If you haven’t already, we highly recommend you first read “The psychological root cause of anxiety” before consuming the below solution. It’ll take less than 1min.
You may have multiple reasons why this triggers your anxiety, but at the core, you may knowingly or unknowingly believe that whenever you’re laughed at, regardless of why, that’s “bad.” You may unknowingly interpret things you consider bad as things you should feel bad or unhappy about.
Because of this thinking, you may unknowingly think that you should be anxious whenever you’re laughed at or that being laughed at is something you should avoid at any cost. Being or getting anxious when people laugh at you is an unconscious strategy to motivate yourself to do whatever you think is needed to avoid being laughed at. You can understand this more by reading our post on the anxiety paradox.
To eliminate or overcome this trigger, you have to figure out the “deep in your psyche” reason(s) why you view being laughed at as a problem. Some people try to find people they know or think are sensitive to being laughed at. They then laugh at these individuals to make them feel bad.
Overcoming the trigger
One key is to think about your personal goal(s) in situations you’re laughed at. If being laughed at has no impact on your goal(s), then although it’s undesirable, there is likely no physical or emotional benefit to viewing someone laughing at you as unacceptable.
If you think being laughed at will or may impact the ability to get something you want, we recommend you think deeply about whether that is true. Our article “Getting what you want” can help you think through that.
If it’s true that being laughed at may impact getting what you want, then it may be worthwhile to ensure you actually want what you say you want. If it is, you may have to change the environment or the people you’re engaging with to get what you want.
Eliminating the trigger
Ultimately, you have to be ok with people laughing at you, regardless of why they’re laughing at you. If you aren’t okay with this, it is only logical that your body will register being laughed at, regardless of the circumstance, as something to trigger anxiety for. We encourage you to leave a comment if you disagree.
If you’re finding it difficult to accept that to overcome or get rid of this trigger you have to acknowledge that despite disliking it and not wanting it to happen, it’s ok if it does happen, then you probably have 1 or more reasons (likely unconscious and unique to you) why you think being laughed at is unacceptable or something you should be anxious about.
To address this, you will have to uncover these reasons so they are out in plain sight. Uncovering these reasons alone may dissolve the trigger. In other cases, uncovering these reasons will reveal what happened to you (likely in the past) that led to you labeling this trigger/situation as something to be anxious about.
You can use our resource (recommended reads section below) for eliminating an anxiety trigger to help you uncover why being laughed at triggers your anxiety and rewire your brain so the trigger disappears.
Recommended reads for overcoming social anxiety
There’s more
If you struggle with low self-esteem, self-consciousness, low self-worth, or low self-confidence, we encourage you to view our self-help solutions for these and other common psychological challenges.
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If you’d like to dig deeper or want 1on1 help let us know. Otherwise, we suggest leaving a comment so our experts or someone in the community can help you.
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