Should you smile even when you’re not happy?

If you’re having a bad day, smiling may just help you get through it.

 PICK-ME-UP. Smiling when you’re a bit under the weather can enhance your mood, studies have proven.

Research has revealed that putting up a smile, even if you’re not happy, can uplift your mood.

Psychologist Paul Ekman had an experiment called “facial coding“. While experimenting with negative facial expressions, Ekman noticed that his mood also changed.

In 1990, his research found that adopting a “Duchenne smile”, a smile that involves facial muscles around the eyes- could have positive impact on your brain that corresponds to a happier mood.

Adding to that, researchers from Kansas, Tara Kraft and Sarah Pressman, published a study with findings that faking a smile could brighten your mood. They used a rather unusual way of stimulating smiles from their subjects: chopsticks.

The subjects held chopsticks in their mouth in different configuration to form smiles and neutral expression. The researchers tried to find if muscle activity could affect one’s mood.

Some subjects assumed a Duchenne smile, while others demonstrate “social smile”, a smile that involves only the mouth. They found that subjects who exhibit Duchenne smile have a lower heart level after completing a stressful task compared to subjects who only smiled with neutral expression.

Scientists have a couple of reasons for this.  Their explanation is that smiling constricts the internal artery that brings blood to your brain. The result is that it lowers the temperature of the blood and the body. Basically, smiling keeps you from being hot-headed.

A botox surgeon in Maryland froze frown lines on a number of patients, which made it impossible to frown. He found that his patients had lower levels of depression, irritability and anxiety after the operation. In this case, his patients being not able to frown caused people around them to smile back.

So whenever you’re down, just try smiling and you might be pleasantly surprised with the result.