Your looks are you...or are they? If your smile makes you feel better, then would a permanent frown make you sad or depressed? Who hasn't had a friend come up and ask "are you OK? You look exhausted or stressed" even when you were doing your absolute best to "seem normal"? Clearly, you're "wearing your heart on your sleeve" for the world to see, no matter how artful your cover up attempts seem.

These and other psychoanalytic curiosities are inching their way into the mainstream body image business where the look-good-feel-good generation demands "cures" for aging looks and emotional baggage that hangs around to reveal our life experiences.

Like any person beyond their smooth skin teen years, you look into a mirror and get back face wrinkles, sagging jowls, frown lines, crows feet lines around your mouth, shrinking lip volume and shape, sunken cheeks and weird facial fat deposits. You don't feel the way you look...but what to do about it?

Botox Depression Therapy - New Guy On The Psychoanalysts' Street.

Sadness can slowly morph into a steady-state depression that can move sufferers into the armchair of the psychiatrist's office as well as into using anti-depressant medications. On the opposite side of the emotional spectrum, the bright eyed lit up face of a smiling person is shown to create a cascade of brain "happy hormones" such as endorphins which have shown measured increases at exactly the moment when smiling and laughter occurs.

So, at this delicate juncture between brain hormones and physical looks enters the Botox depression therapy theory and what it's shown to do. One of the most popular cosmetic procedures to relax facial muscles and so reduce frown lines and the drooping sad hang-dog expression implied by this facial transformation, Botox is leading a secret life as a potentially effective tool in the battle against depression. How so? By subtly altering and relaxing facial muscles, and virtually eliminating frown lines and deeper creases in the skin caused by years of patterned use and muscles remaining tensioned.

The Nuts And Bolts Theory Revealed - Change Your Looks And Change Your Mental State.

In science, and in real life, the generally accepted view is that mood is "created" within the mind...and then becomes portrayed through a person's eyes and facial expression. Sadness and depression, while discernable in another person's outward appearance, is a mental phenomenon, treatable with drugs and therapy aimed at the mind.

However, surprising recent research results show that face wrinkle removal treatment, using Botox, not only reduced the appearance of a "permanent scowl" but also measurably resulted in uplifting the psychological mood of the patients. Here's the body logic reasoning. If the mind can create a mood and "look", then the body can create a look in order to create a "mood". Facial muscles can control mood perhaps as much as the mind can.

More Effective Than Anti Depressants?

Once again, the body-mind matrix proves ever complicating where simplistic theories fail to take-in all the impact factors. This may seem absurd and counter-intuitive. Think of it as the equivalent of stopping hay fever by addressing physical symptoms like simply stopping red eyes or sneezing rather than focusing on a weakened immune system or preventing exposure to allergens.

Sounds wacky but tests using Botox resulted in depression lowering at a rate nearly twice as high as prescription anti depressants. Something is going on, and that "something" lies within the facial muscles and how they interact with the mind to co-produce our moods.

Similar Results For Mobius Paralysis Sufferers.

Is this outlandish or are hints of this phenomenon already known? Turns out that a rare form of facial paralysis known as Mobius syndrome repeatedly shows that sufferers whose face fails to flex and move exhibit far lower emotional responses to all sorts of everyday events.

Psychoanalytic literature contains cases where professional actors and actresses have become temporarily mood-altered by the constant portrayal of sad despairing role characters. The artists leave the stage, but due to the constant visceral tension of portraying despair, they end up "absorbing" their role to the extent that their outside lives begin to fill with sadness and depression.