Smile and the Whole World Smiles with You
Did you know that emotions are contagious? Have you ever noticed that you feel happier around happy people and low around sad or depressed people?
This has now been scientifically explained by mirror neurons.
Mirror neurons are a network of cells in the brain that mirror – copy – the facial expressions and body language of the people whose company we’re in. When they mirror a happy face, they twitch your smile muscles and signal the ‘happy’ areas of your brain so that you feel happy.
Smiling itself is contagious. Try smiling at as many people as you can today and notice how many smile back. It’s an automatic thing. Some people might not smile back but you can guarantee that their smile muscles will have twitched a bit. It is totally involuntary and happens within 25 thousandths of a second!
It’s this kind of thing that makes all emotions contagious. We literally infect everyone with our emotional state and catch the moods of others too. In a real sense, each day we live in an ‘Ocean of Emotion’ where we ride the waves of other people’s moods, and send our own waves out too.
And it’s a big ocean. Your waves of emotion travel much farther than you think. Just as a pebble dropped in a pond will lift a lily pad at the other side of the pond, Harvard University researchers analysed a social network of over 12,000 people and found that happiness could lift the spirits of people at 3 degrees of separation from you. And depression could lower the spirits.
You know the 6 degrees rule? It’s the rule that says every person is connected to everyone else by a maximum of 6 degrees of separation. For instance, you know someone (1) who knows someone (2)… etc who knows HH The Dalai Lama (6) or even Kevin Bacon (6).
The researchers found that if one of your social contacts became happy for any reason then it increased the chances that you would also become happier by 15 per cent. If it was a friend of a friend who became happier, it increased your chances of improved happiness by 10 per cent. And even if a friend of a friend of a friend (at 3 degrees of separation) became happier, there was a 6 per cent chance that you would become happier as a direct consequence.
And the effect is even stronger when we’re talking about close friends. If you became happier for any reason it increased the chances that your close friends would become happier by a whopping 63 per cent. There’s a lot to be said about hanging out with happy people.
We live in an interconnected world where everyone is constantly affecting everyone else. And behaviours are just as contagious as emotions.
With that in mind, what do you want to spread? I have perhaps, an idealistic attitude that kindness can make the world a better place. But what if it can?
What if we spread acts of kindness today?
It turns out that kindness is extremely contagious. So do something kind today and know that your kindness goes much farther than that act.