Sadness

How smiling stimulates the production of endorphins

Have you ever tried to hold a pencil with your teeth? Researchers had proven that intentionally exercising your zygomaticus major muscle and orbicularis oculi muscle can actually make us feel better. How? It is like holding a pencil with your teeth, or simply, smiles!

So what is going on in our brains when we smile? Imagine we are in a pleasant situation, like bumping into an old friend on the metro. When our brains feel happy, endorphins are produced and neuronal signals are transmitted to your facial muscles to trigger a smile. This is the start of the positive feedback loop of happiness. When our smiling muscles contract, they fire a signal back to the brain, stimulating our reward system, and further increasing our level of happy hormones, or endorphins. In short, when our brain feels happy, we smile; when we smile, our brain feels happier.

Fake it till you make it! Yes, if you want to be happy, just smile. Thanks to the positive feedback loop of smiling, we can alter our brain's emotional processing pathway to feel happier with a simple smile.

Smiling is contagious

Does faking a smile sound hard to you? No worries. Just be with someone who smiles. A Swedish study found that it is indeed difficult to keep a long face when you look at people who are smiling at you. Smiling is just contagious! Seeing people smile stimulates our mirror neurones to suppress our facial muscle control, and trigger a smile. 'You smile, I smile' is actually a scientific fact!

Furthermore, smiling also brings health benefits, like reducing anxiety, as well as lowering your blood pressure and heart rate. The happiness level that a smile can bring to our brains is estimated as equivalent to that of having 2,000 bars of chocolate, or getting £16,000. Thus, we do not need chocolate and cash to be happy. A single smile will do!

Why I took part in the FameLab competition

Since I was small, I have always loved learning interesting facts and asking questions. It is rewarding to know how things work, and that is why I love science. I remember when I was in kindergarten; I went to a clinic and read a health leaflet about fever. It was the first time I realised fever is actually not a disease, but a symptom of disease! I told my parents, my cousins, my classmates, my teachers… everyone I knew. That feeling of sharing knowledge was undoubtedly good. Humans are the only known species in the world to gain pleasure from acquiring knowledge, and sharing knowledge is just like sharing joy with others.

Nature is so fascinating that I want to share everything I learn with people around me. FameLab has been a golden opportunity for me to share my happiness in learning interesting facts, and to meet others like me. This is why I recorded my audition video about the 'science of attraction' and joined FameLab.

How we all share the joy of scientific curiosity

Everyone is a scientist. Science allows us to use reasoning and to think critically. We are all experts in different fields: for example, one might question, research, hypothesise, experiment and analyse the best way to clean the house every day. I think that we don't need to read research literature to be scientists. By observing and learning about things that we find interesting, and by sharing knowledge with others, we can all be scientists.