How Smiling Can Help Your Anxiety

Recently I posted an article about how to know when you need a therapists and I have decided to expand on this idea.

In that article I spoke about how seeing a psychologist could help you if you felt overwhelmed by your anxiety.

But are there other forms of therapy aside from talk therapy that can help you along? It turns out that there are quite a few of them and I wanted to share some of them with you as part of my “anxiety therapies series.”

Now the therapies I will be proposing are only called such because they are intended to help you cope with anxiety. But they are not orthodox or traditional in the old school meaning of those terms. Today I wanted to talk about a very simple, and free, way of altering your mood for the better.

This type of therapy does not involve complex actions or planning. All you have to do is smile. Some have called it “smile therapy” and I’ll call it that too for the sake of simplicity. Whether you think of it as therapy or not is not really the point, the point is it can make you feel better despite your normal tendency to feel down when you’re not feeling well.

According to researchers the reason why smiling can help create a positive mood is because when you smile your brain registers this as a sign/signal of happiness. As a result, even if you’re feeling down in the dumps smiling really can lift your mood. One of the best times to start your smiling is in the morning. This is because as we all know the mornings can be tough and mornings also have a way of setting the tone for the rest of your day.

So upon waking smile for a little while. After lying for a few minutes after waking take a deep breath and smile big. Then relax all the muscles in your body – repeat. This may look goofy so if you sleep with a significant other you might want to tell them before you start doing this so they don’t think that you’re losing it.

So are you skeptical about this smiling therapy? Well according to Jane Plant, a chief scientific adviser to the British government, smiling is better than Prozac. Professor Plant exclaims that “smiling is a way of tricking your brain into thinking everything’s OK, even if it’s not.” In an article for the British publication the Guardian, Plant and company encourage people with mood disorders, like anxiety and depression, to focus more on life style changes then simply popping “happy pills.”

I also came across something psychologist call the facial feedback hypothesis. The hypothesis simply states that facial movements can have an effect on your emotional experience. So that even if your doing something you’d rather not being doing, you can still have an effect on how you feel about it based on the facial expressions you make during the not so fun activity.

So even though it may feel forced or even corny at first you should think about giving it a try. The important thing to remember is that when it comes to coping with an anxiety disorder you have to be not only persistent in your attempts to cope, but also creative. Don’t be shy about trying new things that might help put a bounce back in your step. Having anxiety can make us all feel very gloomy, but you have more control over your mind than you give yourself credit for. So smile when alone, smile at strangers, smile when you’re experiencing one of those hated anxiety symptoms and at any other time. You should never allow anxiety to rob you of this beautiful expression of happiness.

Recommended Reading: Happiness: The Science behind Your Smile