A smile is the best thing anyone can ever wear. It requires no effort, it improves your mood, and it radiates positivity to your surroundings. And who doesn’t like a person who radiates positivity?
Starting your day with a smile can significantly impact how you’ll face the day. But it’s a tricky thing to practice if you’re not a smiler yourself. Read further to know the various benefits of smiling.
Smiling Improves Your Mood
You release neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins when you smile. These neurotransmitters help improve the mood by promoting positive feelings such as happiness, pleasure, and love. Smiling won’t seem like a chore if it’s the only thing it takes to produce these neurotransmitters. All you need is a reason to smile or to pretend you’re smiling.
But what do these neurotransmitters provide individually? Here’s what each neurotransmitter does to your body:
- Dopamine: Dopamine is a hormone responsible for the brain’s reward and motivation system, reproductive and maternal behaviors, cognitive function and motor control, and memory and attention.
- Serotonin: Serotonin is a happy hormone necessary for sleep, mood, circadian rhythm, digestion, and brain function. Your gut produces both dopamine and serotonin. Moreover, there are certain foods that you can take to produce serotonin. Some of these are pasta, wheat, cranberries, apples, and blackberries.
- Endorphins: Endorphins are hormones that relieve pain and stress. They are similar to opioids. Opioids can ease pain, which is why medical facilities use endorphins for short-term purposes such as post-surgery. It can also produce a feeling of euphoria.
Smiling can prove to be hard for others if they are not confident with their teeth. One way to have the perfect teeth for smiling is to visit an orthodontist. Often, orthodontists can address issues with misaligned teeth and jaws with solutions like braces and bonded retainers. However, you’ll have to have yourself checked so these aren’t severe issues that might affect you later on.
Smiling Is Contagious
Smiling is contagious because the intention behind it is just pure. It makes you want to spread positivity to others, therefore creating a ripple effect. When someone smiles at you, you instinctively want to return the favor. According to Psychology Today, people will see you as attractive, reliable, sincere, and relaxed when you smile. So, smile at people whenever possible because you’ll make yourself feel better and you’ll make others feel better, too.
Smiling Has Several Health Benefits
As previously mentioned, smiling releases hormones such as dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins. In turn, these neurotransmitters also provide several health benefits such as a strengthened immune system, reduced blood pressure, reduced pain, increased endurance, and reduced stress. These health benefits are enough to encourage you to smile every day.
Make it a goal to smile every day by watching a funny video, catching up with friends, or doing what you love. You’ll unconsciously smile through it without the feeling of being forced to do so. It can be hard to smile if you’re having a hard day. But with these habits, you’ll crack a smile or two.
Friendships and positive relationships usually start with warm smiles. It is an acknowledgment of one’s presence and the interest to develop a friendly start. You can produce positive feelings when you smile alone. But as humans, there are bad days when many of us don’t feel like smiling and feel like the world is against them. That’s normal, but you should also remember that if you start your day in a bad mood, you’ll guarantee to spend the remainder of the day in the same mood.
Smiling to a Great Start
Starting the day in a bad mood is not the most sound decision because it affects your surroundings. You’ll snap at everyone and everything in your way, and you’ll hurt feelings. Hurting others’ feelings while you can’t manage your own is another emotional baggage on your part. Hard as it may be, try to go to a good place mentally so you’ll start your day just fine. Or better yet, play some music while you take a bath, while you cook breakfast, and while you drive to work.
But if you can’t find a reason to smile, you can always pretend. Your brain can’t tell the difference between a real and a fake smile—it just knows you smiled. Once you get that feeling of uplifting happiness, everything will follow, and you’ll be in a good mood the whole day.
The health benefits of smiling and its profound effect on yourself and others is enough reason for you to smile every day. Make it a habit to smile every day, no matter how hard or challenging life has been.
