Yesterday I had a thought that I am going to try. I'm going to call it "The Smile Experiment". I have long heard the notion that smiling elevates mood, so I decided to put it to the test. I'm going to try to smile for a week and see how it affects my mood. I will try to give a subjective measure of how I feel, and if it is better or worse than what I consider my baseline. Then I will try to be as objective as possible in an estimate of external stimuli that would normally adversely affect my mood.
On my first day I tried to do this on my drive home from work. My commute takes about a half hour and it is about an equal mix of freeway and surface street driving. The surface street is mostly three lanes, and it is all well traveled. Just based on a simple appeal to Sturgeon's Law, I see an awful lot of bad drivers driving bad. I usually get a bit worked up about other people's stupidity and bad driving affecting my drive. I enjoy driving when I don't have all the distractions and intrusive fellow drivers, so I really don't like the annoyance.
My observations from the first day:
1. I am in a better mood, and I enjoyed the drive.
2. It is hard to remember to always have a smile on my face.
3. It helped to exaggerate my response to things that amused me or made me smile.
4. Things that would have irritated me didn't bother me as much.
5. It didn't feel right to listen to music that was not upbeat.
6. The drive was average as far as annoying drivers, if not a little less so.
7. The decrease in annoyance was not really proportional to the improvement in mood.
So far, this has been a good experience. It will be interesting to see how this progresses over the next few days.
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