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The Simple Smile
Have you noticed that some people tend to be more ‘smiling’ than others? Maybe you are one of them. As a human being we have this unique capability to smile.
In the book, ‘Thinking fast and slow’, Daniel Kahneman mentions an experiment that was done to understand how our body and facial expressions affect our emotions and vice versa.
Here is an excerpt:
“For example, being amused tends to make you smile, and smiling tends to make you feel amused. Go ahead and take a pencil, and hold it between your teeth for a few seconds with the eraser pointing to your right and the point to your left. Now hold the pencil so the point is aimed straight in front of you, by pursing your lips around the eraser end. You were probably unaware that one of these actions forced your face into a frown and the other into a smile. College students were asked to rate the humor of cartoons from Gary Larson’s The Far Side while holding a pencil in their mouth. Those who were ‘smiling’ (without any awareness of doing so) found the cartoons funnier than those who were ‘frowning’. Simple common gestures can also unconsciously influence our thoughts and feelings.”
The message is clear I suppose: SMILE WHENEVER POSSIBLE – the power of a simple smile is quite underestimated by most of us (though we would all generally agree to the benefits of it!).
We often contend that there is no solid reason to smile. Is that true? Look around you. There are so many little incredible things happening. Any one of those can bring a smile to your lips.
Remind yourself to SMILE.
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