Family Issues Archives

Start Your New Year with a Smile
By Nancy Miller, Ph.D.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope your holidays were filled with good cheer, warm family connections, football scores to please you, and weather that was not too inconvenient! The New Year is in full swing, with everyone counting down (and warning us of dire Y2K events) to the end of the century and the beginning of a new millennium... Awesome events!

I'd like to share some thoughts with you about how we connect to other people, how we feel about ourselves, and how we view the problems many of us carry with us through our daily lives. Many of us feel burdened down by the uncertain futures of our children, and the daily stresses of providing caregiving to a child or other family member who is struggling with some basic daily life activities. It's a natural reaction to feel fatigued, helpless, hopeless, frustrated, alone, confused, and anxious about the future. It is easy to let these feelings seep into our daily routines and influence our moods, our interactions with others, and the way we view the world.

I am now going to present a positive, effective, uplifting alternative to upgrade your daily life! The solution is to SMILE! Does that sound contradictory to how you feel? Does it feel silly, or unnatural? Does it seem inappropriate? Let me try to convince you otherwise.

Smiling is a physical action that is the opposite of a frown. Research even tells us that something like 53 muscles are used to frown, and only 8 to smile. (That's close enough to accurate to be pretty impressive, don't you think?) So first of all, smiling is good for you, and uses much less energy than wrinkling up those eyebrows, cheekbones, lips, and jaw. Smiling has some major benefits to your physical and mental health. Here are some examples, which you will become aware of if you try some of them:

Step 1: We tend not to smile very much when we are alone and go about our daily routine... we often tense our facial muscles into a position of stress, worry, or concentration. Smiling requires a conscious decision. So here are some practice exercises, for you to become aware of how often you smile when you're alone. Every time you look in a mirror, make eye contact with yourself, and smile at yourself. Then say Hi to yourself! Blow yourself a kiss, and then be on your way. Think about what just happened. How did it feel? (Silly, perhaps, and maybe even phony... This may take some practice).

Step 2: Take a break sometime during the day, even ten minutes. Have a glass of juice, a cup of coffee or tea, some toast, whatever. Turn off the radio or TV. Sit down in a comfortable armchair, or at a table. Ignore the mess, piles, chaos that may surround you. Be with yourself, take a deep breath in, let it out slowly, do it again, and smile as you exhale. Close your eyes. Feel the relaxation in your face. Again, it might take some practice, but it's a great refresher, it sets aside the hassles of the day (whether at home or work) for a few moments and helps you get centered, relaxed, and re-energized. If ten minutes is too long, do it for five minutes, but have a goal of 10 or 15 minutes. It's a peaceful oasis of time, space, mood.

Step 3: You've met yourself in the mirror, you've spent some time alone "inside yourself," and the next step is to look around yourself. Sit down somewhere comfortable where you can look at your environment. In your living room, bedroom, on the porch, looking out a window at your yard, anywhere. Your first tendency may be to notice the clutter, the chipped paint, the unmade bed, the kids' mess... You may have to look hard some days, but you CAN find something in your view that pleases you. It may be a picture on the wall, a piece of needlework you stitched B.C. (before children), a shelf of objects you collect, a tree in the yard you and your spouse planted together, a bird in the garden, the sunlight reflecting on the trees... The possibilities are endless when you take the time and make the decision to LOOK at them. Sit with your view, think about how it represents your home, family, or your own personal life in positive ways and then: SMILE. It may feel weird to sit in a room by yourself and smile, but you can get over that: feel the smile on your lips, your face, and let it travel down your body. Take a few slow deep breaths and indulge in the joy a simple smile can bring to your whole body and how it can clear your head, even for a brief time. What's amazing is how that feeling gets inside you, and lingers longer and longer as you get back into "real life." You also start noticing more and more positive aspects of your environment than you probably do now.

Step 4: Smile at Your Family. Observe yourself for a few days; see if you can recognize how often you notice and smile at each family member for doing something you like (even something teeny), or for NOT doing something you told them NOT to do, or for just being there. That includes your spouse and all your kids... It's interesting how much easier it is to find words for complaining than for praising; how much quicker we are to criticize than to compliment. And have you ever noticed this? When you are complaining or scolding, you tend to make really good eye contact, maybe even saying "Look at me when I talk to you!" But when we praise, it's often with much less intensity, much briefer, and usually not as specific. Did you ever say to your child or spouse: "Look at me when I praise you!"

Step 5: Take Your Smile with You. As the old, old song says "Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile." Smile when you're driving. Smile at other drivers at a stoplight. Not every driver - you have to use some discrimination here. (It usually confuses most people, but every once in a while someone actually smiles back and there's an instant of human communication that's really lovely!). Smile (and maybe even wave) at the neighborhood UPS driver, mailperson, and other regular visitors to your neighborhood. They don't get much of that in their daily routines.

When you're driving alone, listen to the radio and smile as you sing along. Or smile when you see a house that's newly painted, or a garden planted with lovely flowers, or someone walking their dog, or a mother walking her newborn in a stroller. Look for things that are pleasing, smile at them, and feel your smile inside. By deliberately focusing on the world around you, and smiling, you will decrease your tendency (if this should happen to apply to you) to worry about your problems while you're driving. You'll arrive at your destination more relaxed.

Step 6: Smile at service people you deal with. You are probably a regular customer at a lot of stores. Think about your relationships with the people who serve you; you probably recognize a lot of them, but how often do you actually have a person-to-person connection with them? You may each say "Hi, how's it going," but our minds are usually somewhere else. Here's a new way to make their day, and yours: make eye contact and smile (at the same time!), and say "How's it going" (or whatever) like you really care! Or comment on a grocery clerk's nail polish color, or praise the produce employee for how nice the display of apples looks today, or really thank - and smile at - the gas attendant for checking the oil. We tend to let people know when they are not performing up to our expectations, and expect good service - but the truth is we rarely relate in a positive way, with some energy behind it, to a person who is doing something like bagging our groceries, handing us our cleaning, cashing our checks at the bank.

(Our families often treat us the same way - take good meals and clean clothes for granted, but complain when the meat is overcooked or you didn't get all the laundry done today! If you want your family to thank you - with sincerity and energy - and to say kind words and to look at you and smile when they do it, then remember they have to LEARN it someplace... They need role models for smiling, thanking, saying nice things...)

(Yeah, being a parent is a big responsibility. SMILE when you think that! Because parenting is also filled with many rewards. Sometimes we forget to remember that part.)

Step 7: Okay, you're smiling at yourself, and your environment at home and in the world as you drive, and at the people you encounter in your daily transactions... What else? You can make your own list: people you work with, your child's teachers and therapists, your friends and relatives. You can take a walk in your neighborhood and smile at the sun, the trees. There is something called "walking meditation" in which you walk slowly, focus on your breathing, focus on your feet touching the ground, on the breeze, the sunshine, the birds in the trees, and being consciously alive and thankful for the world you live in. Ten minutes a day of that, and you will begin to see your view of the universe and your personal sense of well-being expand.

Smiling doesn't solve your problems. Problem-solving - thinking, discussing, making phone calls, going to appointments, waiting for time to pass - is what you do to work on solving problems. Smiling isn't about solving a specific problem. It's about seeing your whole world, your total self, in a more positive and expansive way than just waiting and worrying and working to ease some of the daily, and long term, problems and struggles we all face.

Smiling reflects an attitude about life. A lot of us smile inside, but we just never thought about making it a "project," or letting it show so much on the outside. (There are some people who don't smile because they feel like their life is just too sad, or that it would seem like they don't care or worry enough about their problems, or that it seems silly or phony. To those people I would say, you can smile even when your life is sad, you can smile and still care and worry about your problems, and smiling may feel silly or phony when you're not comfortable with it. But that's true with trying anything new.)

Have a Nice Day! The sun is shining in my window; I smell the coffee... I'm smiling... Bye...

 

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