Smiling:
When you smile, your body responds with physical, chemical and neurological reactions . It’s not just about facial muscles, smiling actually changes your internal state.
Facial Muscle Activation
Primarily the corners of your mouth turn up and the lines around your eyes appear. The brain recognizes these muscle contractions and sends feedback to the brain saying: “We must be happy, we’re smiling.” So even if you are feeling down, if you smile, you can change your whole frequency, regardless eg:
Dopamine is released when you smile, even if it’s forced. Dopamine is tied to pleasure and reward.
Endorphins are natural painkillers and mood lifters, also released during smiling. So why not give it a go?
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter associated with feelings of well-being and calm and the act of smiling can elevate serotonin levels. In fact allowing yourself to smile lowers stress hormone levels, making you feel less anxious or tense – which is amazing!
Smiling also activates the parasympathetic nervous system which lowers heart rate and blood pressure.Your body relaxes. Even a fake smile can slightly tip the balance toward parasympathetic activity. Let that one land. Even a fake smile? Yes.
When you smile at someone, their mirror neurons often trigger them to smile back – which feeds into a positive social feedback loop, increasing connection and a feeling of security. It isn’t just biochemistry, it’s a frequency shift. You change your energetic field and from a quantum or multidimensional perspective, you’re aligning more with heart/brain coherence . A real smile radiates harmonics that can affect others. Have you ever walked into a room and felt uplifted just because someone smiled at you?
The Bottom line
A smile isn’t just a sign of happiness, it’s a useful metaphysical tool with which you can hack your nervous system, elevate your mood, and shift the energetic tone of a moment.
Mudras
A mudra is a conscious, symbolic posture that links the body to subtle energies. So when you smile with awareness, especially from the heart, you’re using your face as a symbolic seal, a living sigil and it is an act of worship, a thank you to the universe.
Alchemy of the body
Alchemically, you’re transforming a challenging moment into something golden. Internally, you’re shifting heavy energy into light, peace, joy and presence.
It could be said that you’re physically locking in that intention with the geometry of your face, particularly the curves of the lips and the sparkle in the eyes. It’s form + function + frequency combining intent, gesture and breath.
The smile activates the vagal nerve through facial feedback, which downshifts the nervous system. From a quantum perspective, the smile becomes a coherent wave emitted through the body’s field. I think this is so beautiful and whoever thought of this is omnipotent. What a gift.
In Taoist internal alchemy, the Inner Smile meditation uses a smile directed inward into organs, bones, cells to generate healing energy. In modern psychophysiology, the facial feedback hypothesis echoes that by confirming that the act of smiling alters emotional state and biochemistry – imagine? It is so very simple.
Sometimes, one can be in the middle of a disagreement with someone and you both burst out laughing. This is a good way of dealing with problems. I am not saying that crying is not good – nor any other expression of emotions but one can change something negative into a positive in an instant just with a smile.
Comedians make us smile and lift us up. One of my favourites is Jimmie Owen, a big fool who always puts a smile on my face and countless others just by pointing out how funny the basic things we all do as humans are. He can make an audience fall about with laughter just by raising his eyebrows or doing a silly walk!
A smile can mean forgiveness, love, understanding, safety, resonance, happiness and so many more things.
So when you feel like ‘marmalizing’ someone (maybe your badly behaved teenager or grumpy neighbour) just stop and remember a smile changes everything – so just smile.
Do you need to smile more? Perhaps we all do?
N.B.: I am taking on new clients from September 2025.
To book: helen@soundmedicinehub.com
