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.

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 opening game? Your mom knows. Because your face tells the story.

So smile.

Often, my mother would follow up this gentle command with: “You have a lot to be thankful for, young man.”

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 your butt muscles which are the heaviest in the body.

(FACT: Two average adult buttcheeks, skin and muscle combined, weigh 33 pounds.)

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 less 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, it will go viral.

Moreover, when we flex our cheek muscles in a smile, 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 happiness.

European researchers were surprised to find that a single prolonged smile can induce the same level of happiness as 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.

And 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. Hate is the go-to emotion. And just when life couldn’t get any worse, Taylor Swift is no longer single.

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 very happy right now.

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

So smile.