Recent research has shown that the more you smile, the more you smile. Muscle memory creates pathways and patterns in the 200+ facial muscles summoned up every single time you smile. And chemicals react to those muscles, eliciting feelings of happiness that would naturally cause you to smile in the first place. Chicken or the egg? The physical, muscular upward curve of the outside of the lips, the broadening of the cheeks, the squint of the eyes, or the inner stirrings of contented mirthful ebullient frivolous giddy all-around happiness?

Try this: hold a pen horizontally in your teeth. You are replicating the actions necessary to produce a physical smile. But deep within you, those physical actions are cooking up a powerful hormonal concoction that actually makes you happier.

During shivasana, that last 10 minutes of yoga class that make all the side planks worthwhile, I ask my yoga students to smile. It doesn’t matter how goofy they look, with big faux grins plastered to their faces, because everyone has their eyes closed anyway. Or, I say, do this for thirty seconds when you wake up in the morning. Lie in your bed and smile. Just to yourself. Just go through the motions. You may not feel anything akin to happiness deep in your soul, but you can trick it, coax it, bribe it with a little cocktail of smile juice to come out later on in the day. Maybe in the form of gentleness to a child. Or diffusing a volatile situation with humor. Or being able to laugh at oneself. Or putting your butt back in that chair and facing your blank pages with a hopefulness, dareIsayit, a happiness towards your writing projects.

If you’ve raised babies, you remember what all the What to Expect books and Dr. Sears books and caring pediatricians told us: the more they sleep, the more they sleep. It’s true.

(True too for certain expat writers who live abroad and stubbornly insist on flying the 5,210 miles from Prague to Seattle to attend the 2014 AWP conference. Ahem. Jet lag, my dear and gentle readers, is a bitch. So is reverse culture shock. And reverse reverse culture shock. And the only cure is sleep. Here’s what else is true: The experience of missing one’s flight in Frankfurt and collapsing into hysterics at the Lufthansa Service Counter provides an excellent opportunity to practice yoga. Inhale. Exhale. That’s it.) But that is another story for another day. . .

After missing my flight, coming home to my children, processing all the many wonderful people and conversations and books and images and cups of coffee and off-the-vine grapes and fresh crab cocktail from Pike’s Market and one mediocre American movie and the great Mary Ruefle and Brenda Shaughnessy and Dan Beachy-Quick’s weird spoken prose poem and the WORDS BY THE WOMEN OF MINERVA RISING reading that was AWESOME and the buzzing thrumming bombastic rhapsodic grandiloquent melodic words that filled my head during that most intense four days that is the biggest writers’ conference in North America or perhaps even the world, the only thing I could do to get past the whirlwind of emotionality was sleep. And the more I slept, the more I slept. And once I woke up from the stupor, what was the first thing I wanted to do? The only thing I could do?

Write.

And the more I wrote, the more I wrote. I couldn’t stop the flow of words.

I am now ablaze with ideas for my current project, a poetic travelogue. I’m working on a post over at lineupyourducks.com that will merely scratch the surface of one of the many mind-blowing encounters I had in Seattle. I am catching up on post cards (This may sound silly. But part of my New Year’s Resolution was to infuse everything I write with the vigor I try to attach to my own creative writing. So the act of writing postcards, some of which I’d been saving on my desk since earlier trips to Barcelona and Vienna, becomes part of my Writing Life.)

If you’re an avid exerciser you know that the more squats you do, the more you want to do. You feel that burn in the back of your glutes and you like it. The more miles you put under your feet on your daily or weekly run, the further you want to run. The longer you can hold your Vasisthasana in yoga class, the longer you want to hold it. And maybe holding it a little longer entices you to try a variation – flip over into Wild Thing, for example. Challenge yourself to do more.

Whatever you’re writing this week, write more. Keep your butt in the chair a little longer. Lean in to that character or that line a little harder. Dig deeper. The deeper you go, the more you unearth. And in your writing, that’s never a bad thing. If you get stuck, just put your pen in your mouth sideways and bare down. For about thirty seconds. I promise you, you’ll feel happier.