Hint: There’s a reason it’s called a million dollar smile and it’s worth a thousand words.
Your smile leaves a lasting impression, and first impressions can often make or break everything from job interviews to potential relationships. A Mansfield orthodontist can help you if you avoid smiling because an uneven smile or crooked teeth leaves you embarrassed.
A recent study of adults showed that 96% felt they’re more appealing to the opposite sex by having an attractive smile. Adults also often fear that issues with their smile, such as crooked teeth or an uneven smile, makes them less attractive to peers, friends, coworkers, employers, and romantic suitors. The fear is that a distractingly bad smile makes their otherwise attractive features and personality less appealing.
Overlapping, crooked teeth can lead to many worsening problems, such as tooth decay because they’re difficult or impossible to be brushed and flossed properly. The overlapping can also make shadowed teeth appear darker and discolored.
Your confidence and self-esteem take a huge hit when you don’t like what you see in the mirror or feel that it’s holding you back from your full potential. A Mansfield orthodontist can help you restore that confidence.
Three Reasons Your Smile Is So Powerful?
1. It Helps You Communicate
Your smile is a huge factor in how you communicate with others. Anywhere from 50% to 90% of your daily communication is done via body language, that is non-verbal communication. Body language signals are powerful tools that convey thoughts, feelings, needs, and desires. Most of these signals manifest in our faces.
Think about it… regardless of language barriers by the spoken word, a smile is a universal body language signal to convey openness, friendliness, or being pleased. It’s a warm hello without the hola, goddag, hei, aloha, shalom, jambo, guten tag, or salve.
2. It’s Often Involuntary
Smiling is part of daily life whether you try to avoid it or not.
A recent study by researchers at the Uppsala University involved volunteers being given pictures of expressions – blank, happy, angry. The subjects were then asked to make contradictory expressions, such as to frown at a smiling expression. Researchers discovered that many had difficulty consciously processing this and would actually twitch in an effort to not smile back.
Bottom line is that it takes a lot of effort not to meet a smile with a smile. Plus, the perception people have when you do accomplish to not smile back is often negative, with an assumption that you’re closed off or angry.
3. It’s Linked to Your Happiness
Research has shown that smiles are indeed contagious. But beyond the psyche of others, smiling also impacts your own health and wellbeing.
Did you know that there’s an entire psychological field devoted to researching how positive emotions impact our minds and bodies? It’s called positive psychology, and it shows how smiling is linked to happiness and happiness is linked to smiling.
Smiling releases endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin, creating a happy little feel good party in the brain. Vice versa, the release of these endorphins also encourages smiling.
Researchers at the University of Kansas told test subjects who’d undergone a stressful situation to hold a smiling facial position for a certain length of time. They found that the heart rates and blood pressure of the subjects lowered immediately. Smiling naturally relaxes the body.
Happy Smile, Happy Life
It’s never too late to contact an orthodontist specialist and change your smile, your life.
While it may be unfair, the reality is that many people judge a book by its cover. And, even if others aren’t judging your smile directly, your smile’s health directly impacts your own mood and how people perceive you as a person.
If you’re self-conscious about your smile, you’re more likely to have body language that leads others to think you’re unhappy, angry, or an unfriendly person. Low self-esteem holds you back professionally and socially from accomplishing your goals and aspirations.
Read testimonials from orthodontic patients who’ve suffered from misaligned smiles and undergone correction. See how it’s changed not only the opinions of others about them, but how they view themselves.
Transform Your Smile with Invisalign & Orthodontics!
Crooked and uneven teeth can be fixed. One of the biggest fears among adults with smile issues is that they don’t want added embarrassment to fix the problem. In other words, they don’t want the uncomfortable and awkward metal braces being on full display.
Invisalign can help you discreetly. Our Mansfield orthodontists often use Invisalign because adult patients want their transformation through a discreet method. Invisalign offers a virtually invisible way to improve your smile.