Have you heard that adage before? My grandmother used to say it to me when I was a little girl. I was evidently a very smiley kid (or so said all my relatives), and that habit has followed me into adulthood. I truly love to smile, and I believe I’ve benefitted, firsthand, from all the wonderful advantages that smiling can bring to one’s life.
There’s a ton of research on this topic. Smiling is simply one of those things our bodies love to do. (Laughing, too, but I’ll save that for a future blog.) When you smile, a cascade of wonderful chemical fireworks goes off in your brain and your body. Three types of neurotransmitters, specifically called endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin, are released when your facial muscles position themselves into a smile.
And it doesn’t even have to be a “real” one: your brain doesn’t really distinguish between whether you’re playing with a puppy or you’re fake-smiling at your annoying next-door neighbor. When your brain senses your facial muscles moving into smile position, it releases the neurotransmitters—just like that. Amazing!
Aside note: the famous “pencil in the teeth” experiment that you may have heard about has since been proven to be unreplicatable, but other, verifiable studies show that you really can “fake ‘til you make it” when it comes to smiling. (Just try it! You’ll feel happier in no time.)
Here’s something interesting: the more you smile, the more endorphins are released, and the happier you feel—in other words, there’s no upper limit, or “maxed-out point” (technically called saturation) as the endorphins are entering your bloodstream. If you smile enough—think about the last time you watched a really funny movie—you can actually start to feel a euphoric, natural high! And endorphins are also stress reducers and natural painkillers by activating opioid receptors in the brain—some studies show that endorphins literally work better than ibuprofen and acetaminophen. (By the way, endorphins are structurally similar to the drug morphine.)
When you’re smiling, while your endorphins are on the uptick, an unpleasant (and dangerous) stress hormone is on the downturn. You’ve probably heard of cortisol. It’s associated with anxiety, panic, headaches, muscle pain, exhaustion, and heart disease, so reducing it is definitely a good thing. Smiling puts cortisol at bay.
Next, the release of serotonin works as a very effective anti-depressant and mood-elevator—drug companies are well aware of this phenomenon. You’ve undoubtedly heard about serotonin on all those TV commercials for various types of prescription medications, and I could attempt to tell you about a classification of drugs called SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), but if you promise to keep reading, I promise to not bore you with pharmacological mumbo-jumbo! Just know that smiling releases serotonin, smiling has absolutely no negative side effects, and smiling does not require a prescription from your health care practitioner.
Want more encouragement? OK, here’s a somewhat playful study from The University of Missouri Kansas City that might tickle your fancy and make you smile: researchers found that smiling makes you look younger and thinner! (Not sure how that works, but I’ll take it.) And still another study showed that smiling people appear more attractive, approachable (you might’ve guessed those two, but wait for the punch line)—and intelligent.
In case you’re playing hard to convince, then here’s my final lure: a recent Swedish study showed that it’s almost physically impossible for people to look at a smiling person and not smile themselves. (It’s basically a biological instinct to mimic the expressions we see on another people’s faces—it’s our way of physically experiencing empathy for our fellow humans.) So smiling is quite literally contagious, and if you smile at another person, they will almost certainly smile back!
This great quote says it all: “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”—Thich Nhat Nanh (Vietnamese Buddhist Monk and Peace Activist) So put a smile on your face, and then get out there and share it! You’ll be doing your part to make the world a better place.