Anne’s August Update and Musings – A Simple Smile…or Is It?

Do you ever find yourself smiling for no real reason? Yes, we all smile when we’re happy, but did you know that simply smiling can also make you a little happier?

Research has found that deliberately smiling can increase existing feelings of happiness and can even initiate feelings of happiness. The effect may not be enormous. Just smiling certainly doesn’t make all your problems disappear, but there is some very real science behind that smile.

A genuine, full-face smile is often called a Duchenne smile, named after a 19th-century French neurologist who studied how individual facial muscles created human expressions. Duchenne discovered that the smile associated with genuine joy wasn’t produced solely by the mouth. The muscles surrounding the eyes participated, too.

In other words, we smile with our mouths, but we also smile with our eyes.

When you have a full Duchenne smile, your cheek muscles pull the corners of your mouth upward while the muscles around your eyes contract and lift your cheeks. That’s when those little crinkles beside your eyes appear—the ones we sometimes call crow’s feet.

Maybe we should rename them “evidence of a life properly amused” and wear them proudly!

Smiling can even affect our perception of pain. In one study, participants who made a Duchenne smile while receiving a saline injection reported about 40 percent less pain than those who maintained a neutral expression. Their heart-rate response was also lower.

Smiling may also help our bodies recover from stress. Studies have found changes in heart-rate recovery associated with smiling during stressful tasks, and friendly smiles from others have been associated with a faster return toward baseline cortisol levels after social stress.

So maybe the next time you’re paying your bills, a genuine smile is worth a try. It certainly can’t hurt. Well, unless you’re looking at your property tax bill. Then all bets are off.

I experienced the power of a smile myself just yesterday.

I was grocery shopping and passed by the seafood counter. The man behind the counter offered me the most wonderful, genuine smile as he asked if he could help me with something. I couldn’t help but smile back.

I wasn’t in a bad mood. Nothing particularly exciting had happened. But in that tiny exchange, my joy increased exponentially. Just from someone’s smile.

Smiles are social signals, and another person’s body can actually respond to them. Research has found that people receiving friendly, rewarding smiles after a stressful social task returned to baseline cortisol levels more quickly. Think about that. Something as simple as the kind of smile you give another person may influence their physiological stress response.

What a lovely—and completely free—gift to offer a friend or a stranger.

One thing I found particularly interesting while doing my smile research was that studies have observed a significant decline in public smiling as we age.

Why do we smile less as we grow older?

I don’t have the answer, but I can imagine a few reasons. Have we lost a little of our easy access to joy as we move through life? Have responsibilities, worries and expectations crowded some of it out? Perhaps we’ve left behind a little of the innocence of childlike wonder.

There is a commonly repeated statistic that children smile about 400 times a day while adults smile only about 20. Those specific numbers aren’t well-established scientific facts, so I won’t pretend they are. But research does support the broader observation that public smiling tends to decline with age.

And that alone makes me wonder.

Maybe smiling isn’t simply how we show the world that we feel good. Maybe it’s also one of the ways we help create a world that feels a little better.

Here’s a fun experiment to try.

For a few days, start noticing people’s smiles—not judging them, just noticing.

How many people smile at you first? How many smile back when you smile at them? Who smiles only with their mouth, and who smiles with their eyes? Do you feel different when you deliberately offer a smile to someone else? What happens when you smile simply because you can?

I have a favorite saying that I use for myself as well as offer to others:

Be the Dog.

Here’s what I mean.

Dogs don’t seem to have much of a joy threshold.

A walk? BEST THING EVER!

A snack? BEST THING EVER!

You come home after being gone eleven minutes? YOU HAVE RETURNED! YEAH!

A scratch behind the ears? LIFE IS PERFECT.

Technically, a dog doesn’t “smile” exactly the way a human does. Dogs communicate with their whole bodies—a relaxed face, bright eyes, open mouth, ears, posture and, of course, that wonderful wagging tail.

But we humans look at all of that and see one thing:

That dog is smiling.

And what do we do?

We smile back.

There’s even some lovely science happening there. Mutual gazing between dogs and humans has been shown to increase oxytocin, a hormone involved in social bonding, in both species. Human looks at dog. Dog looks at human. Everybody feels a little better. What a lovely feedback loop.

Most of us spend an awful lot of time looking for things that will make us happy. Dogs just seem to live there. Everything is a reason for joy.

So perhaps as we move through our day, we can remember to Be the Dog.

Find the joy in what’s already there. Enjoy the moment as if it really is the BEST THING EVER!

Because maybe it is.

And perhaps if we smile just a little more—at ourselves, at one another, at a stranger standing behind the seafood counter—the whole world benefits.

Because while we’re busy overthinking, worrying and being pulled in a thousand different directions, the dog is standing patiently by the door looking at us with that enormous smile:

WALK????

It’s the best thing ever.

Are you smiling? 😊

Love and light,

Anne

Willa. She understood “Be the Dog.”