Anxiety Humor:
It can help to laugh!

by Dave Carbonell, PhD

This part of the site is strictly for laughs. Anxiety humor usually helps!

In my work, I find that helping people find the funny parts about anxiety, and regaining their ability to laugh, can be a big help in recovery. If you're familiar with my workshops, my book, or the materials on my website, you may have noticed that I frequently inject funny stuff in the middle of serious conversations. This section of my site is devoted to funny stuff.

If you don't feel like laughing today, or are likely to feel offended by my efforts at anxiety humor, go back to another section, and return here some other time.

My Anxiety Songs

Throughout the 1990's, I made frequent appearance at libraries in the Chicago area, giving talks about anxiety disorders for the general public.

I often sang a song as part of my presentation.

You'd rarely hear a worse voice sing in public. But I wanted to offer people the idea of finding a humorous response to panic attacks, and so I wrote some new lyrics to a couple of songs, and offered them a cappella.

I found that singing was a useful response to a panic attack. It changed your breathing; it changed your focus; and if you were singing about something funny, so much the better.

Recently, I had an e-mail from a former client from those days. She lives out on the west coast now, and wanted to refer a Chicago friend to me. She didn't remember my name, so she searched the internet for a while, looking for me. All she remembered was a few lines from one of the songs I used to sing. So I got an e-mail from her, mentioning the lines she remembered, and asking if I was the guy who used to sing those songs. Of all the work we did together, what she remembered best was the songs! That's what inspired me to post them here.

Here are my two favorites.