
What are some other ways that humor and laughter can help boost your creativity you might ask? According to Albert Einstein:
Albert Einstein certainly understood a thing or two about creativity. Creativity is highly rewarded in companies because it helps companies maintain a competitive edge. Creativity is really nothing more than problem solving; it is looking at an old problem in a whole new way and laughter can certainly help you look at things differently. Laughter helps take the edge off and it helps you release endorphins, which help you feel better. When you feel better, you tend to be more creative because you don't feel such pressure to perform.
Everyone has this ability to be creative, but not everyone taps into it. Some of us merely need permission to call ourselves creative and we simply need to allow our more creative side to flow.
Laughter helps you feel more enthusiastic and more energized and this helps fuel your creativity. Brainstorming sessions are much more likely to be successful when laughter is involved. Laughter can create magic because it can help you tap into parts of your brain that you don't often use.
In many ways, if life is a journey, laughter is the shock absorber! Life can difficult at best and laughter can help us in many ways by helping us deal with the tragedy and the drama. Laughter should be thought of a sort of survival skill in some ways, because those who know how to poke fun at themselves have the advantage.
Stress can cause many issues, including health problems and laughing at yourself can help you ward off stress and tension. Sometimes we simply need to give ourselves permission to laugh and permission to be silly. Laughter helps keep our creative pumps flowing. Laughter helps us bring about our inner child, which helps us lighten our load. When you recall happier times and humorous moments, you feel better and more light-spirited. Laughter can be a wonderful teacher and a fabulous mentor because it reminds us not to take ourselves too seriously.
Laughter gives you the freedom to be playful and natural. Laughter gives you a pick me up when you feel down. People who are more jovial are much more fun to be around, let's be honest. People that tend to take life too seriously can be a real drag. Everyone has heard the notion that laughter is the best medicine and in many ways, that tends to be true.
Laughter can be very beneficial to organizations because it is a great way to enhance teamwork and cooperation.
Laughter creates emotions and helps us express ourselves and emotions can play a very powerful role in our lives. Laughter can have a very positive effect on employees because it helps people deal with problems much more effectively. Humor in the workplace can improve job performance and satisfaction, encourage creativity and even help diffuse conflict. Meetings are often the way companies communicate and a meeting that encourages laughter and open communication will often be a much more productive meeting than a dry serious one.
People tend to remember things better when conversations are infused with laughter and humor and laughter used strategically can enhance the effectiveness of teams. Laughter can help one lighten the emotional atmosphere and create a feeling of solidarity and collegiality and laughter can be a great ice-breaker. Shared laughter can help create a more relaxed atmosphere and it can help reduce tension and anxiety.
Humor can even be an effective leadership strategy because it helps people relate to one another better.
When we become responsible adults, we often lose our creativity, enthusiasm and joy. Laughter helps us keep a childlike atmosphere and it helps keep our creativity alive.
In order to more fully understand how laughter influences creativity, one must first understand how the brain works as far as creativity. Psychologists have been studying the concept of creativity for generations and there are conflicts with how creativity comes about. Some schools of thought state that creativity is inherent within you while others say that is a byproduct or an adaptation one learns along the way. Humans are inherently creative species and it varies from individual to individual.
Creativity is said to come about from the right side of the brain but that may actually be a bit simplistic and it may in fact involve many different regions of the brain because in reality creativity comes from a dispersed network of many different regions of the brain.
There have been several studies that correlate creative thinking with the alpha brainwave frequency with participants displaying higher alpha brainwaves in the frontal area of the brain, so this may be of interest to those who study the brain. Some studies have even found that there are different types of creativity, some that depend on prefrontal brain engagement with others dependent on prefrontal disengagement.
The conclusion of this work tells us that there may not be just one area of the brain in which creativity comes from and many studies have shown that there are actually a multitude of processes and different levels of the brain that are involved when it comes to something like the process of creativity. Other studies have shown that creativity may even be related to unconscious processes and there are even some schools of thought that relate creativity to mental illness.
Understanding how creativity arises from the brain is a fascinating field of study when it really comes down to it. Many times one hears the word creativity right alongside the word "genius" and even though it may be highly desirable to be a creative genius, the two don't necessarily go together and as a matter of fact they are two very different things.
Creativity has been equated with high levels of divergent thinking. Divergent thinking can be defined as one who has the ability to come up with a large number of responses to open ended questions or probes. Many times you will hear the idea of people getting flashes of insight or creativity when they least expect it. The most famous example being that of Archimedes, who came up with a flash of insight while in the tub bathing.
The story is that Archimedes when faced with the dilemma of whether an irregularly shaped crown of gold was made of an alloy or pure gold, received a flash of insight the moment he immersed himself in the tub, suddenly realizing that he could measure its density by measuring the amount of water it displaced divided by its weight, just as water was displaced by his body in the tub.