How To Improve Your Health Through JOY And Smiling

PICTURE THIS: You’re sitting inside and feeling drained before you’ve even done anything productive. You’re frustrated. Your body is sore for no reason and you’ve got to get out of this physical and mental funk. The way to improve your health is actually pretty simple...And it’s all through JOY and smiling.

Yes. You read that correctly.
It’s a widely accepted belief that living happily and joyfully can vastly improve your quality of life, but there’s also scientific proof that JOY and smiling can do wonders for your overall health.

Today, I’m sharing four ways JOY and smiling can have a positive impact on your health!

Starting With Your Brain
Your brain is a complex organ made up of multiple lobes and cortexes, all working together to help you function through daily life.

According to Dr. Samuel at Columbia University Medical Center, two parts of your brain specifically work together to produce responses to emotions and emotions to respond to stimuli.

The frontal lobe supervises what emotion you are experiencing at any point in time while the thalamus sends signals to execute how your body must respond to the emotion you are feeling.

The hormones serotonin and dopamine are essential in stimulating happiness as a mood, and these two parts of the brain working together trigger the release of these hormones. When your brain perceives something that brings you JOY or causes you to smile, the lobes recognize it and, in a sense, wake your body up in more ways than just emotionally because you are reacting to something positive.

All of Your Hormones
The hormones mentioned above, as well as many other hormones contained in the human body, all correlate to an emotion or a functioning part of the body.

The happy hormones are the ones you want to make more and more of, as much as you can.

Dr. Melissa Bonasera has endorsed that smiling and using those few facial muscles to smile actually cause a release of dopamine and serotonin. And get this: it works even if the smile is fake.

To get your daily dose of happiness, all you have to do is SMILE!

Smile, Smile, and Smile Again. Did you know it takes twice as many muscles to form a frown as opposed to a smile?

In a study done by Kansas University, participants were assigned stressful tasks whilst keeping small sticks in their mouths to force it to stay in a smiling position.

Another test group was told to keep genuine smiles while doing the tasks, and the third control group was told to do the tasks without smiling.

It was proven repeatedly that both the genuine and fake smilers had a lower heart rate and quicker recovery than the nonsmilers. Give your heart a rest and smile whenever you can.

I love smiling so much, I created KEEP SMILING cards that brighten everyone’s day. Check them out here.

How to Get More Deep Sleep
Deep sleep, also referred to as slow wave sleep (SWS), is one of four stages of sleep (light, deep, REM and wake) that you spend time in each night. It is known as the “physically restorative stage of sleep and is of great importance for anyone looking to perform at their best on a daily basis.

We’ll briefly explore what you can do to get more deep sleep, including which behaviors we’ve found help people increase time spent in this highly beneficial sleep stage.

Deep sleep is when your body restores itself physically. The vast majority of human growth hormone (95 percent) is actually produced at this time. Something many people don’t realize is that you don’t actually get stronger at the gym or when you’re exercising. Your muscles break down while you’re working out, then they are built back up again during deep sleep. Getting enough deep sleep is essential for maximizing potential gains from your day.

Additionally, deep sleep helps strengthen your immune system, regenerate cells to repair bone and tissue, stimulate blood flow to muscles, and balance your metabolism and blood sugar levels.

Improving your deep sleep: Any efforts you can make to improve your overall sleep behavior will tend to benefit your deep sleep as well. The most basic thing to do is simply spend more time in bed. There are practical tips and useful suggestions from the National Sleep Foundation.

In general, deep sleep usually consists of 15–25 percent of most adults’ total time asleep. Interestingly enough, when you sleep in their own bed (as opposed to somewhere else), on average you get 15 additional minutes of total sleep, with three minutes of that (20 percent) being deep sleep.

Some sleep-promoting behaviors specifically boost deep sleep at a higher-than-expected ratio when compared to overall sleep time:

• Blue-light blocking glasses before bed. Opinions vary, but it may be worth putting them on up to three hours before bed.
• Ear plugs while sleeping.
• Breathwork to relieve stress, either during the day or prior to sleep.
• Steam room and sauna, with the dry heat of a sauna correlating with the greater proportional increase in deep sleep.
• More Plants in Your diet. This is obviously a more significant lifestyle choice, but often people average two additional minutes of sleep, with half of that being deep sleep. Here are some (now obvious) Deep Sleep Inhibitors Stress. feeling stressed averages eight fewer minutes of sleep and one minute less of deep sleep.
• Screen device in bed. Use of a screened device in bed corresponds with a one-minute decrease in total sleep and deep sleep.

Shared bed. Although people average 12 more minutes of sleep per night when they share a bed with another person, they actually lose one minute of deep sleep. This doesn’t come as a surprise though; noises and movements from your partner in bed may often diminish your sleep quality.

Other Organ Systems
Any reaction from your circulatory system is dependent on your emotions and JOY is certainly the cause of the more pleasant ones, such as beautiful butterflies in your stomach or your face flushing with excitement.

Our body feels good and even better when we experience these feelings from JOY.

When you are joyful, your breathing comes easier and smoother, your digestion is better, and overall, everything works better inside of you.

The Tools To Good Health Are Inside You
You have the tools to lead yourself to good health and a beautifully abundant life! Those tools are right there inside of you. All you have to do is prescribe yourself 1000cc of JOY and smiling and then enjoy the difference it makes.

Got 55 seconds? You can become a JOY Generator in less than a minute with this video: Joy Generator Video

JOY Smiling