You’ve heard that smiling has lots of social benefits and that smiling can make you appear more attractive, likable, trustworthy, and even intelligent.
But are these enough reasons to undergo cosmetic dentistry procedures to improve the appearance of your smile? Oh No! Smiling does much more than that.
Most people are not aware of the fact that smiling more often can improve their health, helping them to live longer, and also improve their productivity at work.
Here are ways smiling can boost your health (both psychologically and physically) and productivity at work:
- Smiling Improves Your Mood
Frowning is synonymous with worrying and failure but smiling is a sign of cheerfulness and confidence. Smiling, even when you’re feeling blue, can improve your mood better than coffee does.
Smiling is recommended for those struggling with depression and anxiety. A survey showed that smiling more often, even when you’re depressed or in low spirits, can help improve your mood and create positive thoughts within you.
Hence, if you’re having a bad day at work, try as much as possible to make yourself smile, this way, your smile will become genuine and your low spirit lifted.
- Smiling Makes Others Trust You More
Smiling does not only help you to build a better relationship, but it also makes others trust you more.
If your work requires you to deal with or relate with so many people, giving a genuine smile tells the people that you are confident of yourself and this will, in turn, increase trustworthiness.
Smiling at people makes them see you as an extrovert and someone they can trust. A study was conducted to determine the impact of smiling on willingness to trust. The study revealed that smiling increased willingness to trust by over 10%.
When you always put on a relaxed, smiling expression at work, even in seemingly stressful situations, you’re invariably telling others that you can exude confidence and cope well under pressure.
This act can go as far as boosting your productivity and building relationships with colleagues.
Even if your job requires relating with clients over the phone, smiling over the phone will affect the tone of your voice and your receiver would be able to pick up on your smiling tones.
- Smiling Relieves Pain
You may wonder what smiling has to do with relieving you of your pain. Believe it or not, smiling, indeed, relieves pain.
A recent report revealed that smiling and laughter stimulates the release of natural pain reliever within your body.
The report further stated that smile and laughter can increase your pain threshold, increasing your pain tolerance level.
Hence, if you’re in pain, try as much as possible to make yourself smile and your pain would be relieved.
- Smiling Helps You Build Better Relationships
Do you get attracted to people who smile a lot? So also people get attracted to you when you smile always. According to research, people who smile always tend to be more likable and attractive than those who don’t smile.
Do you know what being attractive and likable does? It makes it easier for you to build and maintain better relationships with people – family members, friends, and colleagues.
This is very essential for your overall wellbeing and health. Research showed that people who smile often have better interpersonal skills and more stable relationships than people who don’t smile.
So, keep smiling to help build stronger, better, and healthier relationships with colleagues at work.
- Smiling Creates a Stronger Immune System in the Body
Does that look like a surprise to you? Take it or leave it, smiling helps in boosting your body’s immune system.
A dentist report showed that smiling triggers the release of signaling molecules in your brain that ward off fight illnesses and stress, while worry decreases the immune system of your body.
A recent study on lactating mothers showed that smiling increases immune responses. We can say that a smile works like medicine.
- Smiling Relieves You of Stress
Normally, a long day can build up stress within your body but worrying does no good than adding to the stress. However, frequent smiling would help your body to effectively handle this stress.
For instance, during a difficult or energetic task, the heartbeat rate tends to increase, but smiling can lower the heartbeat rate.
Generally, stress increases heartbeat rate and heightens blood pressure but making yourself smile, whether you’re feeling happy or not, would reduce your stress.
- Smiling is Associated with Longer Life
Smiling is related to positive emotions and both are found to be associated with longer life.
8. Smiling Makes You More Creative
People who smile are more creative. So, smiling helps you to develop new ideas that make you productive. If your job requires you to develop new ideas, then always smiling at work is the key.
This study showed that workers who are smiling and in a good mood on a certain day are more likely to have creative ideas all through that day and even the next, irrespective of their mood.
- Smiling Makes You Happier
Smiling doesn’t just make your face look happy, it makes your whole body happy and there is scientific backing to prove.
Smiling triggers the release of serotonin within your body. Serotonin is a natural antidepressant, which also helps in regulating your sleep, mood, and learning.
Hence, when you smile at work, you will engage better with what you do, and this will increase your productivity. Generally, happier people are smarter, hardworking, and get more jobs done than unhappy people.
- Smiling Regulates Your Blood Pressure
It is medically certified that smiling always can help lower your blood pressure. This is good news for your heart health, especially if you are aging or think a lot.
A recent review explained that smiling triggers an initial increase in heart rate, followed by a period of muscle relaxation, and finally a decrease in heart rate, lowering blood pressure.
Aside from lowering blood pressure, smiling can also help to reduce your risk of developing other heart diseases.
11. Smiling Makes Other People Happier Too
Do you know that smiling is contagious? Yes! Smiling doesn’t make you happy alone but it also makes people around you happy too.
When you smile at someone, it’s normal to smile back, and that’s because seeing a smile triggers a neurological response in our brains.
When you smile, it transfers to other colleagues and everyone else will begin to smile. That means all staff would be productive for the rest of the day.
Even if there is any member of staff that wants to frown, seeing smiling faces around the office area would make it difficult for such a person to do so.
A study revealed that participants couldn’t frown while looking at a picture of a person smiling. This is because our brains automatically wanted to imitate a happy expression.
More so, always smiling and causing other colleagues to smile will certainly make you one of the most friendly and popular staff around the office. Smiling would also improve personal relationships since you’ll make others happy and more relaxed.
The list is inexhaustible and the effect of smiling on your health and productivity at work cannot be overemphasized. However, most people find it difficult to smile or laugh.
It’s not because they don’t want to smile but they are not confident enough to reveal the bad appearance of their teeth.
Since giving an appealing smile requires attractive and well-set teeth, to enjoy the benefits of smiling listed above, your teeth must be in good condition – white and well-set.
A recent survey by Procter & Gamble revealed that 80% of Canadians are unhappy with their teeth and would prefer to have whiter teeth. If you’re one of them, here is good news for you.
Cosmetic dentistry is the best option for you. With cosmetic dentistry, you can completely change the appearance of your teeth and smile to enjoy the benefits listed above.
Conclusion
Smiling frequently is beneficial for your health and productivity at work.
You can’t always control everything that happens to you, but by smiling more often, you can change how you relate to these occurrences, and brighten your experience in life.
So just keep smiling, even when you’re in a low spirit, crack a smile and enjoy the numerous benefits that smiling has for your health and productivity.
