On our Krengel Dental blog, we strive to educate, support and motivate you in ways that will help you feel confident about your smile and dental hygiene. Today, we want to address the ways in which caring for your smile and showing off your teeth actually improves your mood and general health by way of smiling. Our smile helps us connect to others, feel more confident and experience joy, benefiting our overall health in a variety of ways. Here are three benefits of smiling more that can help motivate you to continue keeping your grin going healthy and strong.
- Smiling more = more relaxation
Among the many studies that have been done on the effects of smiling and laughter, a common finding is that engaging the muscles that are active when smiling and laughing directly stimulates circulation, which helps your muscles relax. Just curving your mouth into a smile actually starts to release ?happy chemicals? like dopamine, causing a positive shift in your mood. Only laughed for a few minutes? The best part is that the positive effects of laughing and smiling linger for another 45 minutes. So the next time you?re feeling sad or angry, it may seem uncharacteristic to smile, but give it a shot! Many people find this to be a helpful, long-term strategy to coping with difficult feelings when they arise.
2. Smiling improves your mental AND physical health.
The reasons that smiling improves our mental health are more obvious, but there is evidence for how smiling also improves our physical state. Laughing and smiling releases endorphins that act as a natural pain reducer and help to boost your immune system. Research has found that smiling actually helps to reduce the buildup of fat and cholesterol that are associated with heart disease, also lowering your blood pressure for as long as 24 hours after the fact. To keep your heart healthy and happy, make sure to create space for more smiles.
3. Smiling increases productivity
While our Krengel Dental team feels grateful that work is a place where we do smile and laugh often, we know that work is not always the first place you think of when you think of laughing. Believe it or not, research shows that productivity increases when mood improves, and showing off your smile produces a chemical reaction that leads to an improved mood. Productivity and improved mood actually flock together in that being more productive also leads to having more time to do things that make us feel happy, relaxed and connected. The more productive you are, the happier you are, and knowing it goes both ways is a reason to strike up a smile to get the ball rolling.
We hope that seeing these perks of putting a smile on will give you reason to smile for reasons you may not have known before. Since your smile is evidence to lead to a happier life, we are here to make sure that the state of your smile and it?s appearance don?t get in the way. Ready for a professional cleaning, interested in whitening services or just have a question for a friendly team member? Give us a call at 952-888-1311. We are here to help.
