Hello! Seiiti Arata. The title of this conversation is “how to be happy”. The search for happiness has been studied by positive psychology and today I want to share some important discoveries with you. The answer to this search involves social psychology, neuroscience, scientific methodology, philosophy and, above all, self-knowledge. Let’s start with self-knowledge.
To be happy, you need to know yourself and understand what is the value of happiness to you.
Because of that, so we can start, I’m asking you: Do you really want to increase your happiness level? Do you understand what is the value that happiness has for you?
Are you willing to pay the price of doing what needs to be done to be happier? Or are you just saying that you want to be happier but not willing to take the time to reflect? Or don’t you want to take the uncomfortable steps needed to be transformed?
Do you really want to be a happier person, less worried, less pessimistic? Do people around you complain that you are too negative, sad, critical or just plain boring? Is being a happier person a priority for you today?
Think carefully about these questions, as this reflection is the first preparatory step you need to be happier.
Are you ready? Were you able to find within yourself a good motivation, a sincere desire to be happier?
Only after you are clear about this need, continue here because we are now going to go through a very popular piece of advice: if you want to be happy, you just have to smile.
It seems obvious, but it is not that simple and now you will understand everything in detail.
You can change your emotions by changing your body.
People smile because they are happy. Or are they happy because they smile? Or is it a bit of both?
In social psychology there are opinions that our face does not just express our emotions. The face also serves to regulate or initiate emotions.
This hypothesis has been discussed since Darwin’s time. In 1988, some researchers in the field of psychology carried out experiments to test the influence of our facial expressions on our emotions. They wanted to know if you could be happier if you first smiled. But this experiment needed to be done in a way that did not reveal the true intention of measuring emotions. This way, the volunteers would not be influenced.
So, in a very ingenious way, the researchers asked each volunteer to hold a pencil. The volunteers were divided into three groups for this task: one group held the pencil with their hand, one group held the pencil with their teeth and another group held the pencil with their lips.
The people who held the pencil in their hand were part of the control group. Those who held the pencil with their lips were part of a group of people who were making a pout that looks like the face of an upset person. And those who had to hold the pencil with their teeth ended up making a smile without realizing it.
And then, all the participants saw some cartoons and had to grade them by evaluating how funny the drawings were. And guess what? Those who made the upset face gave low marks, those who held the pencil with their hands gave average marks and those who made the smile face for holding the pencil with their teeth ended up giving the highest marks, indicating that they had had a lot of fun.
This pencil theory is a classic scientific source of the facial feedback hypothesis. In the same way that your brain makes your face smile when you are happy, you could do the opposite: force a smile and feel happy. That is why some people say that you can smile for no reason and thus take the first step towards activating happiness.
Be careful not to jump to conclusions based on scientific experiments.
Now we are going to deepen the conversation by going into the part of scientific methodology and neuroscience. Whenever you hear about a scientific experiment like this, caution is necessary before being simplistic and thinking that we are facing some magic formula to have results.
This pencil theory was revised in 2014, in a much larger study, which tried to reproduce the same results, without success. This caused astonishment. If it really was true that happiness would come to people who smiled holding the pencil in their teeth, any group of scientists who tried to recreate the same experiment should achieve the same result.
And there were several different groups of scientists, filming the participants with the pencil … and they didn’t reach the same result. And for some time, many people lost confidence in the facial feedback hypothesis. Could it be that facial expressions have no influence on our emotions?
When you look at the research details and the methodology, you will see things are not that simple. According to Paul Ekman it’s not just any smile that will work. If I ask you to smile now, without a genuine reason, you probably won’t make the smile complete. It is not enough to just use the zygomaticus major muscle because if you only do this you will have what is called a fake smile. You also need to smile with your eyes, using the orbicularis oculi muscles.
Furthermore, you cannot feel that you are being watched. In 2018, a new study was published saying that indeed in the previous attempt to replicate the pencil theory, facial feedback did not happen. And the alleged reason is that the use of cameras to film the participants ended up inhibiting the effect. It would then be enough to make the participants more comfortable without cameras and with more privacy that the effect would happen.
We have to understand all these details to finally get to the detailed life hack of using facial feedback: to be happy, it’s not enough to just smile. You have to smile by lifting the corner of your lips using both the zygomaticus major and also smiling with your eyes with the orbicularis oculi muscles of the eye. Do this in an environment alone with privacy, because if you know that you are being watched, evaluated or judged by others or even by cameras, the effect may not work. And that smile started consciously by you can start a real smile and greater happiness.
Take care not to lose the necessary awareness about important aspects of your life.
The problem with all this is that when we follow this type of life hack, putting the pencil in our mouth or simply smiling in front of the mirror and using the “fake it until you make it” approach, pretending until the emotion becomes reality, we are failing to confront a perhaps even bigger problem, or the cause of the problems. That’s why we need to go beyond life hacks and think a little about our philosophy of life.
Why am I having difficulties when trying to feel happiness? Why am I worried? Why do people close to me tell me that I am boring, unpleasant? What can I improve other than just pretending to be happy? All of this is personal development, in which I realize aspects of my existence that I would like to modify and grow.
The biggest problem is not being aware of the state we are in. It is not necessary to always and immediately remedy the lack of happiness.
Sometimes, I first want to see how I am. At certain times sadness is necessary. Solitude is necessary. Mourning is necessary when a loved one is gone. If you ignore those needs and immediately start looking for happiness, you may be ignoring something important.
A limitation of using science in a merely instrumental and simplistic way is to believe that I can use the facial feedback hypothesis to be happy at any time. In times when I need a neutral introspective moment or maybe even a moment of sadness in order to compose myself, it makes no sense to put a pencil between your teeth and force myself to smile. That is not how it works.
When you seek happiness by forcing it, it will run away from you. There is a proverb that says that instead of hunting butterflies you should look after your garden for the butterflies to come to you.
Using facial feedback to be happy can be a lot like running after butterflies. Perhaps for you it is much more important to take care of your garden first, which is to work on your personal development, your self-knowledge, your self-esteem, your purpose, your spirituality, your professional skills, your communication skills, to save and invest your finances, to take care of your body and health. Taking care of all this, when you least expect it, you will be living a much happier life. Thus, happiness will be more of a consequence and less of an objective in itself.
We need to have the larger context, understanding that we are agents with the capacity for determination and at the same time we are also connected in a context, in a society and in a temporal dimension. To resist all this and to expect a life hack to change the way I feel is extremely superficial. It is similar to thinking that drinking solves problems. It may resolve them superficially and temporarily, with even greater damage later when the hangover kicks.
If you’d like to take care of your garden, become a better and happier person, I invite you to visit this link