Smile
Take-aways:
- Happiness unlocks positive thinking, which opens the mind to opportunity and change.
- Smile to fake yourself into happiness.
- Find a regular source of pick me ups. Use sparingly.
- Practice gratitude.
- Manifest happiness in your environment by sharing it with others.
Why smiling?
This next section is about achieving happiness. If you feel like I’m beating a dead horse with all this positive thinking crap and you’re frustrated that I haven’t given you concrete tips to earn more money and get more organized, then please, by all means skip ahead to those sections and come back later. Or, better yet, go read David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Stress-free Guide to Productivity, or Tim Ferris’s The 4-Hour Work Week, or Don’t Read Email in the Morning.
However, there is a very good reason for proceeding this way. Positive thinking, via mediation, manifesting, self-talk, and happiness, will clear a mental path towards other life changes. If you read the later sections or any of the books I recommended and find yourself responding to the advice by saying, "Oh, that would never work in my life," then you need to seriously consider the possibility that you are mentally blocking yourself and need to root out the mental and emotional obstacles before proceeding to advice on how best to organize your filing cabinet.
"Anger...fear...aggression. The dark side of the Force are they."
- Yoda
These negative emotions Yoda warns against, besides leading to the dark side, create mental obstacles to success in all aspects of life. We don’t want to stumble getting out of the gate.
Faking it real
Did you know you can trick your brain into happiness by putting on a show of it? Forced smiling and laughing has been shown to improve a person’s mood. It doesn’t have to be a big gregarious toothy smile. A simple upturn at the corners of your mouth will add a lightness to your face and your mood.
Your brain’s a funny organ. It will subconsciously feel its own face and think, "By George, I’m smiling. I must be positively jubilant! Indeed I feel jubilant."
Don’t fake a smile if it makes you feel cynical and negative, but definitely try it out. Simply smiling can be a great way to improve your mood (plus it makes your enemies nervous).
Pick me ups
Find something that makes you smile and use it as a pick-me-up when you need one. Here are some suggestions:
Not all news is bad news. These sites provide only positive news stories:
Good News Network
Happy News
Good Mood News
I like lolcats personally: i can has cheezburger
And this: It Made My Day
Or find something unique to you.
Be sure to check out only one article or three pictures. Limit yourself to a specific number of pick me ups otherwise you can end up spending more time on them than you intended, which may lead to feelings of guilt or regret.
Also, by doling out the pick me up in small amounts, you get something to look forward to the next time and the boost is not cheapened from overuse.
Gratitude
Keeping a journal of things you are grateful for is an excellent way to move your focus away from the negative and closer to the positive. Another method is to use coins to remind yourself to recognize things you are thankful for. I like to put five pennies in my right pocket and move one penny to the left pocket each time I experience something or someone for whom I am grateful.
Such gimmicky exercises are worth trying out, but don’t feel bad if you decide they aren’t working out for you. For example, if you find that you are expending energy early in the day to find something to be thankful for solely to quickly move those pennies so you can forget about them, then you’re missing the point. If the act of recognizing gracious acts becomes a burden then stop doing it or try a different approach. This advice applies to all the advice in these sections and other books. If something is not working for you, stop and analyze why. Then either try again differently, or move on to a completely different approach.
"If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point being a damn fool about it."
~ W. C. Fields
Manifesting happiness - the Boomerang Effect
One thing that absolutely positively can be manifested in your life simply by projecting the thoughts out into the universe is happiness. That’s because happiness is contagious, and that is no idle observation. Psychological studies of social networks have found that happiness can spread through a network. Thus by smiling at your neighbors, coworkers, whoever, and by greeting people in a lively manner, by making the world brighter for others you begin to spread a contagion of happiness that will come back to you in the manner of more positive attitudes from others.
As always, don’t descend into cynicism. This happiness boomerang effect is not something that responds well to over-analysis. It may take weeks or months for the happy contagion to take hold of the people around you. Some of them may resist it and never get a more positive outlook (you might consider ways to distance yourself from such people who are determined to be unhappy). Nonetheless, the happiness boomerang effect is too potent and too easy not to practice.
But wait, you may protest. I live or work with miserable sadists whose only delight is my own pain. Well in that case, smile anyway, and enjoy the delight that comes from putting those sourpusses in a foul mood.
What if the people around me become jealous of my good mood and resent me for it? Well then take a bit of guilty pleasure in sadism. These people aren’t worth pleasing.
Tips:
Be aware of the sensation you feel when you smile. Smiling releases tension in the forehead, in the mind chakra. (Chakras are points on the body thought to be centers of energy.) This is a major point of stress. You can even massage it to gain some stress relief, but smiling is better.
The Boomerang Effect is another reason to fake a smile. Besides tricking your own brain into happiness, it will also improve the happiness of people around you, which can boomerang back to you as your environment becomes more saturated by happiness.
Sources:
National Institute of Health study on smiling and laughter
More reasons to smile
The following was excerpted from the comments on the above article:
"In psychology, there is a theory entitled the "facial feedback" hypothesis. This hypothesis states that "involuntary facial movements provide sufficient peripheral information to drive emotional experience" (Bernstein, et al., 2000). Davis and Palladino explain that "feedback from facial expression affects emotional expression and behavior" (2000). This is scientific evidence that SMILING does indeed drastically enhance your emotional state while providing your body with the necessary passion for the purposes of living. Great ideas and something that we need to have even more people adopt into their world…SMILE!!!!"
