Smile, Even if You Aren’t Feeling Happy

Why “fake it until you make it” is a smart strategy

There’s a great quote by Vietnamese Buddhist monk and author Thich Nhat Hanh about the power of smiling: “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”

I love this quote because it perfectly illustrates what empirical research in psychology reveals: We think that smiling reflects how we feel, but the mere act of smiling — even if we are not happy — can actually change how we feel.

In one of the simplest illustrations of the power of simply holding a smile, researchers in one clever study asked people to hold chopsticks in their mouths while holding one of three distinct types of facial expressions. Some people were asked to hold a genuine smile — the smile you automatically make when you find something funny, other people were asked to hold a standard smile — the smile you make when posing for a photo, and still others were asked to hold a neutral expression.

Then, while they were still holding their assigned facial expression, study participants were asked to undergo a painful task: to hold one of their hands in a bucket of freezing-cold ice water and to keep it there as long as they could.

Here’s what the experiment revealed: People who were holding either type of smile felt less stress and discomfort than people holding a neutral expression. Perhaps most importantly, they also had lower heart rates, showing that the mere act of smiling led to lower levels of physiological arousal, indicating less pain.

A more recent study provides even more compelling evidence for the benefits of smiling. Researchers asked people to hold one of four facial expressions while receiving a simulated flu shot via injection in the arm. Once again, some people were asked to hold a genuine smile, others to hold a standard smile, others to hold a neutral expression. A fourth group was instucted to hold a grimace.

Smiling was equally beneficial in this study: People who smiled rated the injection as 40% less painful than people who did not. They also had a lower heart rate, again suggesting that merely smiling decreased feelings of stress and pain.

These findings from empirical research provide insight into the old Chinese proverb, “A smile will gain you ten more years of life” … and perhaps help explain gender differences in life expectancy (as indicated in this photo of me with my brother, his wife, and two of my kids as well as my niece and nephew showing clear gender differences in smiling)!

How does smiling increase your life expectancy? One possibility is that the mere act of smiling leads to physiological changes in the body that improve health, such as lowering heart rate. Another possibility is that smiling changes how people react to you, which also feels good.

But regardless of the mechanism explaining the benefits, the simple takeaway from this research is really easy: Make a point of smiling, even when you don’t feel like it. It’s a great strategy for boosting happiness AND health!

This article first published in my How to Feel Better newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe (for free!) to receive a brief motivating post each week. You can also follow me on Instagram, where I post daily about happiness & health.