We all know that a healthy smile is an obvious sign of proper dental hygiene. It’s a visual confession that you take good care of your pearly whites to keep them, well, pearly white.
Still, having a stunning set of teeth isn’t just something you can be incredibly proud of. A beautiful smile may also improve your overall health and may also have other unexpected benefits you haven’t thought about before.
Can a lovely smile lead to a massive confidence boost? Can it improve your immune system? The team here at Gables Sedation brings you the inside scoop.
A Healthy Smile to Transform Your Life
Keeping your teeth healthy and white is crucial for maintaining proper dental hygiene and avoiding dental complications down the road. Apart from that, a healthy smile may also improve your mental hygiene, help you professionally, improve your immune system, and boost your quality of life overall.
A Pearly White Smile Has Anti-Stress Characteristics
The benefits of a smile are many. You might not know this, but embracing your smile and smiling more often can help you manage stress. This is a fantastic effect – when you are smiling, experts say you can handle more stressful and difficult situations more confidently and easily.
As a matter of fact, even a fake smile can be able to help you, but an authentic and genuine smile is more potent when you want to experience its anti-stress characteristics.
We understand that sometimes it can be difficult to churn out a smile when dealing with pressure, but taking a few seconds and giving it an honest try may go a long way with a bit of practice. On the other hand, we all have to deal with pressure and stress almost every day, so why not use our healthy smile to try and combat the daily tensions?
A Friendly Smile Can Improve Your Mood
You’ve probably realized that a broad smile is a well-recognized symbol of happiness in every country worldwide. A wide and healthy smile is a natural response to joy. This means that smiling can also evoke the response the other way around; more specifically, you can improve your mood when you smile or try to force a smile. On that end, laughing does an even better job of improving your mood.
Don’t get us wrong; we’re not saying you should bottle up your emotions and smile about everything. That’s unhealthy, and you should never suppress your feelings. Still, striving to find ways and reasons to smile can truly change things for the better. Also, aim to surround yourself with supportive and happy people – this is a surefire way to live a more balanced and comfortable life.
Your Smile Is Contagious
The terms contagious and infectious have gotten a bad rep since COVID-19, but in the case of smiling, there’s nothing negative about these words. Apart from having anti-stress characteristics, a healthy smile is also contagious. As you may know, people usually pick up on their emotions and might have a tendency to copy others’ facial impressions. Experts also refer to this phenomenon as facial mimicry.
Most people aren’t aware of the fact that the emotions they display have a profound effect on others surrounding them. That said, a healthy smile is almost infectious, helping people around you experience joy and happiness.
Also, you should know that people around you can pick up on other emotions, such as anger, anxiety, and even sadness. Still, you shouldn’t overthink this. Whenever you and the people around you feel down or under the weather, do your best to smile, and you won’t only improve your own mood but the mood of others as well.
Improve Your Immune System and Live a Longer Life
As it turns out, smiling isn’t only a mood booster but can also help you improve your immune system and may potentially help you live longer. Researchers from Wayne University did a study on this. They’ve reviewed and analyzed several photographs of the players from the 1952 baseball registry, examining their facial expressions.
They put the players into three distinct categories: those who didn’t smile, those with a partial smile, and those who smiled fully and genuinely.
Those partially smiling in their pictures lived around 2.1 years longer on average than those players who did not smile. Astonishingly, those players with full and wide smiles on their faces, on average, lived around seven years longer than the players in the no-smile group.
As it turns out, the benefits of a smile shouldn’t be overlooked. A healthy smile and frequent smiling is a pretty good longevity indicator, and it plays a crucial role in maintaining both physical and psychological well-being and health.
Smiling Can Be a Confidence and Success Booster
You’ve probably heard that you need to smile during job interviews to make a good first impression, right? Well, you only have one chance to make an excellent first impression; as it turns out, happy and smiling people who are positive do tend to become more successful than grumpy folks.
A study from the University of California, Berkeley analyzed several school yearbook photos (from 1958 and 1960) from Mills College, tracking the women in the images across time, overseeing how they “performed” in certain areas of life, like career, marriage, and family.
Those ladies with more authentic smiles in their pictures had a tendency to flock toward more positive outcomes down the road. More specifically, those who smiled tended to have higher levels of personal well-being and married more often than those who didn’t smile in their pictures or smiled less authentically.
On the other hand, a bright smile in the workplace may be able to help you boost your productivity. A study from Oxford University’s Said Business School found that employees, on average, are 13% more productive when they are happy. And that’s not all! Experts also agree that leaders and team managers who smile can make their employees feel more at ease. This creates a better work environment and translates into the better company culture.
Lastly, a wide smile is also an excellent confidence boost. An authentic smile is a hallmark of a trustworthy and approachable person who will get the job done.
Don’t Underestimate the Power of a Beautiful Smile
As you can see, a broad and genuine smile is more than just pearly white teeth and impeccable oral hygiene. Smiling is a great way to live a more positive, successful, and happier life.
Our expert team of dentists thoroughly understands all this and is committed to making the patients feel happy and healthy, helping them build long-lasting and strong relationships, both personal and professional. We aim to help them achieve their dreams and goals with genuine and broad smiles.
So, if you are looking for a seasoned cosmetic dentist to help you achieve the smile of your dreams, don’t hesitate to reach out to us today.