We smile many times a day and we don’t even know it more often. What is it about a smile that makes it so valuable? Why do we devote our lives to making people’s smiles better? Can we say that it is contagious to smile? When we watch other’s grin, our brains are designed to imitate them. Others will be happier if you smile at them. So if you smile at someone, you could just brighten their day. (How simple is that, right?)
Smiling conveys self-assurance. The more you smile and feel happy, the more self-assured you will become. Smiling makes you appear more appealing, successful, and confident to others. What are the chances? It may even help you obtain your ideal career! (Now we can say, damn smiling is important!)
The science behind the smile
So, when we laugh, what happens in our heads? Endorphins are made in our brains when we are joyful, and neuronal signals are sent to our face muscles, causing us to smile. This is the start of happiness’s positive feedback loop. When our muscles contract, they send a signal to the brain, which activates our reward system and raises our levels of happy chemicals, or endorphins.
To put it simply there, we say that we smile when our brain is happy, and our brain is happier when we smile. With a single grin, we can change our brain’s emotional processing pathway to feel happy, all thanks to the positive feedback loop of smiling.
How can a simple smile help change your life?
Smiling boosts mood-boosting chemicals while lowering stress-inducing hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. It also lowers blood pressure in general. Because you smile when you’re pleased, the muscles you utilize encourage your brain to release more endorphins, a chemical that helps you feel better.
Look for anything nice in your environment or inside yourself to make you feel better. It might be anything as simple as observing the gorgeous mountains outside your window. Or the tranquil moment of waking up early when the rest of the world is still asleep. Simply seeing a good makes individuals more aware, even thankful, but it does not always make them feel happier.
So choose to grin while concentrating on your selected positively. Then pay attention to what you feel in your body, it may fill in the gaps in your intellectual understanding of good aspects of your life.
How does a smile or a missing smile affect us at work or in a social context?
Smiling offers several societal benefits in addition to personal ones.
- Our facial expressions are frequently used to convey emotions or even messages about how we feel.
- Openness, acceptance, and even trustworthiness is typically shown by smiling.
- When you smile at others, they are more likely to engage in conversation with you.
- Smiling helps you appear more friendly and approachable.
- It also indicates that you want to converse with people.
- The capacity to transmit joy, happiness, or contentment is another social advantage of smiling.
- In the same way when a person is having a good time at a party or social event, he grins. Smiles turn to laugh, which leads to even deeper connecting with others. If you’re having a good time, a grin on your face will communicate to others that you’re enjoying the event and their company, making others smile and joyful as well.
Therefore, if you miss a smile or a gentle laugh at such crucial moments, it might not only affect your ways of socializing with others but also make your relationship with your community lose the special bond as a missing can remove an extremely valuable form of communication.
Is smile an important communication?
Smiles are one of the few nonverbal signals that cross-cultural boundaries. In some cultures, common signals such as a thumbs-up have quite different connotations; for example, in Australia, it might be regarded as rude. A grin, on the other hand, may transmit the same joyful attitude regardless of where you are from.
Smiling is also a state of mind. You’re more likely to be in a better, more relaxed state of mind if you start your business contacts with a grin. This will assist you in putting your best foot forward in every business encounter. While social media and online communication are important, seeing people face to face with a genuine grin and handshake may go a long way toward establishing relationships. So when it is said, it is being said truly that individuals prefer to do business with people they know and trust.
Health benefits of smiling
Regardless of your disposition, smiling more regularly can enhance your health and perhaps even help you live longer. Some major health benefits of smiling are as follows,
It can improve your mood
So when a person smiles the happy chemicals of our body called as endorphins get released, making him feel happier and more cheerful. Smiling and other good facial expressions can lift one’s spirits and encourage positive ideas. So, the next time if you are feeling down, just try smiling and see how it just could help you feel better.
It can help lowering your blood pressure
Heart health is crucial. Increasing your laughter or smiling can help decrease your blood pressure in a way that laughter can cause a rise in heart rate and oxygen consumption right away. This are followed by muscular relaxation, a slower heart rate, and lower blood pressure. Even a modest quantity can help minimize a person’s risk of heart disease.
Smile can act as pain or stress reliever
A hearty chuckle, believe it or not, can help relieve various physical aches and pains or even reduce stress. Your stress response is activated and relieved by smiling or laughing. Laughter is the finest medicine because it permits the body to manufacture its own natural painkillers by triggering the production of endorphins, the body’s natural feel-good chemical. So, all you have to do is smile and make your body feel juvenile.
It can make your immune system stronger
There are very high chances that smiling or laughing might enhance your immune system. This is true because laughter, which frequently begins with a grin, actually boosts immune cells and infection-fighting antibodies, boosting your immunity to infections.
It will help you build a better relationship
When compared to individuals who do not grin, those who smile are thought to be more likable. So you might have a higher chance of creating and keeping relationships with people if you are pleasant, which helps you and your general well-being.
The psychology behind not smiling
Did you know that caring for your teeth also means caring for your overall health? Reduce your intake of unhealthy foods, sweets, acidic beverages, and alcohol with good tooth care. As a result, the likelihood of developing normal lifestyle issues is reduced. Heart disease, inflammation in the body, diabetes, and maybe lowering the risk of Alzheimer’s disease are just a few examples. Of course, it also lessens the issues that come with being overweight.
But why is it that certain people do not prefer to smile despite all of its vital benefits?
There are various typical reasons for an individual not to smile either in public or in front of his/her family. Some of them are as follows,
- Toothache is the most common cause of stopping you from smiling and it can happen as a result of negligence in taking care of your teeth’ health.
- Stained teeth are another problem causing trouble for you to smile in front of your colleagues, friends, or partners. Your teeth can be similar to your laundry and with the use of an appropriate method, you can get rid of a lot of stains. The things that results in teeth stains include foods, cigarettes, drugs, and trauma are all potential causes of tooth discoloration.
- When you smile or laugh and if these little holes in your teeth called cavities are there, they are definitely going to make you feel embarrassed and eventually stop opening your mouth at all.
- A chipped and impacted tooth could also be the reason behind not smiling.
- Crooked teeth can also become a hurdle in your way of smiling and laughing heartily. And straightening crooked teeth and correcting your bite improves your smile in more ways than one. It can help to improve overall oral health by alleviating symptoms such as jaw discomfort.
And most of the time, instead of taking care of such problems what happens is that people avoid visiting their dentists because of the fear of expensive treatments. As a result, the minor problems grow into big ones and become more painful and costly to fix as well.
The good part is that there are some dental clinics such as oslotannlegesenter.no that offer exceptional deals with discounts to their patients to help them come out of their misery and retrieve their smiles. This clinic is the only one we have heard of that offer a discount if patients recruit friends to become new patients. Even the friends get the same discount and patients can save up discounts so that a costly treatment actually can be cheap or even free of charge. This kind of service could be welcomed especially by those with a low income and bad dental care habits because of financial problems.
To wrap it up!
We must absolutely have a grin on our faces when everything is going well. When things aren’t going our way, though, we have an even bigger cause to grin as smiling reduces stress and anxiety and aids in the transformation of our own and others’ negativity. Consider what would happen if we all smiled and shone our light into the darkness.
