Emotional Debate

I have always been interested in psychology and how emotions play a part in our lives. In one of my college classes we studied an interesting debate. It was about emotion and action. One side said that emotion came first, then the action. For example, we feel the emotion of happiness, then we smile or laugh. We become sad, then cry. The other side said that our action of crying, laughing, or whatever is actually what triggers the emotion.

For me, this was an easy one to figure out. I firmly believed the first argument. We feel the emotion, than comes the action. Recently, I thought of this from the other side. Would it be possible to act first to create the emotion? The more I thought about it, I thought..Yes!

Think about when we smile. Many times we smile because of a positive emotion. However, I believe it is possible to cause positive emotions by smiling. Try it. Spend a few minutes with a big smile on for your face. Does it make a difference? It does when I try it. The first time I did it, I actually ended up laughing because I thought I had officially gone crazy trying to keep a fake smile on my face. Before long though, it wasn't fake. When we smile and laugh we feel positive. And when we feel positive, life goes much smoother. Besides that, it positively impacts those around us.

A smile can also combat negative emotions and situations. When I worked in customer service, I often received calls from angry customers. When they "heard" my smile on the phone, they were much less likely to remain angry, and were much more willing to come up with a mutual solution. I recently read of an experiment. It suggested to try to smile and think of negative, worrisome thoughts at the same time. It is very difficult to do!

The bottom line is that our action can impact our emotion. The best part is we have full control over it. There are many benefits to keeping a smile on our face. One of the greatest is the positive emotions we feel as we do it. I don't know about you, but I no longer need psychological proof to believe this.

Have an excellent day : )