The Importance of A Smile

I had a particularly rough time with my newborn son. He is my first, and currently only, child. I might be a great big sister, but my maternal instincts did not kick in the way I expected them to. I kept finding myself getting increasingly frustrated with his crying. It seemed like every time he started crying, he didn’t stop! One day, he was crying and I realized he was avoiding looking at me. I looked in the mirror, and I had a deep scowl etched into my face, dark circles around my eyes, my hair was wild. No wonder my kid was crying so much, he was probably terrified of me!

I splashed some water on my face, and took a grounding deep breath. I looked myself in the eyes, and told myself this was temporary, and my son is vulnerable and scared. It is my job to comfort and assure him. I went back into the room where my son was still crying in his crib, and the moment his eyes locked on mine and he registered the smile on my face, it was as if the clouds broke. He stopped crying, and broke out in a sleepy grin that took up his entire face. My heart ripped into a thousand pieces. My son had been mirroring my misery.

My son didn’t start crying because of something I did, maybe he was just hungry or needed a quick diaper change. He sure kept crying because of something I did, though. I was showing him that he wasn’t important to me, and that his discomfort made me angry and upset.

Controlling my facial expressions has always been a particular challenge of mine. Everyone I know always tells me that I have an extremely expressive face. I wear my emotions openly and for everyone to see. I do not have the ability to school my face. I have tried so many times over the years. The closest to control I can manage is a horrific, maniacal smile that is frankly quite off-putting. My face will and always will show what is happening inside my mind, no matter what I do about it.

I heard somewhere that smiling does something psychologically to you to change your mood. Some sort of fake-it-till-you-make-it dogma. It has never worked for me, and I have never figured out why. Forcing myself to smile has always just felt fake and disingenuous to me. I don’t like having to conform to some mold that isn’t what I actually am. It is why I have been fired from so many jobs. I stay true to who I am. This is essential to myself as a person. If I feel an emotion, I let myself feel it.

But how can I be true to myself, feel my emotions, but also control myself for my son’s sake?

The answer is delightfully macabre, and I can’t wait to share it with you.

The Duchenne Smile

In the nineteenth century (around the 1860s), there was a French neurologist named Guillaume Duchenne that performed a series of experiments on the anatomy of the face. In some of these experiments, he used an electric probe to zap places around the musculature of the face in order to see what muscles control individual facial expressions. He used the then-groundbreaking technology of photography to record the expressions of his victims. I say victims, because it was supposedly so painful that he had to resort to performing his zapping experiments on corpses.

Duchenne discovered that a genuine smile includes two muscles, the names of which are super complicated so I’ll just say that one compresses the skin around the eyes into crows-feet, and the other lifts the cheeks.

The reason a fake smile never worked for me is because I was focusing on my teeth. Weird, huh? You think of a smile, and you think mouth and teeth. I needed to change my focus to my eyes. They say the eyes are the windows of the soul, don’t they? I was not smiling with my eyes, and my kid could see that I wasn’t happy to be helping him. I wasn’t happy and so I didn’t appear happy.

So how could I make myself be happy? I needed to just follow the advice that everyone had been giving me all along, and smile! A real, genuine smile! Smile with my eyes! But why does that work?

Apparently, in order to produce a Duchenne smile without thinking about it, the impulse begins somewhere in your sensory system. You see, feel, smell, hear, or touch something that makes you happy. Some chemical wizardry happens inside your brain, releasing your happy chemicals. These happy chemicals spark specific nerve impulses like a chain reaction from your brain to your muscles. Without even thinking about it, your eyes begin to tighten and your cheeks lift.

If you tighten your eyes and lift your cheeks using the specific muscles needed for the Duchenne smile, you can trick your brain into thinking that the happy chemicals have been released because those muscles usually only fire off when you are happy. This can cause a little bit of brain-confusion or what I like to call a mental reset. It helps me if I close my eyes and imagine something truly blissful while I’m trying to trick my brain. Taking a deep breath, and maybe counting a little can also help.

I didn’t realize you can smile wrong. There are a lot of things I have learned while on my journey as a mother, and this is perhaps one of the most useful things. Smile with your eyes. If you smile with your eyes, you can take yourself out of the moment you are currently in and reassert your own reality. Not only this, but everyone around you will think you are the calm in the storm. Your child will feel like they are being enjoyed, even if they’re having a hard moment.

I hope you are able to find that calm place in your mind that you can retreat to and allow yourself to smile a real, genuine, Duchenne smile.

*You can check my sources! https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/duchenne-smile https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-psychological-study-of-smiling https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2826128/#R9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Duchenne_de_Boulogne