The Effects of Repetitive Facial Muscle Movements on Your Health
A nice smile can get you almost anywhere, but we rarely pay attention to how our facial muscles age with us. Age starts to show on your face as time passes, and taking care of your facial muscles as much as possible is important. However, you might encounter more trouble than simply aging with repetitive use of your facial muscles. What are some of these problems, and how would they impact your life in the long term? That’s what we hope to answer.
Taking Care of Your Smile
You tend to notice some discomfort in your face if you laugh or smile too much. This is because muscles are responsible for even the slightest facial movement. And as with other muscles in the body, your facial muscles also become fatigued. Knowing this, you might search for effective facial treatments like massages. But before you book your next neuromodulator treatment, here are some effects of repetitive facial muscle use.
Obvious Aging in Your Face
Your face is controlled by delicate muscles working with your brain to control your expression. Thankfully, the muscles are generally rigid and do what they are meant to for a long time. Sadly, there are obvious side effects of repeated face movement. It could age you rapidly, creating creases and lines on your face that weren’t there before. This is most obvious around the forehead, as some develop lines here very early.
However, the creasing can also be observed on other parts of your face. While these lines are a sign of maturity and a testament to what you’ve been through, not everyone likes looking at them. Thankfully, there are ways to smooth out these edges, which is worth looking into.
Battling Spasms and Involuntary Movement
If you’re quick to laugh and wear your emotions on your sleeve, you likely use your facial muscles often. While this isn’t inherently bad, you open yourself to complications, like muscle spasms. This could occur due to extreme wear in the facial muscles or a misfire of the signals responsible for controlling your face. If you notice persistent spasms and can’t seem to control your face, seek an expert as soon as possible.
Facial Fatigue and Pain
If you laugh easily and a lot, then chances are, your facial muscles are constantly stressed. When this happens frequently enough, you might develop fatigue in your facial muscles and run into a situation where it hurts to laugh. In such situations, fighting the urge to laugh as much as possible is important. Limit your facial movements, and give your muscles time to recover. Thankfully, fatigue can be healed with time and rest. Sleep also places your muscles at ease and helps you relax.
Shadows and Bruising
Facial exhaustion can manifest in many ways and might not only be attributed to stressed facial muscles. You might also notice some adverse side effects from poor sleep or lack thereof. It would help if you got your minimum required sleep whenever possible. By sleeping late and waking early, you rob your body of the time it needs to recover. If this repeats frequently enough, you might notice dark circles under your eyes, which can be challenging. Makeup offers a temporary solution, but the dark circles will remain. To get rid of them, it helps to get the sleep you’ve been depriving your body of. Make out time so you can pass out and really rest.
Handling a Plumper Face
While facial swelling can happen for a number of reasons, overexerted muscles should be carefully considered. If you push your muscles hard enough, they might swell while healing, and this applies to your face as well. Thankfully, you can usually bring the swelling down with ice or something cold. However, should it recur frequently, you should consult a healthcare expert about steps you can take to prevent overexerting your facial muscles.
The Inability to Feel Your Face
Facial numbness might be a given in some instances. As with most of the health conditions mentioned above, you might not be able to feel or operate your face as normal when your facial muscles have been pushed beyond their limit. Thankfully, if this is the case, you will gradually regain feeling by allowing your muscles to rest. Don’t put yourself in a position to make things worse; try to rest instead. You’ll discover that you’ve regained feeling in your face when some time of relaxation has passed.
Lines and Wrinkles
Not to be confused with facial aging, if you constantly move your face in a certain way, then your skin will try to adapt to this movement. This is what leads to conditions like laughing lines and unwanted wrinkles. In most instances, these lines are harmless and shouldn’t affect how you move your face. However, if you are fixated on your looks, you might not be happy about these lines. You can get treatments to reduce the degree of changes in your face. However, all solutions are temporary, as time will continue to leave its marks on your face.
Facing Difficulty With Chewing
The muscles that control your jaw are also facial in their positioning and should not be ignored. When you smile and laugh, these muscles are also exerted and can be over-strained. When this happens, you might find it hard to chew effectively. However, you might not need to worry about this as the jaw muscles are resilient. However, if you have such a problem, it helps to use ice or something cold. This should help relieve some of the stress in your facial muscles. But if symptoms persist, consider reaching out to a doctor. There’s still so much you can learn about your face and what it takes to stay looking young for a long time. Sadly, time catches up with us all, and there’s a limit to what you can do about your looks. However, by remaining aware of some health risks associated with overexerting your facial muscles, you might learn to take care of your million-dollar smile better.