It´s a fact that to keep a beautiful, healthy smile. You should take care of your oral health. But have you ever stopped to think about why´s your smile so important?
Having a beautiful smile improves your appearance and, in turn, your self-esteem. Also, the resulting confidence boost positively impacts your personal and job relationships.
But one thing people often overlook is how smiling affects your health. Aside from eating healthy, sleeping, and exercising, adding smiling to your everyday health routine provides many benefits.
Having said this. In this article, we´ll review some of the most common but often ignored ways how smiling affects your health. Let´s begin!
Smiling and Health: A Helpful Guide
When talking about how smiling affects your health. You could say smiling is the simplest (and cheapest) natural “feel-good pill” Among its multiple benefits, we can mention:
Helps reduce stress
It´s common knowledge that there´re many ways to relieve stress. Exercise, medication, and even stress-relieving foods, the list is long.
But recent research has shown that smiling (whether it´s for real or fake) increases your serotonin levels, which can work wonders in reducing stress and anxiety.
Improves your mood
Other than making you look happy. Smiling causes your facial muscles to trigger certain neurotransmitters that, in turn, will make you feel better.
Likewise, smiling not only increases serotonin release. It also favours the production of endorphins and dopamine.
While endorphins act as stress and discomfort suppressors, dopamine (like serotonin) is a natural antidepressant that helps you relax and feel happier.
Smiling is contagious
We´ve already mentioned how a smile (real or fake) positively affects your mood. It turns out that smiling not only brings benefits to you but also to those around you!
Our brain´s reward centre is activated when another person smiles at us. This produces a positive response that causes us actually to feel better (and even smile back).
It boosts your immune system.
While some studies have proven that smiling can be a natural antidepressant, other scientific tests determine that smiling contributes to giving your immune system a much-welcomed boost.
Smiling helps your body become less vulnerable to a common cold or the flu. During said research, happier, more positive participants also reported a lower risk of getting sick.
Also, another recent research has suggested a relation between smiling and the likelihood of living longer.
It´s beneficial for your heart.
Although it´s not a cure-all, almost every scientific study regarding laughter (and its relation to health) has confirmed its positive contribution.
When you laugh, blood flow increases due to an expansion of your blood vessels´ inner linings. This, in turn, helps reduce the risks of stroke/heart attack.
Finally, your smile also positively affects how other people perceive you. Smiling makes you seem more friendly, relaxed, and downright approachable.
A healthy, well-preserved smile will also make you look younger. That´s why it´s so important to keep up with your regular dental health checkups and daily oral hygiene routine.
Suppose you´d like to know more about how smiling affects your health and how to preserve your natural smile. We´d love to hear from you.
Our staff of dental professionals can give you expert insight on how a healthy mouth helps you keep your body healthy. So, feel free to contact us!
