Face Value

Your Mom and Your Muscles Want You to Smile

My mother always told me to smile. Especially when I didn’t want to. She often told me to smile when I was sad, when trying on school clothes, or whenever I was forced to eat beef liver at gunpoint.

“Smile,” she’d say. “You have a lot to be thankful for, young man.”

A mother knows how her child is feeling by looking at their face. Are you in pain? Upset? Angry because your Little League team lost the opening game? Your mom knows. Because your face tells the story.

Turns out, you have 43 muscles in your face. Your face contains more muscles than any other body part. The only anatomical region coming close to having this many muscles is your back, which has 40 muscles, excluding the muscles of your bootyus maximus, which are the heaviest muscles in the body. This is totally true. Your buttocks, skin and muscle combined, weigh 33 pounds.

So, why is your face so muscled? Because. Your face was not just made for photographs. Your face is a precise signaling system.

You can communicate entire paragraphs with only your face. It’s how you were designed. Don’t believe me? Try getting lost in a foreign country without cell service or a functioning GPS. By the end of the day, your face will be tired.

As it happens, the default mode of your face, according to research, is smiling. Recent studies discovered that we are born smiling. Doctors used 3D ultrasound technology to find that developing babies smile in the womb.

Once born, babies continue to smile. Even when crying, they are flexing their smile muscles. And babies keep smiling throughout childhood. A child smiles, on average, 400 times per day. Whereas the average adult smiles fewer than 20.

Something else researchers discovered is that a smile is catching. It’s called the “yawn effect.” Just seeing someone else smile stimulates your empathetic reflex system. If one person in a crowd smiles long enough, the smile will go viral.

Moreover, when we flex our cheeks, we cause thin facial bones to distort slightly, which stimulates blood flow to the frontal lobes. This releases dopamine, which mingles with brain chemicals known as opioids. And the body experiences a flush of elation.

European researchers were surprised to find that a single prolonged smile can induce the same level of happiness as vigorous exercise, falling in love, and can even be “as stimulating as receiving up to 16,000 pounds in cash.” Which is the equivalent of about $20,000.

I bring all this up because life is hard. Sometimes, life is almost unbearable. Sometimes, all you want to do is cry.

Heaven knows, there’s a lot to cry about. Loved ones die. People hurt other people. Countries hurt other countries. Bad things happen.

Not to mention that we live in a culture where selfishness is celebrated, where the media is full of crapola, and your newsfeed has degenerated into a firestorm of negativity and rage-baiting.

Hate is the current go-to emotion. And just when things couldn’t get any worse, your electrician will tell you that you have squirrels in your attic. The electrician doesn’t say why these squirrels have chosen YOUR attic as opposed to all the other attics in Alabama. There are literally hundreds of thousands of attics which this particular family of Eastern gray squirrels could have chosen for their nest of iniquity, but they chose YOUR electrical wires to gnaw.

So please allow me to remind you of something. I know you’re going through a lot. I know you’re in pain. I know you don’t feel happy right now.

But you have a lot to be thankful for, young man.

So smile.