[inavalan]

You want to win friends, get a better job, get more opportunities and even get served faster at Burger King? Simple, no tablets or surgery, no course to buy: look happy and confident.

According to various polls and studies over the last 30 years and more, visually happy, confident, well-adjusted people get offered more opportunities, more promotions, get served faster, get more respect and even seem to have better luck than those less well-adjusted among us.

Also, the simple act of displaying how you feel, whether to someone else or just yourself, is very, very powerful, because it creates your mental state. Sustaining a tell, such as a frown, keeps you feeling the emotions that caused it. It's a little like a feedback system. You feel down, you show it as a tell. But sustaining the tell keeps you feeling down and makes the depression grow even deeper. You display a stronger tell in response, etc, etc.

You can cause yourself just as many problems with the tells you put on in pretense of something as you do with 'real' signals. For example, you might be hoping to take the afternoon off work and are pretending to have a cold or headache. After just a very short period of pretense you really will start to feel off-color or even quite ill, simply by reproducing the signals associated with illness.

Now what's so incredible about this of course is that you are meant to be the one doing the fooling here. You aren't doing this to a subject who has no knowledge of suggestion, you know you aren't ill. All you're doing is play-acting with the full knowledge that you aren't really sick at all. But the acting out of the correct posture, expression and voice of an ill person will be based on your previous knowledge of what it's like to be ill. In simply acting out how it feels to be ill you're inflicting some of the actual symptoms of illness upon yourself. You just start to feel a bit off-color at first, then suggestion does the rest.

You create, even in the face of your own knowledge of your actual well-being, a real illness.