The Magic of a Morning Smile
A young 8-year-old Stella shared her precious life lesson: “Wake up every day happy.”
Before you ask how one does that, Stella beautifully explained that the first thing she does when she opens her eyes in the morning, and sometimes even before she opens her eyes, is smile.
She says, “No one ever told me to do it, but I have always done it and it helps me to wake up every day in a good mood and start things off great. My teachers have even noticed that I always come into the classroom in a good mood!”
That’s an eight-year-old Stella intuitively practicing what leading scientists have discovered after decades of research.
Smiling can trick your brain into believing you’re happy, which can then spur actual feelings of happiness. When you smile, through the physical act of smiling, the brain sees the muscle activity and assumes that humor is happening. The baseball card study also found a clear correlation between how big a smile someone made on a baseball card photo and how long they would live. The people who smiled the most turned out to live 7 years longer than those who didn’t.
Happiness, as they say, is a choice or an obligation. It isn’t a pot of gold you discover at the end of the rainbow but rather a muscle you build with practice over time. The act of smiling every morning is an effort to learn to smile a lot.
If pretending to smile is not your game, then you could simply try to bite your pen or put it above your upper lip. A small, encouraging, self-motivated action to stretch your lips like Stella and guide them towards cheerfulness, is perhaps the smallest seed we can plant to cultivate a garden of childlike joy.
We know that smiling might not be easy to do everyday, but we have something more! No matter where you are right now, plug in your earphones or turn your device speakers on, sit back, and tune into this Happiness Song coming to you from the Happiness Monk of Bhutan (originally created by Thich Nhat Hanh). 🎶
Do let us know if this helped! 😁
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