How Smiling Benefits Your Brain
Smiling is a natural human expression of happiness or joy that happens largely involuntarily. Your favorite song comes on the radio, you get that job offer, you see a treasured old friend, or a silly joke hits just the right spot. Whatever the reason, we can all agree that it feels good. And there’s a reason for that. Cracking a smile is good for your brain. Let’s find out why that is.
Grinning is Good!
If you’ve ever experienced someone telling you to “just cheer up, smile,” you’ll know it can be pretty frustrating. It always seems to happen when you’re having a bad day, and it’s just not what you need to hear. But as counter-intuitive as it might sound, especially if you don’t feel like it, turning that frown upside down can materially change the way you feel.
What Can Smiling Do for Me?
Several studies have shown that putting a smile on your face can have a variety of health benefits. These include:
Relieving pain
Aiding anxiety and depression
Improving mood
Fighting off stress
Reducing heart rate
Boosting your immune system
How Does It Work?
Sound too good to be true? Then you’ll probably want to hear the science to back up the claims. Let’s look into our brain chemistry for the answers.
When you smile, tiny molecules within your brain called neuropeptides activate. Neuropeptides are designed to help you deal with stress, and they help your neurons to communicate with one another.
Smiling also releases endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine into the brain. This beautiful blend of neurotransmitters is associated with positive feelings such as happiness, and lower levels of anxiety.
This chemical cocktail also has the ability to lower your heart rate and blood pressure.
And endorphins are the body’s natural painkiller, helping to lower pain levels.
What If I Don’t Feel Like Smiling?
Let’s be honest, we’re not all walking around happy-go-lucky and smiling all the time, and that’s okay. But the amazing thing is, the brain can still produce these feel-good chemicals when you fake a smile. So this is one of those times where faking it till you make it really does make sense! With that in mind, whether or not you’re feeling like smiling today, try it out and give a quick yourself a quick brain boost. Plus, smiling at a stranger could do the same thing for them, too – it’s contagious!