Laughing and smiling feel good, but they also have noticeable effects that improve your life!
Frowning, smiling, laughing, grimacing, scowling, blushing, rolling our eyes—there’s a lot our facial expressions can say about how we’re feeling. Maybe we’re upset and angry, or perhaps we’re happy or nervous. The same expression can carry with itself a hundred different nuances and meanings. Sometimes it may even be faked. However, in many ways, our facial expressions can directly affect our bodies and minds rather than the other way around. This is no more true than the way we laugh and smile. When we fill our lives with laughter and smiles, it can come with some incredible social, mental, and health benefits that can improve our lives.
Your Appearance
Have you ever noticed that people seem more attractive when they show off their grins? A beautiful smile lights up a face like no other, and it even gives us a temporary facelift. Some studies have shown that people often see people as younger and thinner when they smile. Meanwhile, a frown can put the world’s weight not just on their shoulders but on their faces. So if you ever want to give yourself an instant boost to your appearance, don’t be afraid to show off your beautiful pearly whites.
Your Relationships
Attraction
Smiles are attractive, and not just because they improve our looks. We all feel more drawn to people who smile and seem happier than those who don’t. They look more approachable, friendly, and “likable.” We’re much more likely to open a conversation with them than someone who’s scowling and has their arms crossed in a closed-off manner.
Connection
People who continuously smile and laugh also have better luck in the love department. Laughing is contagious, and it can help us feel more connected to one another when we’re smiling and laughing together. First dates full of joy and laughter are universally better than those that are stiff and awkward. They can also be a good indicator of how long a relationship is more likely to last. While there’s no sure-fire way to a perfect marriage, couples who smile more together often find their relationships more emotionally satisfying and lasting longer.
Your Mind
Mood Booster
While we often smile and laugh when we’re happy, smiling and laughing can also improve our moods. These actions tell your brain to release our body’s feel-good hormones: endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine. These hormones flood us with natural antidepressants and painkillers that can give us an instant pick-me-up. Even faking a smile can produce similar effects. When people push their lips wide into a grin using chopsticks or pencils, they feel better than before. Now imagine the effects a genuine smile can have on your mindset!
Stress Relief
Along with the good feeling we get from the wave of happy hormones, smiling and laughing can also reduce our stress levels. They lower our body’s output of stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline, keeping our minds alert for danger and ready to act at a moment’s notice. Without our fight-flight-freeze response getting kicked into gear, we can stay more relaxed.
Your Body
Heart Rate and Blood Pressure
Smiling and laughing can keep our hearts working better, as they should. Laughing can lower your heart rate and relax your muscles, helping with your body’s circulation. When your body stays calm, the blood vessels remain open rather than constricting and lower blood pressure. Over time, this can reduce your chance of developing heart disease.
Immune System
Laughing can boost the immune system by increasing your immune cell count, allowing our bodies to better protect us from infections, illnesses, and diseases. People with weakened immune systems often see the effects in their smiles too. When our mouths can’t fight off infections, we become more prone to dental problems like tooth decay, gingivitis, and gum disease.
Severe oral health issues can even become bigger problems for our general health. While oral bacteria can spread to nearby teeth, gum, and jawbone tissue, it can also enter the bloodstream and infect the rest of your body. Patients with untreated cavities and gum disease are more likely to develop diabetes, heart disease, pneumonia, rheumatoid arthritis, and pregnancy complications.
Your Success
When you love what you do, time seems to fly by with all the work to show for it. People who smile more in the workplace are much more productive than those who can’t wait to clock out at the end of the day. They spend more time on-task, learn and understand better, and are usually more creative.
Smiling and laughing can also make us seem more charismatic and competent, making us better liked by coworkers, bosses, and clients. Research has shown that people with beautiful smiles and healthy senses of humor are more likely to get hired or promoted than those who don’t.
How To Smile and Laugh More
When many of our patients start smiling more often, they worry that their smile won’t look natural. Building a habit of faking a smile can be difficult at first. It’s common to believe that if you can feel it’s fake, others can tell too. Our Bellflower dentists are often asked, “How can I make my smile real?” Here’s what you can do:
Practice
Practice makes perfect in many ways, and that’s also true for your smile and laugh. It might seem silly, but the more you smile, the more genuine it becomes. Plus, by looking in the mirror, you can adjust your grin until it’s how you want it. Soon, you’ll find yourself achieving that perfect smile every time. If you need help getting started, give yourself reminders to smile throughout the day. For some people, this may mean setting alarms periodically or writing post-it notes for you to find at home or work. Do what works for you and stick to it.
Cosmetic Dentistry
Anywhere between a third and half of all Americans have something they don’t like about their smile. Small cracks and chips, crooked and protruding teeth, and years-worth of yellowing can make it difficult for people to feel confident showing off their pearly whites. Thankfully, there’s more to be done at the dentist than getting a dental cleaning or having a cavity filled. With cosmetic dentistry, you can reinvent your grin’s shade, shape, and alignment to achieve a perfect Hollywood smile.
What are the different types of cosmetic dentistry? There are multiple cosmetic procedures available, with aesthetics playing a crucial role in non-cosmetic work as well. Gum contouring can replace missing tissue in late-stage gum disease. Silver amalgam fillings can be replaced with composite to give a more natural look. Porcelain crowns, though not as long-lived as metal ones, can restore the appearance, feel, and bite of a natural tooth. However, when most people consider getting “cosmetic dentistry,” they are talking about the four most common kinds:
Tooth Bonding: bonding shapes composite resin over a tooth’s surface to change its appearance. It is used to fix cracks, chips, minor crookedness, stains and yellowing, gaps between teeth, and incorrectly shaped teeth.
Porcelain Veneers: veneers also remake your teeth’s look, but they can make more extensive changes using thin, porcelain shells attached to the enamel.
Orthodontics: orthodontic treatments allow you to correct alignment problems with your smile like crookedness, crowding, overbite, underbite, and gap teeth. Clear aligners like Invisalign can shave months and even years off of your treatment time.
Professional Teeth Whitening: using powerful dental bleach, you can whiten your teeth to remove years of stains that over-the-counter strips can’t. Professional whitening can either be done in the dentist office or at home using a kit made specially to your smile.
What are the benefits of cosmetic dentistry? Along with correcting aesthetic issues like cosmetic damage, teeth stains, misaligned bites, and misshapen teeth, these procedures also come with these advantages:
Better dental health
Improved self-esteem and confidence
Better speech and eating
Happier patients, more genuine grins
Money saved over time
Stay Positive
Just as your smiling and laughing can change your mood, so can happy thoughts make it easier for you to smile and laugh. Look for the humor, benefits, and silver linings in every situation. By staying more positive in your day to day life, you’ll find that your smiles look and feel more natural. Plus, you’ll start finding it harder not to smile than it is to let your pearly whites shine.
It’s alright if you have trouble keeping up a consistently happy attitude. Stress, your mental health, and a plain-old bad day can put a damper on things. However, that shouldn’t keep you from turning things around, even for only a short while. If you can, try giving yourself a minute or two of uninterrupted time to forget about your daily life’s worries and stresses and let yourself relax. Try giving a smile to let those endorphins flow and give you an extra boost for your mental state.
