I’d been watching James Marshall videos for the past couple of days and with the concepts swirling around in my mind, I decided to smile less at work.

I work in a shop, selling alcohol, cigarettes, confectionery, soft drinks amongst other things. In an attempt to offer the customer a pleasant experience, you smile, say please, say thank you and all other polite things. I tried to do the opposite. Not smiling, not saying thank you, not nodding, not saying anything for a few moments. It was difficult to do, because much of my behaviour is habitual through years of working in a retail environment. Some of my thoughts were “It’s going to be awkward; they won’t be happy about it; I’m going to feel uncomfortable; It’s scary.” It was awkward. It was scary. It was uncomfortable. But less than I’d imagined. And I don’t think anyone cared. Some of the regulars might have noticed something different, but nobody said anything. In fact, the hardest part was not nodding or saying thank you or cheers.

Why smile less? Why stop saying thank you? In hindsight what I was doing was playing around with the concept of Pressure and Release. When people are nervous, be it talking to an attractive lady or whatever, there is the compulsion to say something to release the pressure. Sexual tension can’t build without any pressure. James Marshall loves to sit in that tension. When you watch him speak he has an enormous presence on stage, particular when he isn’t saying anything. Improving Pressure and Release will increase sexual tension will improve your results with women.

However, in the shop, I was using it because it directly ties in with my social anxiety. When I’m compulsively smiling and talking it’s because I’m feeling uncomfortable and I’m not okay with pauses and silences of two seconds or more. Smiling less, delaying my thank yous, strong eye contact with no talking were all ways of exploring the silence, the tension and the pressure.

James Marshall also encourages to remove the judgement and labels from feelings and sensations. Social anxiety, approach anxiety, fear, embarrassment, shame, and so on are shorn of their names. Instead, Marshall encourages you to focus on the physical sensations and describe those without judgement. I can’t remember what the feeling was, but the other day I noticed there was tightness in the abdomen, the chest, the throat and the face. And with this feeling, everything was happening in the front of my body with nothing going on in the back.

The Smiling Less experiment happened for the whole day. It felt quite weird at first, like I wasn’t being myself. But I remembered something Marshall said: “What possible new behaviours could you adopt and could be you?” This quote in turn reminded me of the Feldenkrais Method, which is all about doing and learning new movements to change what is habitual and usually painful to your body. What Marshall was saying was like the Feldenkrais Method but instead of movement it was social interaction.

As the day wore on, I became a bit more like my old self. This happened because it was tiring to adopt new behaviours for a whole day and I also think it happened because my subconscious was calibrating on how to fit this with the rest of my personality.

Another way of looking at this experiment is that I was regulating my emotional compulsions. Instead of saying or doing the first habitual thing that came to mind, I paused or did something else. This goes against some ideas like going with your gut or the popular idea of improvisation where you blurt and do things with no filter. Impro is like that i.e. responding to your impulse or desire to do something, but oftentimes in bad improv it’s a result of adrenalin and nerves and a need to make things comfortable and safe. In impro, we channel what the audience wants most. And almost always it’s the uncomfortable and dangerous option. As my facilitator has said, “When you’re in the shit, stay in the shit.” By smiling less, I was putting myself in the shit. At least what I thought was the shit. It wasn’t easy, but it was easy enough for it to be surmountable.

I hoping to take some of what I learned at the shop to the open mic I’ll be hosting tomorrow. Breathe, pause and smile less.

TL;DR: Smiling less as a way to regulate compulsive emotions and behaviours. In this case, smiling when I don't want to.

EDIT: added a link.