The current state of the world can make it hard for you to find a smile every single day. Most of us are walking around with a brave face, but we rarely feel the urge to smile. Did you know that smiling can be extremely beneficial for your health and life? It’s crazy how such a small contraction of muscles in your face can have a significant impact on many aspects of your day. Put shortly, people that smile regularly tend to feel a lot happier and more confident.
Photo, Nicolás Villalobos.
We’ll explore these ideas in more detail, as well as looking at some tips to help you learn how to smile more often; without forcing it either. Hopefully, by the end of this post, you’ll feel more compelled to smile.
Smiling releases endorphins: Endorphins are a hormone within your body that helps improve your mood. You release endorphins when you exercise, and you also release them when you laugh and smile. In essence, they help you feel happier and more positive, meaning there’s actual science behind the statement that smiling makes you happy. It’s funny because people think that you smile because you’re happy, but smiling itself actually makes you happy.
Smiling helps you relax, helping many health issues: Similarly, when you smile, you release all kinds of chemical signals in your body. These signals send messages to your brain, effectively making you relax. As a result, this can have a profound effect on your physical and mental health. Smiling is shown to potentially help decrease stress and high blood pressure, thanks to how much it calms you down. Smiling can also help you feel a decrease in tension throughout your body, offering a temporary relief from physical aches and pains.
Smiling conveys confidence: Slapping a smile on your face can make you seem more confident to others. This is particularly true if you’re working or going for a job interview. No smile will make it look like you’re nervous, anxious, or worried. Smiling is like a projection of your self-confidence out into the world. As such, people start to smile back at you and respect you more. Funnily enough, this fuels your confidence and makes you smile even more. It’s a fantastic cycle to end up in, and one that will help you get rid of some self-confidence issues.
Clearly, smiling has its benefits. It will improve your mood, help you feel less stressed, and boost your confidence. So, why don’t we smile as often as we should? There are many reasons for this, but the two main ones are external factors making you feel sad, and self-confidence issues. The following part of this post will teach you how to tackle problems like this and smile more often.
Photo, Hybrid.
Get to the root of your confidence issues: While smiling helps you feel more confident, it’s sometimes hard to find the confidence to smile. Typically, this all revolves around your teeth. If you are unhappy with your teeth, you will be less inclined to smile at people. Why? Because you’re self-conscious about revealing teeth that might be stained or out of alignment. So, you keep your lips closed and put on a grimace at best.
Thus, the best way to handle this problem is to address your oral health issues. As you can see on whitesdentalcare.com.au, there are plenty of dental treatments you can get to sort out your smile. It may be a simple case of teeth whitening, or you might need braces/aligners to straighten them. Either way, find the treatments required to give you a set of teeth you’re happy with. Instantly, you’ll feel a greater inclination to smile everywhere that you go. As a result, you get to see the benefits listed above.
Think of things that make you happy: Loads of external factors can put a frown on your face; particularly during a pandemic. Therefore, you don’t feel the need to smile as regularly as you should. Whatever’s causing your sad thoughts, a quick way to fix this is to think about the opposite. Instead of dwelling on all that’s wrong in your life, consider things that make you happy. Think about your family, friends, pets … anything that puts a smile on your face. Even if you have to rove your memory banks for memories that make you happy, it will help. By focusing on the positive, you stop dwelling on the negative, making it much easier to smile.
On that note, everyone reading this should have a big smile on their faces right now. It can improve your life, but it’s understandable why you might struggle to smile. Hopefully, the tips at the end of this piece will help you get over this issue and smile more every day.
