Are you smiling or frowning to yourself? Smiling is the secret to health and serenity, according to several spiritual traditions. The theory behind inner smile practice is that when we smile like a Buddha, the world beams back.

Mother Teresa (1910-1997) believed “peace begins with a smile”. A sincere smile shines from your soul, making the world a warmer place. As English essayist and poet Joseph Addison (1672-1719) put it, “What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity.” A genuine smile puts us at ease, while a frown creates unease, promoting disease and depression, according to both modern and traditional medicine.

Smiling to others and ourselves is a gift of love. The universal language of a smile speaks straight to the heart, bypassing the intellect and ego. To nurture loving relationships, Ayurveda advises greeting others with a pleasant face, Buddhism encourages friendliness to all (maitri) and Taoism teaches that giving yourself a grin is the best medicine.

A deep inner smile spreads like a relaxing elixir, making us receptive to transforming negative energy into positive. Conversely, a scowl suppresses the immune system by increasing stress and blocking energy. Research by French physiologist Dr Israel Waynbaum indicates that facial muscles used to express emotion trigger specific brain neurotransmitters. Smiling triggers happy healing hormones such as ecstatic endorphins and immune-boosting killer T-cells, whereas frowning triggers the secretion of stress hormones.

Smile therapy lowers the stress hormones cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline and produces hormones that stabilise blood pressure, relax muscles, improve respiration, reduce pain, accelerate healing and stabilise mood.1 If you’re feeling down, the stress hormones secreted with a scowl may increase blood pressure, weaken the immune system, increase susceptibility to infections and exacerbate depression and anxiety.

But what if you don’t feel like smiling? Can you fake it till you make it? Though a heartfelt smile has a deeper effect, even a surface smile tricks the brain into releasing happy hormones, according to facial biofeedback research.2 And the more you smile, the more you want to smile, concluded a study where participants were either prevented from smiling or encouraged to smile by holding a pencil in their mouth (those who held the pencil in their teeth and were able to smile rated cartoons as funnier than those who held the pencil in their lips and couldn’t smile).3 This is because each time you smile, you reinforce happy neural pathways that fire more spontaneously with each subsequent use. Self-love smiling circuits then release healing nectar, while self-hate messages release toxins that breed disease, according to Taoism.

The smile trial

How often do you smile? Try the smile trial for a minute. Relax your face and let a subtle Mona Lisa smile spread from your eyes to your lips. Now frown and sense the emotional and energetic shift. Feel the difference? Considering it takes only 26 muscles to smile and 62 muscles to frown, why wear the strain of a scowl? As motivational speaker Les Giblin says, “If you're not using your smile, you're like a man with a million dollars in the bank and no check book.”

Smiling seems to have a cultural element. The Japanese rate low on the smile-o-meter, so they’re being encouraged to smile to increase profits. “Japanese are truly hopeless at smiling. That's caused the loss of many business opportunities,” says Makoto Tonami, president of Mac Corp, an operator of beauty salons offering 30-minute smile sessions using exercises and a machine to lift the mouth muscles and spirits.

Britain also has sorry smile statistics, with research revealing that if you smile at 100 people, 70 will smile back in Bristol, 68 in Glasgow, 18 in London and only four in Edinburgh.4 Writing this article while on retreat in Thailand, I notice how people there go out of their way to smile at others, while in many other places I’ve found people often avert the gaze of others, as if avoiding a smile ambush.

It’s easy to share a smile, since it’s the second most contagious facial expression after yawning. A smiling face is always beautiful and an endearing accessory, while an ugly expression will overshadow meticulous attention to grooming and dress every time. But smiles do more than increase your face value: British researchers found that receiving a smile could give more pleasure than sex or eating chocolate. It also generated much higher levels of stimulation to the brain and heart than being given money or having a cigarette did.

Never underestimate the power of a smile. Use yours and you’ll find it helps to disperse sadness and dissolve stress. When dressing in the morning, remember author Jim Beggs’ advice: “Before you put on a frown, make absolutely sure there are no smiles available.”