Sponsored by The Health Resource Network (HRN), a non-profit health education organization, Stress Awareness Month is a national effort to inform people about the dangers of stress, successful coping strategies, and harmful misconceptions about stress that are prevalent in our society.During April, health care professionals across the country will join forces to increase public awareness about both the causes and cures for our modern stress epidemic.As an orthodontist, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the mental health benefits of smiling. In fact, a study from the University of Kansas department of psychology suggest that smiling can reduce stress and make us feel better:
“Age old adages, such as ‘grin and bear it,’ have suggested smiling to be not only an important nonverbal indicator of happiness but also wishfully promotes smiling as a panacea for life’s stressful events,” said researcher Tara Kraft. “We wanted to examine whether these adages had scientific merit; whether smiling could have real health-relevant benefits.”
To investigate the claim, the researchers recruited 169 willing college students for a hands-on experiment. But they had to engage in a bit of deception. Actually telling the participants that they were testing whether smiling would make them happier would have distorted the results, so the students were told that the experiment was about multi-tasking.
Next, the students were put in “multi-tasking situations” that were intentionally designed to be stressful. In the first one, they were asked to trace a star shape with their non-dominant hand while looking only at a mirror image of it, and were misled about the average person’s accuracy in completing the task. While attempting to execute the maneuver with as few errors as possible to win a reward (a chocolate), they were continually reminded to hold the chopsticks in their mouths to maintain the intended facial expression. Afterward, they were instructed to do the same as their hands were submerged in ice water.
The experiment’s findings were startling. As a whole, the smilers had lower heart rates while recovering from the stressful tasks than those who had assumed neutral expressions, and those with Duchenne smiles had lower heart rates yet. Even those who were smiling only due to their instructed chopstick position—without explicitly being told to smile—showed the same effect. Since heart rate is an indicator of the body’s stress response, it seems as though the act of smiling actually reduced the participants’ overall stress level.
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