Shimmy
New member
- Joined
- Jun 9, 2009
- Messages
- 1,867
- MBTI Type
- SEXY
This.
You smile at people -- not just with your lips but your eyes -- and a lot of them will suddenly respond to you. Pretty amazing stuff. The social cues and emotional responses are almost inborn or at least culturally reinforced.
I do it well, but it exhausts me because I'm not a natural emoter.
I do exactly the same thing. Especially in social situations with unfamiliar people. When I'm with friends or alone I hardly ever smile. I sometimes try to smile when I'm just walking down the street but I find it hard to keep that up.
I can do the whole smiley friendly bit with people I don't know well or just bump into pretty easily, otherwise if I try to do a fake smile it looks really forced. It's like I can only access the right combination of muscle memory to make a real smile when there's actually something behind it. Though I've been told that my smile is really more of a smirk.
Try thinking of something happy. When I feel it would useful for me to smile I think of good memories that have a particularly good emotional memory attached to them. Like times when I achieved something special, or when I was first meeting a person that later changed my life for the better.