The illuminating power of a smile.

This week’s theme on self-improvement, growth and creativity is…Smile.

I always smile at people as I pass them on the street.

I make it a point to wave and smile to fellow runners coming at me.  Some respond, some don’t and some cross the street in traffic because they think I’m nuts or about to ask for something.

I like to smile.  It makes me feel happy and like I did my tiny part to make the world better.  Also to show strangers that not everyone they meet is a potential threat.  Beats walking around with a scowl, which I was fond of doing for a long time as it was my personal shield against the intrusion of strangers.

I noticed something rattling around my head about this broad smile and hearty greeting.  The smile is not mine.  That isn’t to say it’s contrived.  The smile belongs to my internal sidekick, Oliver or Ollie Bug whom you can see in the accompanying illustration.  Ollie smiles all the time because he’s a six year old shielded from the rough edges of this world.  As he should be.

Ollie smiles because he’s happy, he’s friends with everyone and everyone is a potential new friend.

A smile, when genuinely offered, is an innocent gesture of friendliness and warmth.  It is disarming (which is probably what freaks some people out).  It’s the first greeting a child learns and the first thing they offer you as an introduction.  It is an expression of a state of being, of happiness.  It’s what you do when you see the people you love, when you do something amazing and what you actually should do when you meet someone for the first time.

If a smile, given or received, makes you feel good, there’s a reason for it.  There is plenty of research into the physiologic effects of smiling.  Some of it is exhaustive to the point of over thinking it.  I’ll stick to basics for easy digestion.

A study in Psychology Today referenced a few studies which cut down my Google time exponentially.  Among the handful of useful nuggets;

• Smiling bathes your brain in a nice marinade of serotonin, dopamine and endorphins, the Feel Good potion.
• Also, if you want to be seen as more attractive, slap a big smile on your mug. One study found that both men and women were more attracted to images of people who made eye contact and smiled than those who did not.
• If that wasn’t enough, smiling is contagious. No really.  In a Swedish study, subjects were shown a picture of someone smiling.  The researchers asked the subjects to frown in response. Instead, the facial expressions went directly to imitation of what subjects saw.  It took conscious effort to frown.  If you’re smiling at someone, it’s likely they can’t help but smile back. If they don’t, they’re making a conscious effort not to.

It’s not so easy as that.

How you smile also matters.

There are many types of smiles but only one is associated with positive emotional states.   The upper lips curl and the muscles around the eye contract.  This is called the Duchenne Marker after the researcher who documented the observation.  It is identified as the only “genuine” smile whereas similes without the marker could be smiles of politeness or manipulation.

To examine this further, a study published by the National Institute of Health suggests there are different effects for different smiles.  The study identified at least three distinct types of genuine, spontaneous smiles. Each one serves a different social function. “Reward” smiles show happiness and reinforce behavior, “affiliation” smiles strengthen social bonds between people, and “dominance” smiles are derisive and signal feelings of superior social status.

The results of that study found that stress levels in the body were reduced with the offering of reward or affiliation smiles.  Stress levels were elevated and remained so when presented with dominance smiles.

The grand takeaway here is…smile.  Slap a big warm toothy grin on your face whenever you can.  It makes you feel good, it makes others feel good.  It’s contagious so don’t be afraid to smile like Ollie because he makes friends wherever he goes.

How bad can more friends be?

Tom Serafini is a writer, illustrator, motivator of dreamers and sometime stand-up comedian residing in Brooklyn, New York.  His first illustrated picture book, Ollie Bug and the Icky Sticky Thing From Space, will be funded through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign coming soon.  It’s on the list.