Why Some People Laugh When It Hurts Most — and How the Brain Is Helping Them

Recently I stepped outside the comfort of being a hypnotherapist to train as a dog trainer. I knew from the start that being bitten would come with the territory, and by the fifth class it duly did — bleeding enough that anyone squeamish would have fainted.

But instead of crying or panicking, I laughed.

Genuinely laughed, from the moment it happened and all the way to the hospital, chatting with the friend driving me as though we were off to the seaside rather than to A&E for stitches.

Many people would put that down to shock. There is something more interesting going on.

Laughter does more than lift the mood — it changes brain chemistry

Research from Oxford University led by Professor Robin Dunbar, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found something striking. Participants watched comedy and were then tested for pain tolerance, for instance by holding an arm in ice water. Fifteen minutes of genuine laughter raised pain tolerance by around 10%, significantly.

The mechanism is that real laughter — not a smile or a light chuckle — works the muscles of the chest and lungs, and that exertion prompts the brain to release endorphins, which act on the same receptors as morphine. Perception of pain falls naturally. In plain terms, the brain manufactures its own analgesic.

Dopamine is released alongside it, helping the body soften, the muscles release, and the nervous system shift from fight-or-flight into recovery — the opposite of jerking your arm away in fright as you are bitten, which can tear a wound considerably wider.

And it works better still in company

The same research found that laughing socially has a significantly greater effect than laughing alone. Shared laughter does not only release endorphins in us; it builds a sense of connection, of safety, of still being among people who can be trusted — all of which eases the suffering the brain is processing by another degree.

Which is why I could keep chatting with my friend the whole way to the hospital. That shared laughter was genuinely holding my brain and body steady.

What psychologists call this

In psychology this is humour as a coping mechanism, and it differs from denying pain or evading a problem. It is a shift in how a situation is viewed, without pretending it did not happen.

One theory describes it neatly: benign violation theory, which proposes that we can laugh once the brain begins to read an event as wrong but no longer life-threatening. It is still strange, still not good, but the brain has judged it manageable. That is when laughter comes — not because the thing is funny, but because the brain has assessed the threat as passed enough to let go.

It hurts, genuinely. The brain has simply chosen to process it differently.

And if you cannot laugh on the worst day?

Not everyone can, and that is entirely all right. Some need to cry first. Some need to be angry first. Everyone has their own process.

We certainly cannot order ourselves to laugh. But patterns of response can be learned. If in ordinary life we let ourselves notice the humour in small things, the brain gradually builds a pathway connecting stress to release more quickly. That is the same principle we work with in Neuro-Behavioral Repatterning & Hypnotherapy — not compelling a feeling, but helping the brain learn to respond with more options available.

We cannot always govern what happens in a life. How the brain answers it can, in part, be learned and changed.

And perhaps when someone laughs on the hardest day, it does not mean they feel nothing. It means their brain is holding them up in one of the most powerful ways a human being has.

To understand how the brain builds its responses to pain, see “The More You Attend to It, the More It Hurts”. And for how subconscious patterns are worked with, “Hypnosis Is Subconscious Learning” makes it clearer.