It has been a stressful month for me so
I restarted a little practice that you might find interesting. There
are a lot of methods to this but I prefer a simpler one that I can
implement all day long. It's a one step program. Step one: SMILE.
That's pretty much it.
If you want to be happy at any given
moment just take the time to smile and really feel the smile. To do
that some people have to think of happy memories or recite a sentence
or two in their mind. When I was first taught about the inner smile I
was given sentences like “Every day in every way I'm feeling better
and better”. As silly as that sounds it works. I'm a natural
skeptic so when I first heard about the “inner smile” I was,
well, skeptical. Trying something new that doesn't cost anything is
an easy choice to make. I tried it and it improved my mood
dramatically.
Since I developed interest in the daily
practice of the inner smile I have read a lot on the subject. I've
seen articles that claimed smiling reduced stress hormones. There are
also articles that say even when you're unhappy smiling can shift
that mood. I'm no scientist so I can't really verify whether that's
true or not but it certainly feels that way when you are legitimately
smiling.
Whatever you do, don't fake smile! To
quote an article from the Baseline of Health Foundation: “A 2011
study at Michigan State University in East Lansing found that people
who had to be polite all day at work and produce fake smiles ended up
with overall worse moods than others. Yet, when those same subjects
were told to conjure their smiles based on happy thoughts, both their
moods and their productivity levels increased.”
(http://www.jonbarron.org/article/fake-smile-equals-lower-stress)
There are even people who think that
smiling is a key to their success in life. Here's where I'm going to
really indulge my inner skeptic just a bit. A smile is certainly a
sales tool. Nobody is going to buy something from a rude or
depressing salesperson. However, if the item being sold costs three
times as much as the competition the fact that the salesperson is
smiling just makes me think they're smiling at how much of a fool I
am to buy from them. So, while smiling is a tool I don't for one
moment think that it leads automatically to success in business or in
life. Good people and bad people smile, but that's the subject of a
separate article.
Another important point to me is that
there is no downside to smiling. Take for example something we should
all be doing, exercise. You have to be careful not to injure yourself
doing specific exercises in the wrong way or with bad form. How can
you smile wrong? Smiling is that universal language that every person
in every culture on the planet earth understands. It can't be done
badly and is always understood.
One last point before I let you go.
Make sure that you don't just smile with your mouth. Smile with your
eyes too. Smile so broadly from happy memories that you engage the
muscles around your eyes. This is known as “Duchenne Smiling”
and is the real smile that reflects the mood from inside. The inner
smile.
