It’s almost a chicken and the egg phenomenon, happiness research says.
Just as we naturally find ourselves smiling when we’re happy, putting a smile on your face can make you feel happier.
Well, not all of the time. Smiling isn’t a magic cure-all. In fact, if you suggest that someone should “just smile” when she’s down or upset, you’re likely to make things worse. You need to honor and empathize with negative emotions and look for alternate ways to help.
But if you’re feeling neutral or pleasant, putting a big lip-stretching, cheek-raising smile on your face will overwhelmingly up your happiness quotient.
Grin while you’re watching a comedy and it will be funnier. Try smiling when you’re exercising or even doing routine chores, and suddenly you’ll find you’re more engaged and happier.
Things just go better with smiles.
Feedback from a Smiling Face
One reason smiling faces trigger increased happiness is that the set of the facial muscles a smile produces is associated with happiness by the brain. A study at New York’s Barnard College found that people whose range of facial expression was limited by Botox injections experienced a blunting of emotions. The brain wasn’t getting the emotional feedback from the face that it expected.
But there’s far more to the smiling-brain connection than that.
Smiling is Good for You
Because it’s a signal that you’re experiencing happiness, and because happiness is what you’re designed to feel, when you’re smiling, your body responds in a host of positive ways.
Among other benefits, smiling:
- Elevates your mood;
- Relieves stress;
- Boosts your immune system;
- Lowers your blood pressure; and
- Releases endorphins, natural pain killers and serotonin.
And if that’s not enough, it helps to keep you in a positive mood, enhances your chances of success, and makes you a social magnet.
The Contagion of Smiling
People enjoy being around smiling people. When I broke my arm recently, my coworkers sent me a card signed by everyone on the staff. So many of them wrote “Hurry back! I miss your smile!”
Happiness is contagious. And smiling, the flag of happiness, helps spread it around. When you smile, you’re doing your part to make others happier as well. Smiling is an act of kindness, a service you’re rendering to make one little corner of the world a brighter place.
Prove It for Yourself
You can test drive the power of smiling for yourself. Make an intention to practice smiling as you go through your day and watch how it enhances and brightens your mood, affects your performance, and how it impacts the way people around you relate to you.
And here’s a fabulous experiment you can do right now: Go look at these gorgeous photographs of happy, smiling faces and watch how you respond. After you look at several of them, intentionally put a big smile on your own face and notice the difference in your levels of openness, joy and appreciation.
When I tried it, my own level of happiness deepened so profoundly as I continued to scroll through the smiling pictures that it actually brought tears of joy to my eyes.
Amazing, isn’t it, how easily we can turn up our happiness and spread it around? How wondrously powerful smiling can be?
Want to make the world a happier place today? Wear a smile, “like” or tweet this article, and pass it on to a friend.
Here’s beaming at you!
Photo: istockphoto.com
