When nursing humor is part of the workplace culture, healthcare facilities can enjoy tremendous success. As George Burns once said, “Do something you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.”
There a lot of ways to create a positively outrageous work environment—but let’s take a look at humor specifically. There are three primary roles of nursing humor in the healthcare setting that make it an ideal Service Prescription tool.
Psychological
As healthcare professionals become more anxious and their focus becomes narrower, they become less creative and are more easily upset. Stress may not come from the event itself as much as from the nurse’s perception of that event.
Nursing humor provides a perceptual flexibility that can increase one’s sense of control. Learn techniques such as “catastrophizing” the event. It is where one takes the situation at hand and looks for the absurdity by asking, “How could this be worse?” may help the professional put the event into its proper perspective.
Social
As Victor Borge, a well-known comedian said so eloquently, “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” When two or more can share in amusement, there is a commonality experienced among them, thus creating a bond.
Some types of shared humor, such as self-effacing humor, reveal one’s own flaws, humanness, and vulnerability. This ‘revelation’ creates an environment where the listener feels that it’s safe to share. Once the listener feels safe, the two can develop rapport, establish, and/or strengthen nursing relationships. For that moment, the humor helps to diminish the perceived hierarchy, such as nurse/patient, doctor/nurse, or teacher/student. Meanwhile, everyone involved gets to participate in the fun.
Communication
Sometimes a joke is just a joke. But often, true words are spoken in jest. It may be helpful for the healthcare professional to know that frequently a patient will present a serious concern in the guise of a joke about an embarrassing or frightening situation.
If a nurse responds in the manner that the patient had hoped, that patient has achieved his or her desired outcome. However, if the nurse doesn’t recognize the serious nature of his comment, then he has the ability to ‘save face’ with the rationale that he was “only joking.”
The skill for professionals is in learning to listen beyond the laughter, whether the person addressing them is a peer, patient, family member, or doctor.
An important point in humor and communication is about listening beyond the laughter.
Once, while taking care of a patient going for an orchiectomy (removing the testicles due to a disease), I asked him to explain the surgery to me as he understood it. The patient laughed and said, “Sounds like the doc is going to change me from a rooster to a hen.”
Things are always funnier when they’re happening to someone else. And I sensed this guy didn’t really find this as funny as he let on. I hung around for a few minutes and in no time he was asking me questions about his sexuality after the surgery. Listen beyond the laughter.
Humor is recognized as a healthy coping mechanism. There are a lot of unhealthy ways people deal with their stress—eating, drinking, smoking, and drugs. Professionals in healthcare need a lot of tools to cope and I encourage people to include a variety in their coping tool belt. These may include meditation, visualization, exercise, massage, and muscle relaxation.
But humor doesn’t require additional equipment and space, it doesn’t cost anything to implement, and you don’t have to be coordinated. It can be done practically anywhere at almost any time. And best of all…it feels good!