Smiling the best Superpower

Welp, Brian Johnson did it again.  Delivered to me an awesome food for thought message, and $25,000.  According to Frank Lipan's studies, smiling one smile has the same physical benefits as recieveing $25,000, or 2,000 bars of chocolate (minus the caloric intake).  Pretty awesome.  This TED talk, is a more than worth it 7 minutes.  Here it is, check it out: The Hidden Power of Smiling

Lipman discusses his 32 year longitudinal study at Berkley, measuring success and wellbeing in conjunction with measuring participants smiles.  Studies have also used athletes smiles on their baseball trading cards to correlate with their lifespan.  Players who had beeming smiles on their cards, lived up to 80 some years, whereas players that didn't sport (pun intended) smiles, had a shorter life expectancy.  So stop trying to be a hard ass in your athletic photos, and show your pearly whites.

Now on to the kiddos.  Thanks to 3D ultrasounds, we can now see that even in the woom, developing children smile.  Interestingly, Lipman also points out that blind children/infants smile.  So its not just a learned behavior from watching our peers or parents smile, its an innate behavior.  Children on average smile an amazing 400 times a day.  Now multiply that by $25,000 - children are the richest little buggers on the planet.  We should take note.

Smiling is also evolutionarily contagious.  So when you are faced with a smile, the odds are against you if you are trying to maintain your stern face or frown.  Also, interestingly enough by mimicing a persons smile it helps us determine is sincerety.

Lipman discusses a study that inhibited individuals from smiling (pencil in mouth), and the result was severly impared judgement on sincerety of the smile.  This is known as the Facial Feed Back Response Theory.  Inhibiting your physical response interrupts cognitive processing of emotional content.  How rude, huh!

Smiling makes us healthier, inhibits stress hormones, increases mood inhancing neurotransmitters, reduces blood pressure, makes us look good in the eyes of others (scientifically proven), makes us percieved as more likeable and more competant.  Humans smile to display joy and satisfaction, and by faking it until you make it you can change your physiological status to that of joy and satisfaction.  1/3 of humans smile 20 times per day, where as children smile 400.  Wow.  Tis the season for joy, so its a perfect time to try to catch up to those ankle bitters.

To quote one of my all time favorite movies, Elf, "Smilings my favorite".  :)  Your mission today smile 400 times. Go get em.