This morning, I made it my personal goal to hold a good, genuine smile during my drive to and from work. I did OK on the first leg, and we’ll see how the second leg goes, but besides being a mood augmenter, the personal challenge is eye-opening to a lot of things.
While the more I’ve learned about people, the more I’ve come to understand how strange each single person is, it still doesn’t exclude the fact that I’m a strange person. A few months ago I started practicing smiling. In fact, there are a lot of really subtle things that I go through phases of training and practice with. Smiling just happened to be the one that popped into my mind a few months ago.
One of the things I’d do during this phase was try to hold a smile the entire time I drove anywhere. Partially because of easy mirror access to judge how well I was holding up, and the other part because if you’ve ever driven a car, then you know how hard it is to stay happy for long.
The thing about smiling is that it seeps into your mood. If you’re smiling, and by that I mean replicating a genuine looking smile, then eventually the line will cross from just forcing that smile to actually smiling, and because pleasantness and happy emotions are so strongly bonded with that facial expression, that smile gets you feeling better; feeling good.
Life’s been pretty great lately, but I still have found my mood wanting to fluctuate, and I admit, I have a few things that my emotions are trying to hang on to against my will that I currently have no reason to be holding on to. Sometimes I feel like I’m too much of a loner. I make it work, and I can surround myself by people, but you can always be around people and still be a loner. An example like this is just one element. Elements. Just enough small elements to pull my average mood down to a slightly less vibrant coefficient than what that factor was sitting at a couple months back.
My drive in to work got me realizing two major things: first, that I was generally feeling happier and in a more consistently in a buoyant mood back when I was actively practicing smiling. I don’t think that this is a spurious correlation by any means, and maybe I can be proven wrong, but I firmly believe that the more you smile, that more you’ll feel happy (even if you’re not, holistically). It’s a chicken and the egg kind of situation at times, but if I want to feed myself, I’m going to stock up on as many chickens and eggs as I can. Why be exclusive?
Second, and less encouraging, is it makes me realize how much pettiness we have in the things we get upset about. Before you read this and fuss at me — hey, jerk, don’t lump me in with you, I don’t get upset at stupid things!
Bull.
I always pride myself as someone who is laid back and able to take almost everything in stride. HA! How silly. Even though I don’t let annoyance visibly mount, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there often, and even worse, when I look back at all the things I got frustrated by in the past couple weeks, almost all of it is is so stupid. You know those bags of chips you get sometimes that are, like, 1/4 full? Well, it is like the reasons I get get upset are produced in a factory that follow Six Sigma standards, except if reasons I get upset were like a bag of chips, my personal factory produces those defective back of chips 99.99966% of the time, and a legit reason the other 3.4 million times. What a rip off.
So there I am, driving, bright expression on my face, happy because I woke up early and it is a beautiful day in a beautiful world, but every 2 minutes, a miniature, invisible Spider-Man attaches two webs to the corners of my mouth and yanks down.
🙂 —-> : |
“HEY, PERSON IN THAT HYUNDAI, IF YOU’RE GOING TO DRIVE 2 UNDER, GET THE HELL OUT OF THE LEFT LANE.,” the thought courses through my mind. Then I parse it, and force the muscles in my face, and with more strain, the little urges of mood flitting around inside me to prop back up.
^ _ ^’ ….
Back to full power
Not even a minute passes.
“Oh, hey there person in the lane to my right. Oh, you want to speed up? Ok, I’m slowing down. Wait, why are you slowing down now? Stop that, you trickster. Hey. HEY! I NEED TO GET OVER. HEY, TRY THIS COOL MAGIC TRICK: PUT YOUR CAR KEYS IN YOUR MOUTH THEN SWALLOW! BASTARD.”
And then I want to break.
And sometimes I dip down a little bit lower than I should.
Then the safety net embraces me as I catch myself. Why you heff to be mad? So worked up, and over something so small, so inconsequential that the other people involved will never realize that they did anything to upset anyone (though some of these people really do need to learn how to drive, but that’s beside the point).
All these thoughts want to dent my ornate set of armor.
This person never talks to me unless I contact them first. Do they even like me?
Why do these people aaaaaalllways misunderstand me?
How is she going to trust HIM over me?! So stupid.
GAAAAAAAH, someone teach this person how to put what they’re going to say all in one text instead of carpet bombing my phone.
Why does this dude insist on calling me when he knows that I can’t answer right now?
These passing thoughts continue, and they riddle and splatter into everything like raindrops in a thunderstorm. Then you look up and realize your umbrella is terrible.
So that’s that.
My personal goal this morning was to hold a good, genuine smile during my trip to and from work, but now my goal is to smile every day when I drive to and from work.
Give it a shot.
I don’t know what can be done about the things that upset us— the things that upset me, but I at least know that if I can turn the volume on Channel Feel Good, that it will start to cancel out the profanities and infrasound coming from The Downer Network.
So..
