They say emotions are ubiquitous to human life. We experience emotions due to various stimuli or situations. These emotions guide our thoughts, our actions, our judgment and decision making capabilities. Decades of research have been conducted to understand how emotions affect our everyday life. Research aims to also find out the health benefits of very specific emotions such as gratitude, love, happiness, and the importance of a smile.

It is understood that experiencing joy and anger propels people to take actions. Fear exaggerates the feeling of risk, disgust and hate make one do things that they may regret later. Since we know that emotions dictate our actions we must also be in a position to balance our emotions, get hold of them to bring stability in our lives.

Surrounding us today mostly is Stress; stress that has developed due to our competitive lives. Competition in schools among students to score the highest so he or she will get into a good college, parents wanting their children to score better than the other, competition at work to rise on the rungs of the ladder, to earn better to be able to afford the luxuries of life. Experiencing stress at home as creating a work life balance is a challenge with distances to travel and children to look after.

All of this leaves us frowning, sullen, dull, unable to generate positivity within us thus not being able to spread positive vibes. Most of the times we are unaware of the immense role our emotions play in our lives.

10UP last weekend took the initiative to remind us all that all it takes is a Smile to generate those positive vibes and to spread that via a smile.

‘Smile and the world smiles with you. Cry and you cry alone’ is a well-known proverb.

Ashish specially got around a 1000 smiley balls…(known as great stress busters) for us his team to distribute to people at the signals.

At the on-set one wondered if one would have the courage to run across at signals and between cars knocking on windows to give to the passenger or the driver a smiley ball…saying ‘smile and spread this smile to others!’

But to my wonderment all of us got so enthusiastic doing this activity, spreading joy to others that there were moments we were oblivious of the moving traffic.

What gave us this boost is also credit to the ones in the cars. People were open and accepting of course of the activity. The delightful smile on their faces when we told them of the purpose of our activity encouraged us. Many agreed. On some their smiles reached their eyes. You knew then how much this meant to them.

We persisted in our mission with joy in our hearts spreading it to others along the way.

A smile is happiness under your nose…spread it!

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