29 Nov 2018 Smile—It’s Good For You!
How much have you smiled this morning? We hope you have smiled a lot! We talk in dentistry how important it is to take care of your teeth, so you feel confident smiling. As important as taking care of your teeth is, how you considered why smiling is needed and even important? Smiling can actually affect your overall health and can even extend your lifespan.
Whether your teeth are perfect or not, we hope you will smile. If there’s a dental reason why you won’t smile, don’t delay getting it fixed, give us a call and one of the best dentists in Salt Lake City can fix it. Or at the very least smile with your lips closed!
At this time of year in the Salt Lake City area, there’s a lot to smile about. We’ve got beautiful mountains to look at while we drive around town and beautiful canyons to explore on foot or on ski. We’ve got an incredible number of holiday concerts, plays, and events that can lift our spirits. In addition, we have a number of non-profit organizations near Salt Lake City looking for volunteers. Helping others will bring a smile to your face. This is definitely the time of year to smile! So what does smiling do for your health?
What Smiling Can Do For You
- Smiling can lift your mood and decrease your stress level. Even though we live in a beautiful area, our busy lives and the daily grind of jobs and school can leave anyone feeling stressed. Did you know that smiling, even if we don’t feel like smiling, stimulates the release of chemicals in our brains called endorphins? Endorphins are “feel good” chemicals that physically relax our body. Even as I’m typing this article, I have a smile plastered on my face, testing this out. I tell you, it is working! Even if you aren’t in a good mood, a smile can put you in a good mood.
- Smiling can help you feel and look more attractive and more productive. Just smiling, even if you don’t feel like smiling, can help you have a better day. Smiling can help your job, your schooling, or anything you are doing go better. It’s like a secret pill without any negative side effects.
- Smiling can strengthen your immune system, decrease blood pressure, and even decrease pain. Who doesn’t want a stronger immune system in Utah in the winter during the flu season?
- Smiling can increase your endurance. Increased endurance could come in handy for that wintry 5K race you signed up for, or for getting through another day at work on not enough sleep.
What Smiling Can Do For Others
- Smiling can lift the moods of others. Did you know that when we see a smile, we are biologically wired to want to imitate it? By seeing a smile, something within us wants to smile. Smiling at others can literally make them smile.
- You can cause others to feel the health effects of smiling. You can help others to feel less pain, to have a stronger immune system and less stress. You can help others live longer and happier.
All of this good comes from one of the simplest things we can do. Start smiling today. Right this second. Even if you are alone looking at a computer screen. You will start feeling the positive effects of smiling and you will want to share a smile with others, too. Here at Holladay Family Dentist, we make sure that our new dental patients and our loyal patients always leave smiling.