Smile High Club

“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”

- Rebecca Long

Whether you buy the hedonic brand of happiness or favour the life satisfaction metric, consistently feeling chipper demands a whole lot more than pithy affirmations and a flash car. Overall wellbeing is a complex tapestry of cognition, connectedness, self-efficacy and goal attainment, and various other factors such as physical and mental fitness and obtaining amino acids that build key neurotransmitters through balanced nutrition. Yet in terms of  feeling more buoyant in the short term, certain simple tactics may significantly alter mood for the better. Among the most compelling theories is that deliberately choosing positive facial expressions can actually make you feel the emotion by engaging neural networks associated with positive emotion. The ‘facial feedback hypothesis’, pioneered by Charles Darwin and early psychologist William James, is supported by recent studies suggesting that inhibiting negative expressions with muscle relaxants such as botulinum toxin type A (the best-known brand of which is Botox) can improve depression symptoms. In the largest randomised, double-blind, placebo controlled study to date on