What Are Defense Mechanisms?

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Laughter releases endorphins and is correlated to improvements in physical pain, depression, and anxiety.

Humor can also be a psychological defense, from easing social tension to shielding emotional turmoil.

If humor is disruptive, exploring the need for constant joking may help identify and resolve emotional pain.

They say that laughter is the best medicine. If you’ve ever been having a hard day but then told a good joke or, better yet, caught off guard by something comedic, you can likely attest to how levity can break the spell of gloom.

Interestingly, even nonhumorous laughter, like in laughter yoga, has been correlated to reduced pain, depression, anxiety, stress, and sleep problems (e.g., Uner et al., 2022). This is because laughter, whether humorous or not, triggers the release of endorphins, or “feel-good chemicals,” which not only boost mood but also contribute to relaxation of muscles (e.g., Hajar, 2023). Even better, an increase in endorphins decreases stress hormones, which can be damaging to our immune system (e.g., Alotiby, 2024), and regular laughter has been correlated with improvement in physical ailments (e.g., Oliveira & Arriaga, 2022; Singh et al., 2025).

Aside from the above, humor is also health-related in its role as a psychological defense mechanism.

Psychological defenses

These are subconscious cognitive processes that serve to protect against things that would be too anxiety-provoking to consciously acknowledge, guard against low self-esteem, and loss of self-integration (Cramer, 2008). While the term “defense” can have a negative or pejorative connotation (e.g., “S/he is so defensive!”), everyone has psychological defenses, which begin in childhood as adaptive responses to the world/people around the child. They develop at the intersection of temperament, the nature of stresses suffered early on, defenses modeled by important figures, and the reinforcement effects of using the defense(s) (McWilliams, 2011).

One common defense is withdrawal. On the........

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