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Your smile is right for your brain, your body and those others around you. Smiling activates the release of feel-good-messengers while releasing dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin into your bloodstream, making your body relax and your mind breathe. Endorphins are natural painkillers, 100% naturally produced by your own body. Smiling is also infectious because the part of our brain responsible for the facial expression of smiling is located in the cingulate cortex that is an unconscious automatic response area. So our smile makes others around us smile and vice-versa!
We all want to feel happy. For us and for the happiness of those we care about. But there are days and days. And even happy people have to sometimes confront those moments of sadness and internal heaviness that seems to place a big grey rainy cloud over our heads making us experience a particular urgency to run away or simply throw in the towel and giving up.
So what to do then? How to overcome the grumpiness and bring the smile back as soon as possible avoiding long days of dryness, confusion and general mental laziness? Well. Sometimes the answer is as simple as human nature! These 5 essential remedies were proposed by an XIII century theologian and philosopher and proven today by science showing how understanding the hearts of human beings has many times more of common sense than expected.
Yes! Chocolate is a powerful antidepressant, and a good glass of wine gladdens the soul!
Focusing on the basic joy that the smallest things can bring to our lives is a potent trick to fight against gloominess. When you feel like your mind is starting to get down, make sure that you help it out by powering your body with any of all those little and healthy pleasures that make you smile when you think about them.
2. Take a long bath, and a have a sweet sleep
According to researchers at the University of Freiburg in Germany, a regular warm bath can have a more significant effect on mood than physical exercise. Taking regular afternoon baths has been associated with a moderate but persistent lift in mood among people with depression. By increasing core body temperatures, warm baths helped to strengthen and synchronize, circadian rhythms and daily fluctuations in behavior and biochemistry that affect every one of our organs, including the brain.
In the same line, the Living Well Index, created by researchers at Oxford Economics and the National Centre for Social Research, has analyzed several factors linked to happiness. Job security, the health of close relatives and strong connections in the community are among some of the most relevant while sleeping appears as the most important factor of them all.
Why not start with the very basics?
3. Cry
Learning to cry is a critical step for mental health and general happiness. When the moment of distress is hitting, the only thing that we many times may need is to let our sadness find a safe escape route. Studies have found that emotional tears contain more mood-regulating manganese than any other type of tears. Crying activates the parasympathetic nervous system and restores the body to a state of balance. It also raises the so-called interpersonal or social benefit, helping us to get support from others as crying is primarily an attachment behavior. Shedding emotional tears also releases oxytocin and endorphins, chemicals that make people feel good and may also ease both physical and emotional sickness. To really release the pain, we need to positively learn let it go.
4. Meet your friends
When important events happen, whether good or bad, sharing them with others makes them come to life. Real friends will make you laugh at small problems and cry with you when big ones come. Shared sorrow is half sorrow, and when sharing with others, even through the difficult times, we manage to create more joy, gratitude, trust, and community.
“Connection and sharing is what helps us through our darkest times. Connections heal,” says New York City-based psychotherapist Susan Solomon. “We can take two paths when challenged by life, we can condemn ourselves to isolation or open our hearts, share our pain, and immediately feel better.”
5. Surround yourself with nature
Being in nature reduces anger, fear, and stress and increases pleasant feelings. Exposure to nature not only makes us feel better emotionally, but it contributes to our physical wellbeing, reducing blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension, and the production of stress hormones. By getting exposed to the beauty and the marvels of nature we better reconnect with the 'full picture' of our lives and the world functioning. This 'big picture' helps us to better analyze and comprehend our problems and grieves in perspective allowing us to give them the exact importance they deserve. Nature is beautiful, and beauty is proven to have a calming and soothing effect on us.
The mind-body connection happens on both a physical and a chemical level. These connections between what is going on in your mind and heart, and what is happening in your body, form the psycho-emotional roots of health and disease. Taking care of your body when your mind starts to be tired is the first right step for quickly coming back on the track!
