The Smile Muscles

What if our mothers were right?

How often as a child, when you were upset or unhappy about something and walking around with a frown, did your mother say to you, "If you keep frowning like that, your face will become stuck that way"? It always sounded like a cheesy, "motherly" kind of saying, but maybe they understood better than we realized.

The other day, I was standing in front of my bathroom mirror. I suppose I was shaving; I mean, there aren't many other reasons why I would just stand there naked staring at myself in the mirror. As my mind wandered and considered things besides standing naked in front of my mirror, a pleasing thought came to me, and I felt myself smile. 

But then I had a bit of a shock: the face I was looking at in the mirror didn't seem to be smiling back. I had a thought, an emotion, that should have led to a smile, and on the inside I felt like I was smiling. But the face I was looking at barely cracked a smile at all. It seemed halfhearted at best.

So then I got serious; I stared intently at the mirror and worked harder at pulling my face into what appeared to be a real smile. It almost hurt. To achieve the appearance of a genuinely happy smile in the mirror, I had to really put some effort into making those facial muscles work. But in real life, I never feel like my face is working that hard. 

The conclusion then was that perhaps I never seem to be smiling in real life, even when I think I am. I wondered what other people see when I think I am happy and smiling. Do I come off as dour and unhappy all the time? When I pull my face into what seems to me like a real, happy smile, does it look to others like just a slight upturn of the lips - more sad than happy?  Do my "big smiles" just look to the outside world like little more than small cracks in an otherwise stoney and emotionless face?

I really wondered about this, and it made me consider the possibility that, just as the other muscles in our bodies can become weak and less responsive when they don't get exercise, so too our facial muscles probably suffer from atrophy if they don't get used enough. And if this is the case, then probably I just haven't had enough occasions to smile over the past years, and my smile muscles have become weaklings. I think this is true for a lot of people.

We all know people who seem to smile all the time with big grins that are happy and full of life. Maybe this is because they keep their smile muscles in great shape. The muscles are strong and can easily pull the sides of the mouth and the skin around the eyes up into a huge, natural-looking, happy face. And they probably don't feel like they are putting any real work into it at all. 

The big smilers are like the guy at the gym with the six-pack abs who has been doing crunches and sit-ups every day for so long that he can just knock out five hundred of them in a couple of minutes without working up much of a sweat. The big smilers can spend the whole day smiling and their facial muscles never get tired. 

That's actually a pretty good way to be. 

But for most of us, life seems to have gotten us down often enough and for a long enough time that either our facial muscles just become weak because we don't communicate emotion at all, or the frown and rage muscles get all the work and become the stronger group. Certainly, that's not so good.

So, if my reflective revelation has taught me anything, it's that I need to work on those smile muscles more. I need to add the smile muscles to the list of the other muscle groups that need my immediate attention: upper body, lower back, abdominals, legs. As I think about it, perhaps the smile muscles are no less important. 

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