Keep Smiling!

While you’re practicing (I hope!) better breathing (and if you aren’t, please go back to yesterdays post and start practicing it today) I want to share a really simple stress-relieving technique with you that you can practice anywhere at any time – and the more often the better.

You probably don’t know it, but you are very efficient chemical factory. This is one of the reasons I can never understand people coughing up large sums for supplementary, more dangerous, and less effective chemicals – but that’s a whole other story. The important thing is that you appreciate that practically everything you do with your body causes a chemical reaction that can be positive or negative – and that many of those reactions are completely under your control.

All facial gestures, for example, trigger the production of neurotransmitters – negative or positive. When you smile, your brain is triggered to produce ‘uppers’ to fit the gesture, and your mood and energy levels lift accordingly – and (obviously!) the longer you smile, and the more you smile, the more ‘uppers’ your brain will produce.

Equally, if you frown the brain produces the equivalent of ‘downers’ - and the longer you frown and the more you frown the more ‘downers’ your brain will churn out, and your mood and energy levels will drop dramatically in consequence.

If you want to, you can test the speed and efficiency of this kind of automatic chemical response by going into your bathroom right now and snarling – really seriously snarling – at yourself in the mirror.

Whenever people snarl aggressively, the body immediately produces adrenaline and painkillers - and if you manage a really good snarl in the course of your experiment, you’ll find that not only will you undergo a very noticeable mood change, but also that your heart rate will go up, your nostrils will flare, and you’ll be able to feel ‘fight or flight’ quantities of adrenaline flooding into your system. There isn’t a threat in your bathroom, of course – and no reason to fight or to run away and live to fight another day either - but your unconscious mind will assume that there is, because that’s what you’re saying with your face.

Facial expressions are a particularly unsubtle form of body language, and the easiest of all to produce deliberately – and it’s a good idea to produce positive ones, because (as you will have learned for yourself if you managed a really successful snarl in your bathroom just now!) a particular facial gesture doesn’t have to be accompanied by the appropriate emotion in order to produce results. ‘Fake’ snarling produces adrenaline and painkillers; ‘fake’ smiling – smiling when you don’t feel like it, in other words – produces a cascade of upper-type chemicals from your brain, because your unconscious mind assumes that you wouldn’t be making the gesture without good reason.

This built-in, easily manipulated mechanism means that you have the power to influence your own moods, and reduce (or raise!) your own stress levels.

• Negative and anxious facial expressions produce very definite stress reactions in the autonomic nervous system because the neurotransmitters they provoke are stress-producing.
• Positive and happy facial gestures lower stress because the neurotransmitters they provoke make you feel good.

It’s obviously therefore in your own best interests to try to maintain positive facial expressions - and to make the effort to actively produce them if you’re feeling really miserable about something.

It’s important to bear in mind as well that positive facial expressions receive positive responses from other people – and equally that negative ones receive negative responses.

This is because facial expressions and moods appear to be contagious. In other words, when we perceive that someone else is happy, or sad, or angry, we don’t just register the fact, we actually experience the emotion, albeit to a lesser degree. Consequently, if you smile, you’ll not only feel better yourself, you’ll make other people feel better, too, and that mood will build on itself. Equally, of course, if your facial expressions are negative, you’ll make other people feel negative and that mood will build on itself.

Most of our stress and many of our negative thoughts and feelings directly result of dealing with difficult people.

Making the effort to maintain positive facial expressions habitually will go a long way toward ensuring that the person creating the difficulty isn’t you.

Oh yes – there is just one other thing. We all age and, in the process, we all get the lines and wrinkles we deserve. Make smiling your habitual facial expression today. Nobody needs to get written off as a miserable old bat on sight...

Emily - http://www.therapypartnership.com/