Photo: flickr
“Smile and the world smiles with you,” goes the cliché. But, turns out, there might just be something in it.
According to researchers, have a smile bring you further up in your career ladder. And even if you are faking it, the very act itself, rewires your brain, reduces stress levels and improve your mood.
A study from Penn State University has found that, when you smile, you appear more likeable, courteous and even competent. Smiling is contagious and everyone in the room feel that tiny bit happier. It has been shown by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden that frowning at someone who is smiling at you is tough.
How to get a pay raise? Try smiling!
New research is emerging all the time about the ‘plasticity’ of the brain – its extraordinary ability to morph and develop. Now it turns out that the act of smiling actually changes our grey matter, rewiring it to make positive patterns more than negative ones.
Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, agrees. He explains that we really can coach the brain “to scan for the good things in life – to help us see more possibility, to feel more energy and to succeed at higher levels.”
Achor's ‘The Positive Tetris Effect’ proposes that it if we work on a more positive thinking pattern, we can do something similar. Put simply, studies have shown that playing Tetris has been shown to help rewire the brain – demonstrating that by repeating a task, we become more adept at it and our brains require less energy to complete it.
Using that theory, Achor reckons we can also train our brains to repeatedly recognise the positive.
He says: “Happiness is a work ethic… It’s something that requires our brains to train, just as an athlete has to train.”
Source material from Telegraph