How to De-Stress With a Smile

Next time you're so frustrated you feel like gritting your teeth, you might try grinning instead. Studies suggest smiling is not only good for you psychologically, but physiologically, too. Surprisingly, a smile can bring you health benefits even if you don’t start out feeling happy.

A team of psychologists from the University of Kansas set out to discover whether having your face in a smiling position could reduce stress. In their study, published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers Sarah Pressman and Tara Kraft wanted to test the old adage “grin and bear it" to determine not what makes a person smile, but what a smile can do once it’s in place.

About the Research

Subjects were given a couple of different tasks known to be stressful, including tracing the outline of a star using the non-dominant hand while looking in a mirror (phew!) and plunging a hand into a bowl of ice water for one minute.

Study participants performed the tasks three different ways: without smiling, with the teeth held in a moderate smile and with a broad smile, all while holding a chopstick between their teeth as instructed by researchers. The chopstick provided a way of standardizing the facial expressions, in order to compare them and to create a smile artificially. A broad, or so-called Duchenne smile - named after the French neurologist who documented facial expressions back in the 1860s - engages not just muscles around the mouth, but around the eyes as well. Subjects with Duchenne smiles were coached to engage those muscles, too, though not asked explicitly to smile.

What They Found

Stress levels were gauged two ways: by taking heart rate measurements and by asking the subjects how stressed they felt while performing the difficult tasks.

All of the participants, regardless of facial expression, reported feeling about the same degree of stress during the tasks. What differed, however, was how quickly the different groups' heart rates returned to normal: the heart rates of the subjects with a neutral expression (no smile) took the longest to recover. Subjects' heart rates in the broad-smiling group recovered the most quickly, and those with a moderate or so-called standard smile were in-between, still experiencing better heart rate recovery than those with a neutral face.

The results support prior studies in which research subjects who used pencils to manipulate their facial expressions found certain cartoons funnier when their faces were held in a smiling position than when their expressions were neutral. Pressman and Kraft also cite past research that found similar areas of the brain appear to be activated, whether a smile is spontaneous (a result of good feelings), or displayed intentionally, without those emotions.

Fake It Till You Make It?

Should you fake a happy demeanor? Would you feel less stressed? It depends. Research published in 2007 in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology reveals that subjects in a customer service call center simulation who were told to be enthusiastic and hide their frustration were more exhausted and made more mistakes on the job. The authors cite the energy cost felt by workers trying to act happy on the surface when they are not.

Despite this, researchers write that focusing on positive thoughts or reappraising a difficult situation can help improve feelings over time.

The key may lie in how long the stressful situation lasts, according to Pressman.

“Smiling is not a cure-all for every type of stress, especially for long-term stressors,” she says, like dealing repeatedly with hostile customers or other difficult people, but it may offer relief “for brief, acute stressors, and only for short periods of time or as an antidote to a passing negative mood.”

So next time you’re stuck in traffic or the person ahead of you in the grocery line is taking too long, consider smiling. It may make you feel better and bring your heart rate down, too.