Your Challenge Today:
Smile through my heart …
By Bernadette Kathryn, LMT, IHLC
Let my soul smile through my heart
and my heart smile through my eyes,
that I may scatter rich smiles in sad hearts.
~ Paramahansa Yogananda
The Duchenne is defined by the smile which utilizes the muscles around the eyes that lift the cheeks to produce crow’s feet and has long been held as an inimitable sign of genuine human emotion. According to recent studies, smiling reduces the stress that your body and mind feel, almost similar to getting good sleep. Smiling changes your brain helps you recover from stress and generates more positive emotions within you. Smiling self-medicates and heals, it has specific hormonal and physiological consequences which make us feel better and want to smile more!
The positive effects of smiling are shown to be more rapid with Duchenne smiling compared with regular smiling or not smiling at all. So, putting on a Duchenne smile, lifting your cheeks an including your eyes may be just the tonic to combat stress. Your brain keeps track of your smiles; it knows how often you’ve smiled and which overall emotional state you are in. That’s why we often feel happier around children – they smile more. On average, children smile around 400 times a day. While happy people still smile 40-50 times a day, the average is only 20 times a day ~ and we would do well for yourself to practice smiling more!
- Smiling leads to decrease in the stress-induced hormones that negatively affect your health
- Smiling breeds trust makes you happier and helps you to live longer
- Genuine laughter increases breathing while lowering blood pressure and heart rate
- And most importantly, smiling can be learned. Or to put more precisely, re-learnt
Sadly, most of us have forgotten how to smile genuinely over time. We have adopted social smiles more and more which are less natural and don’t carry the same physiological benefits as a genuine smile. Smiling is the outward manifestation of happiness and serves to connect us to others. We are all “prewired” to communicate with others via this system of smiling. Thus it has been shown that people who cannot smile, because of facial paralysis, have more difficulty in social relationships. On average, women smile more than men. And sharing a smile with someone else helps them to feel happier too!
daily affirmation!
I always smile, stand tall and walk proud.
I am a well-liked and respected woman.
Smiling breeds trust, makes you happier and helps you to live longer #LivingFitLIfestyle Click To Tweet
i am smiling today because a very silly thing happened. i was changing the bed linens when the shy cat came to play on the bed with me. i was so surprised at this unexpected behavior that i lost my concentration and found myself putting the dirty sheets back on the bed! so much for mindful bed making!
what fun to play with the shy kitty…. it’s nice that you have a furry family to distract you….
I am smiling that we have sunny, high of 79 degrees today. I am smiling that my schedule changed so that I have no more early mornings in the office (for now). I am smiling at the fact that my future husband has the smiles of a child (according to today’s post). He smiles hundreds of times a day and they are almost always with his whole face that enclude his eyes… that’s one of the many reasons I am always kissing his sweet face. This makes ME smile! 🙂
How wonderful — now you can easily go for your morning swim and you have a handsome hunk with a gorgeous smile to smooch on!