7 Reasons Why You Should Smile More

 

Did you know that you can instantly transform the state of your consciousness just by smiling? Science has now shown that when we flex our facial muscles to produce a smile, our brain releases a cocktail of feel-good hormones that elevate our mood and reduce stress. But you don’t need anyone to tell you that smiling feels good. You’ve already experienced the uplifting effects of smiling and laughing with friends and family.

However, in this article you can read about the science of smiling, and once you discover how smiling works and how to reap the benefits, it’s going to be hard for you not to smile more often!

What Occurs In Our Brains When We Smile

Smiling is an inherently human trait. It’s interesting when you think about it. We flex the muscles in our face in response to a positive stimulus, and suddenly, not only do we feel good, but it also makes those around us feel good!

On a simplistic level, when you see an old friend or reunite with your family after time away, a good emotional response is triggered based on the memories and connection you have with them. So you smile at them. The neuronal signals travel from the cortex of your brain to the brainstem. From there, the cranial muscle carries the signal further towards the smiling muscles in your face.

This creates a positive feedback loop. Your brain releases a plethora of pleasure hormones like dopamine and serotonin in response to your smile. Now you are feeling good from both the original stimulus and the feel-good hormones, so you keep smiling and the loop continues.

Smiling Can Improve Your Mood

This feedback loop means that we not only can communicate our mood through our facial expressions, but we also can influence our mood, consciously, by choosing to smile, even when faced with a negative stimulus. When you laugh at yourself when things go wrong, it’s easier to avoid getting overwhelmed with self-doubt and frustration.

Smiling Can Reduce Stress

In a 2012 study, published in the journal Psychological Science, University of Kansas psychological scientists Tara Kraft and Sarah Pressman studied 170 participants who were instructed to hold chopsticks in their mouths in three different formations, making them smile to various degrees without realizing it, while performing a stressful task. The experiment revealed that subjects whose facial muscles were forced into the biggest smiles, due to the chopsticks, experienced a substantial reduction in heart rate along with quicker stress recovery, compared to those whose expressions remained neutral, even though the participants didn’t realize that they were smiling, and there was no positive stimulus present.

Smiles Are Contagious

Have you ever smiled at someone and not received a smile back? It may have happened a handful of times, but it’s usually the exception, not the rule. Most people can’t help smiling back at you, even if it’s just to be polite.

Smiling is contagious thanks to the amazing structures in our brain called mirror neurons. “The way mirror neurons likely let us understand others is by providing some kind of inner imitation of the actions of other people, which in turn leads us to ‘simulate’ the intentions and emotions associated with those actions,” Iacoboni told Scientific American. “When I see you smiling, my mirror neurons for smiling fire up, too, initiating a cascade of neural activity that evokes the feeling we typically associate with a smile.”

Smiling Makes You More Approachable

If you were waiting in line at the bar and you could choose between a smiling barman and one with a neutral expression on their face, who would you pick to take your drink order? Most of us would feel drawn to the smiling barman. We instinctively perceive a smile as genuine, friendly, warm, and welcoming.

There was an interesting study published in 2005 designed to test whether the authenticity of employee expressions influenced the impressions formed of the employee’s friendliness and the overall customer satisfaction with the encounter. After reviewing 255 customer interactions with 64 restaurant servers, “the study showed that perceived display authenticity enhanced the perceived friendliness of the employee and had a direct effect on customer satisfaction.”

Smiling Makes You Appear More Trustworthy

This one seems pretty logical, right? It makes sense that compared to someone who is displaying a neutral or frowning expression, a smiling person is going to seem more trustworthy. At the University of Pittsburgh, researchers explored the potential connection between a model’s level of attractiveness, the intensity of her smile and her perceived level of trustworthiness. Participants ranked 45 models on these three conditions, revealing that the models who were ranked as the most trustworthy had the biggest smiles.

Smiling Boosts Your Immune System

Smiling activates the parasympathetic nervous system through stimulation of the vagus nerve. This helps you switch from your fight-or-flight survival mode to the relaxed-recovery mode, reducing your blood pressure and boosting your immune system. It is the same system that gets triggered when you hug someone.

Smiling Makes You More Creative

When you smile you are literally transforming your state of consciousness. A whole host of feel-good hormones such as dopamine and serotonin get released into the brain that can actually make you more creative. Recall a time when you were stressed or angry, but you needed to find a solution to a problem. Chances are, you found it pretty difficult. That’s because stress hormones actually reduce your brain activity in the prefrontal cortex, the area of your brain that’s responsible for logic, reasoning and creative thinking.

The Power Is In Your Hands

The message of this article is that you have the power to transform your state of consciousness and influence how others perceive you in your day-to-day life. By being aware of what occurs in your inner universe while smiling, you can get a deeper understanding of the consciousness-body connection, and access simple tools to make a transformation in your life. Whenever you find yourself in a stressful situation, make sure to smile sincerely and whole heartedly. It won’t instantly transform your situation, but it will transform how you feel about it, putting you in a better position to devise a creative solution.

 

yogaesoteric
April 17, 2020