Smile When You Exercise

Smile When You Exercise

When we smile, it generally evokes the Connection System. Exercising turns on our Sympathetic System. When we smile while we exercise we bring together this Connection System with the Sympathetic System into a hybrid that Dr. Stephen Porges calls “play.” This connection buffering increases the health of the heart, and is a neural exercise that teaches us to be able to experience connection in higher arousal states, which translates to our ability to maintain connection states when we experience higher levels of arousal. Part of the reason people have difficulty staying connected during conflict is because high arousal–the racing heart–often signals threat inside the body. If we have experiences of high arousal that are not threat it makes it easier for us to work against this conditioning. Smiling when you exercise translates into being able to stay connected when you are challenged: a useful skill for us all.

As an aside, notice the universal victory gesture in the woman at left. This seems to be, in our research, an archetypal gesture associated with joy and feelings of accomplishment. Archetypal gestures tend to be associated with deeper autonomic physiology. You might experiment with making this gesture while you are exercising, and noticing what feelings arise in the body when you do so.