Smile For Health & Happiness
Humans are hardwired to smile whenever we are happy. Unfortunately, there are a lot of fake smiles and a lot of tension around the idea of “being told to smile more.” This can make smiling seem like something you have to do instead of doing it just because you enjoy wearing a smile.
Smiling is good for you, when it is real. A study done by Michigan State University found that putting on a fake smile, like those you wear in retail, will worsen your mood and negatively impact your productivity. Yet, the same study also found that those workers who wore real smiles were able to cultivate more positive thoughts, such as those about an upcoming vacation or their child’s play, and were more pleasant throughout the day.
A real smile also decreases your sensitivity to pain, since it decreases the distress you feel in difficult circumstances. This fits into the “facial feedback” hypothesis that states how a true smile will work against your brain’s attention to more negative stimuli. That means you can trick yourself into being calmer and more lucid in stressful situations with just a smile.
