Ready to start your own body image revolution?
When I was in a class in counselling school about helping clients with depression, the lecturer shared one weird way that had been proven an effective part of a treatment to help lift the fog, this also paved the way for the discovery of some botox side effects:
- have the client clamp a pencil in their mouth, sideways, and keep it there for at least a few minutes, up to 20 a day, for best effect. It activates pathways in the brain that trigger endorphins, some of the brain’s feel-good chemicals.
Obviously it’s not the pencil that triggers the release of the feel-better chemicals, it’s the movement of the muscles at the side of the face, including the ones around your eyes that make them crinkle up when you smile. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison got curious about this, and wondered if the muscles we use to show our emotions also affect the way we feel our emotions.
The current popularity of the wrinkle-quick-fix, Botox, presented a large population of study subjects. To confirm the botox side effects, researchers asked 40 women who were waiting to have Botox injections for the first time, to read 60 sentences on a computer and press a key when they understood each sentence. Two weeks later, when the paralysing botox side effects was on the highest, the women were asked to repeat the experiment.
And what they found was that they were slower (about 1/10th of a second) to understand the “sad” sentences than they had been before the injections.This is one of the botox side effects.
So does that mean the women were just happier after the treatment, perhaps feeling more confident or happier about their appearance? The researchers did mood-analysis studies to rule out that possibility.
1/10th of a second isn’t much, so probably wouldn’t have that much of a negative Botox side effects. And might feeling happier after having botox injections mean we can get off the prozac? Not quite: our brains are so highly tuned to monitor other people’s subtle non-verbal cues during a conversation, that we interpret others’ signals in just microseconds. So what happens when a response is a whole 1/10th of a second slower?
If it was your partner being so unresponsive, how would you feel, especially if it went on for days, weeks, months?
Lead researcher at Wisconsin, David Havas said that the study confirmed that our facial expressions also guide how we interpret what other people are saying! (In my language, it’s more scientific evidence that we are a body-mind).
And it confirms the unease I expressed in an earlier post about speaking with botox-frozen-faced people.
But botox side effects do get worse, I reckon…
I was speaking this week with a colleague whose leg cast has just come off – she had five breaks in her right shin when she landed badly after a sky dive. She is an exercise physiologist and is super fit and very strong. The repair surgery was extensive and she has a bolt through her ankel that will stay there for good, so it really slowed her down! She’s been conscious to use all her learning and the skills of her staff, also all exercise physiologists, to keep her body at the strength she likes it, during her long recovery.
She knew her broken leg was losing strength and now the cast was off she was amused to point out that her right thigh muscle was so much smaller than her left, because she hadn’t been able to move it as much.
The muscles in her leg shrank because they were not moving.
As I said in the earlier post, what will happen to facial muscles that are unable to move because they are paralysed?
They will shrink, of course. The muscles of our face give our faces tone and shape and hold our skin in place.
To me it’s a logical conclusion that if you have the injections, the botox side effects are:
- Your face muscles will shrink over time.
- You will end up with loose sagging skin.
- This will plug you in to a further round of cosmetic surgery.
- This will cost you time, money, anxiety and pain in the long run – lots of all of it I reckon…
Now, I’m a counselor who helps women with negative body image issues learn to love and nurture their bodies, instead of hate and abuse themselves. I’m not an exercise physiologist or a cosmetic surgeon, so I’m not an expert in those fields. I do know that a short-term fix like botox is never the answer to feeling good about yourself, and this research is showing us some less-than-desirable and unexpected botox side effects.
An application of common sense shows that even in just a couple of years, the actual botox side effects on the way a person’s face looks could be devastating….
Is it worth it?
Update: A few people have emailed saying – okay, so what’s the alternative, I want to look as good outside as I feel inside.
I get that, I really do.
Recently during series 2 of The Body Image Revolution I interviewed the gorgeous Carolyn Cleaves about her facial fitness system. It is an easy facial muscle exercise program that even plastic surgeous are recommending to their patients whose facial muscles have – guess what – atrophied because of being paralysed! I ordered the system and if I get organised enough to take piccies, will post piccies of my progress here. It’s fascinating to me that we are conscious about keeping our bodies strong but haven’t really paid much attention to the muscles of the face. It was a very interesting interview, you can read a summary of the interview with Carolyn Cleaves here.