Smile genuinely to live longer

Good morning friends. How often do you smile? If you’re are going to smile, do you think it has to be a good reason for you to smile? If you want to live longer, one way is to smile. Smile genuinely. That’s what they said. Many said that the secret to live a grand old age is to smile, and make sure you mean it.

There is one pro baseball players in the 1950s who genuinely beamed in their official photographs tended to live longer than more sullen-looking sportsmen and those who put on fake smiles. There are players from the US major league with honest grins lived an average of seven years longer than players who didn't smile for the camera and five years longer than players who smiled unconvincingly.

Happy people tend to be healthy too. Some researchers wondered if this relationship would be reflected in the smiles and longevity. Genuine smiles are known as Duchenne smiles after the 19th-century neurologist who defined them in detail. They engage muscles both near the corners of the mouth and around the eyes - the zygomatic major and the orbicularis oculi respectively. Fake, ‘non-Duchenne’ smiles exercise only mouth muscles.

With training, these muscles are easy to recognize in photographs. Thus, the researchers were trained to analyze smiles, looked at vintage photographs of 230 major leaguers who played in the 1952 season. The researchers classified them as non-smilers, Duchenne smilers or non-Duchenne smilers. Then they looked up the life spans of some players who had already died. They found that out of the dead players, Duchenne smilers had tended to live the longest, followed by non-Duchenne smilers.

The researchers also tend to predispose people to longevity, such as a university education and good health. They found an even firmer link between strength of smile and length of life. People who didn't smile had just a 50% chance of surviving to 80%, all other things being equal, whereas those with Duchenne smiles had about a 70% chance of surviving to this age.

Overall, 35% of the differences in lifespan correlated with smile intensity. Some conclude that people who smile genuinely in photographs "may be basically happier than those with less intense smiles", making them more likely to experience the health benefits of happiness, which has been linked with lower levels of stress hormones and a protein implicated in heart disease.