Give Yourself and Others a Boost: Smile!
Smiling enhances health, happiness and community. But not all smiles are honest. ; -)
Smiles aren’t just billboards advertising enjoyment. Smiling leads to healthier bodies. Smiling makes you feel better. Smiling enhances your social connections.
Dozens of experiments show that genuine smiling improves physical health. Smiles damp down overactive immune responses, increase pain tolerance, and are associated with greater cardiac fitness and healthier patterns of hormonal release.
Smiling enhances emotional well-being. Genuine smiles help people recover faster from social rejection. Smiling can enhance your motivational state; smiling people work harder towards healthy goals, like exercising more, or eating more nutritious diets.
By the process called facial feedback, the emotion you paste on your face trickles back into your brain and can instill at least a glimmer of the feeling that your face is displaying. When you make a genuine smile, you feel happier. When your face droops in sorrow, you start feeling sad. Facial feedback happens without conscious awareness. Even when subjects don’t know what their faces look like in the moment, their facial expressions engender within them some of the feeling of the emotion on their face. The old advice…
