The perks of perking up

Several nights a week, I find Shakespeare’s "Romeo and Juliet" startlingly relatable to my own life, and it’s not because of the play’s theme of forbidden love. Oh no, when the clock reads 12:03 a.m. on a school night and a stack of homework assignments perches on the desk, I begin to draw parallels between the blood feud of the Montagues and the Capulets and the no less bitter battle of student versus homework.The problem becomes this: how does one finish one’s homework quickly?The unconventional answer? Be happy.Yes, we hear people tell us to stop procrastinating. We know to stop procrastinating, and as we furiously scribble out an essay the night before it’s due, we promise ourselves that there will be no more procrastination. Whether this vow, made in the depths of desperation, proves to be possible or not we will see later. For right now, let’s focus on a more immediately effective solution: smile.It might seem odd that cracking a grin or letting out a laugh will help one do one's work faster, but research supports this idea. British periodical "The Observer" published a 2010 article, "Happy people really do work harder," which described the connections between attitude and productivity. It cited research done by a team of economists led by Professor Andrew Oswald of the Warwick Business School.“We find that human happiness has large and positive causal effects on productivity," the team said. "Positive emotions appear to invigorate human beings, while negative emotions have the opposite effect.”In translation: happy feelings energize while sad feelings depress or dispirit.In Associate Economics Professor Daniel Sgroi's analysis article, "'Happiness economics' in reverse: Does happiness affect productivity?" the results of the research at Warwick Business School, as well as their lasting implications, are more closely examined. Through a series of experiments that measured and compared the subjects' quality of work, Sgroi and his fellow economics researchers concluded that happiness acts an incentive for people to try harder."The effect operates through a rise in sheer output rather than in the per-item quality of the laboratory subjects’ work. Effort increases. Precision remains unaltered," Sgroi said. "In our first experiment, we induce short-run shocks to happiness and find a pronounced positive effect on productivity. In our second, we turn to the longer run when we ask whether subjects who have experienced recent 'life shocks' perform significantly differently, and again, we find that they do."Psychology pins this phenomenon on the neuropeptides released when one smiles. According to Sarah Stevenson's article "There's Magic in Your Smile" in Psychology Today, dopamine, endorphins and serotonin help to alleviate stress and improve one's mood."Each time you smile, you throw a little feel-good party in your brain," Stevenson said.Ultimately, perking up will have benefits — though sometimes nuanced — on various aspects of daily life, from social interactions to issues of optimizing productivity. I realized some of those benefits on a night when I had pages upon pages of biology reading to do. Since I've always had trouble concentrating on the information presented in the hefty textbook, I decided to try a new approach and read the passages out loud to my plush seal. Though it was a bit silly — no power in the world could make the act of educating a stuffed animal on macroevolution seem dignified — in the end I felt I had a much better grasp on the material than usual. Afterwards, I experimented more with ways to make studying interesting — passages in my history textbook that mention the British I embellish with a faux British accent, gleaned from years of watching British television; math notes I collect on large sheets of sketchbook paper, formulas distinct in bright gel ink.Whether it's constructing colorful diagrams with gel pens or conversing with a favorite childhood toy, it's essential that you make studying into an art, not a chore. So find some way to make studying engaging, utilize those twenty-six facial muscles involved in smiling more often and spread the cheer!