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Any smile, even an insincere one, can help you deal with stress
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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Psychologists have confirmed the popular wisdom that a smile helps you overcome difficulties, with the only difference being that, according to research, any grimace, even an insincere one, will still help you cope with stress.
Folk wisdom advises to endure any troubles with a smile. But is there any real effect behind this? That is, is a smile really capable of driving away a bad mood and helping to cope with stress?
To find out, psychologists from the University of Kansas (USA) invited more than one hundred and fifty volunteers to take part in the following experiment. Each of them was taught two types of smiles - a standard one, in which only the muscles of the mouth are involved, and a "real" or "sincere" or "Duchenne smile", in which the muscles around the eyes are also involved. The peculiarity of the training was that the subjects were forced to make a smiling face with the help of chopsticks. This, at first glance, strange condition allowed the psychologists to avoid the word "smile": some subjects simply constructed a certain facial expression, not knowing what the result should be.
After everyone had learned to manipulate their faces, it was time for the tests. The tasks were related to stress, which the participants were not warned about. The tests were multi-tasking, and among them, for example, there were some that required dipping a hand in ice water. While performing the tasks, the subjects maintained one or another expression on their faces: neutral, a standard smile, a sincere smile; they were helped by sticks that recorded the corresponding expression. At the same time, their heart rate was measured and they were asked about their subjective feeling of stress.
It turned out that smiling really does improve our physical condition: those who smiled sincerely suffered less from stress than those whose faces expressed a standard smile. (Here we note once again that the differences between a “sincere” smile and a “standard” one in this case are purely anatomical: they differ in the mechanics of the facial muscles.) But in reality, something else is curious: people who simply performed some manipulations with their own faces, who were not openly told that they should eventually fix a smile, suffered from stress somewhat more than those who knew about the smile. However, the difference was not very significant.
In other words, the grimace of a smile really helps to cope with difficulties (how exactly is a question for neurophysiologists). So smile as often as possible, even if you do not feel joy. Just make this facial effort - and you will be happy.
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