Today we are going to talk about an interesting psychological study: The California Study. It is interesting because it has treated severe depression with smile alone, without any other therapies or medication.
Overcome does not mean that you just need to stand in front of a mirror and smile, then your depression will be gone. However, this short post will enlighten you with some stories that happened in the past.
The study gathered many moderately and severely depressed people. They were about 7 to 8 on the depression scale. They were guided by some therapists, doing nothing except sitting in front of a mirror, smiling for 2.5 minutes to themselves. They were asked to do this three to five times a day.
The interesting thing is: these people were supposed to be in a 30 day programme. However this study never finished because, most of these depressed people went so far down the scale, they went down to 2 or 3 on the depression scale, and they were discharged. Scientists were never able to collect all data and finish the experiment because it was not completed, which was in fact good news because these people were much better within a month.
If you go to free depression sessions offered by your country’s national health system, or you pay for endless sessions of private doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists, you probably will be put on medication for years and years. These anti-depressants are like placebos, which make you believe they work, but indeed, they don’t or they don’t work that much. It is just a comfort. They have catered for your eager needs to get cured. Of course if you are severely depressed, take some anti-depressants, they do no big harm to you. However, putting you on medication and long-term consultation or therapies can only boost the business of big pharmaceuticals and enrich the pocket of doctors. It does not help you that much. This is probably why you are almost certain to be given anti-depressants rather than any real help to instantly get out of that depression. We don’t mean doctors are bad-intentioned, it is the system that asks them to do this. It is a systematic lie, not the fault of most individual doctors.
A “standard” smile is one where the corners of the mouth are slightly upturned. A “genuine” smile, defined as one with both upturned corners of the mouth as well as scrunching of the eyes, is called a “Duchenne” smile after the French biologist who described it in the mid-1800s. Smile therapy is a way to leverage the power of a smile to influence physical and mental health. The act of smiling is not only a sign of being happy, it can actually help make you happy.
We don’t mean to teach you this simple DIY therapy and it will solve all your problems, but think about it. Think about what we talked about in the previous posts on the “Imprint Period” and most people were programmed and live in illusion.
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Overcome provides CTAA accredited remote and tailored advice on solving mental health related problems in a few efficient and effective sessions with unbeatable strategies to give you an unfair advantage in life that can benefit you for all your life with 98% success rate. (Overcome | The Unbeatable Strategies | Depression, Anxiety, Stress, Sleep, Mental Health, Therapy, NLP | neuro-linguisitc programming | REBT | rational emotive behavioural therapy | Success | Confidence)
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