There’s a comforting piece of advice that gets repeated so often it’s practically wallpaper. Learn to laugh at yourself. Don’t take life so seriously.
It shows up in self-help books, in wedding speeches, in that one uncle’s favourite line at Christmas dinner. And there’s real truth behind it. But like most tidy advice, it doesn’t hold up quite as neatly under closer inspection.
The case for it
Being able to laugh at your own mistakes is genuinely linked to resilience. People who can find the absurdity in a bad day tend to recover from setbacks faster than people who spiral into self-criticism.
There’s a difference between laughing at a mishap and being crushed by it, and humour often provides the gap between the two. It signals to yourself, and to everyone watching, that a mistake doesn’t define your worth.
It also tends to make people easier to be around. Nobody enjoys spending time with someone who takes every small error as a personal catastrophe.
A bit of self-deprecating humour can soften a room, defuse tension and make other people feel more comfortable admitting their own flaws.
Where it gets complicated
Here’s the catch. Self-deprecating humour has a shadow side.
There’s a meaningful difference between laughing at a genuine slip-up and using humour as a permanent shield against ever being taken seriously. Constantly undercutting your own achievements with jokes can, over time, chip away at how others perceive your competence, and eventually how you perceive it yourself.
Psychologist Rod Martin, who developed the Humor Styles Questionnaire at the University of Western Ontario in 2003, splits humour into four kinds.
Two are broadly benign. Affiliative humour brings people together without cost to anyone, and self-enhancing humour helps a person cope with their own bad days.
Two carry a cost. Aggressive humour builds you up at someone else’s expense, and self-defeating humour earns laughs at your own, so consistently that it becomes a habit rather than a choice.
That fourth category is the one worth watching. Across Martin’s research and the studies that followed, self-defeating humour correlates with lower self-esteem, higher anxiety and higher rates of depression.
A longitudinal study of adolescents found it working in both directions, with heavy use of self-defeating humour predicting later increases in depressive symptoms and loneliness and drops in self-esteem, while depressive symptoms in turn predicted more self-defeating humour. Not proof of cause, but a fairly grim loop.
Context matters enormously too. Laughing at yourself after tripping on a kerb in front of friends is very different from making the same joke repeatedly about a genuine insecurity, whether that’s weight, intelligence, or a past failure.
The first is lighthearted. The second can quietly reinforce the very belief you’re trying to laugh off.
The healthiest version seems to sit somewhere in the middle. Laugh at the small stuff. The spilled coffee, the mispronounced word in a meeting, the wrong turn on a road trip.
Save the seriousness for the things that actually deserve it, your values, your relationships, your genuine achievements.
Perhaps the better advice isn’t laugh more at yourself, full stop. It’s learn to tell the difference between a moment that calls for humour and a pattern that’s quietly doing damage.
Getting that distinction right matters more than how often you laugh.
