Smile

Are you feeling upset? Try to smile. You can hold a pencil between your teeth toward the back of your mouth in order to force one if you are having that bad of a day. When your mouth and face form into a smile it has a physiological effect on your brain. Your brain automatically becomes happier. This is the notion of cause and effect. The happy brain makes you smile and the smile makes your brain happy.

What does a smile say? A genuine smile fundamentally changes your face. We as humans have mirror neurons that allow us to feel what others are feeling. If you smile in a genuine way, others are able to tell. There are subtle micro-expressions on your face that signal to others if your smile is genuine or not. If your smile is in fact genuine, then the other person will experience a bit of happiness. Who doesn’t want to be smiled at?

There are about 300 muscles in the face. When you smile, it relaxes them all. We spend so much of our day with our eyes squinted and faces scrunched looking into screens of all sorts. When we finally pull our heads out of the virtual world, we should take care not to carry these facial expressions with us into the world. Take a second, and smile. How does that feel? Now you are ready to greet the world with a smile. The world will surely smile back if you take the first step.

Try to be first to smile at people passing by. Take this small first step as an initiative. Most people will smile back. Perhaps those who don't needed someone to smile at them even more than the people who reciprocate. You can't help but to have a warm, happy feeling inside when you are smiling at people. On top of that you have taken some small step toward building initiative taking skills. This will become a brain pattern and before you know it, when you meet anyone new, you will greet them with a big smile as that is how you greet all people.

You reap the seeds you sow. If you are putting out a genuine smile and accompanied positive feelings into the universe, you will surely get those back. It has been said time and time again, you get that which you project out into the universe back, but ten fold. If for no other reason than to increase your own personal happiness, put a smile on! It is the least difficult unselfish, selfish thing you can do. You can genuinely know that you made a small, positive impact on someone else’s day.