Smile, you will be healthy! For a long time, we have wondered if smiling can make us happier, less stressed and in better health. We present to you the famous smile exercise which, if you play the game, will do you the most emotional good!
What if one simple smile, even forced, to fight against stress and improve his state of health … Do you believe it?
Last year, academics in Texas and Tennessee analyzed more than 100 studies (link in English) carried out on this astonishing hypothesis for about fifty years. Their work has thus shown that there is indeed a very real correlation between facial expression and a feeling of well-being.
In other words, smiling brings us A LITTLE MORE happiness. So let’s move from theory to practice and from words to deeds …
Smile to “program” yourself positively
The smile exercise is a very simple technique that takes very little time. It is an exercise of managing emotions like others health-tools also from applied neurosciences, such as SB2 breathing or the cardiac coherence for example.
Read also:
The real power of a genuine smile
7 rituals to put you in a positive state of mind in the morning
The emotions leave more or less deep traces depending on the individual. Some are more disturbing than others and leave traces, such as chronic fatigue or weight gain.
By learning to better manage our emotions, to adapt to them, to put them into perspective and to experience them without being overwhelmed, we will be able to modulate the reactions that the body manifests in the face of emotional experience.
In this sense, the smile exercise is a form of “Positive programming” daily to practice as soon as you wake up.
What if we found out how it works?
The smile exercise in practice
Here is the protocol for the exercise of smiling as it was described by Dr Yann Rougier, Specialist and neuroscience enthusiast (you can find the interview he gave us here):
- In the morning when you wake up, do not get out of bed immediately. Lie down on your bed moments.
- Eyes closed, draw mentally a smile on your lips (we encourage you to really smile if that seems easier).
- As you breathe, bring up that smile to your brain. Try to “feel” that smile that bathes the whole inside of your skull, conveying a feeling of joy, of happiness. well-being and fullness.
- Next, bring down that mental smile in your arms, bust, abdomen and legs. It must “flow” into your body and flood it all.
- Exhale and open your eyes : you are ready to face the day in the joy and serenity.
- Everything will have taken you about thirty seconds.
This exercise will help you experience your emotions better. Do you already practice techniques to improve your emotional reactions? Tell us in the comments.
