Your Face Has Movement Habits Too: Why I Like Face Yoga

Have you ever caught yourself clenching your jaw and realized you have absolutely no idea how long you have been doing it?

Or noticed that your shoulders are almost touching your ears while you are reading an email?

We talk about posture and movement patterns in the body all the time, but we do not talk nearly as much about the little patterns we repeat with our face.

That is one of the reasons I like face yoga.

Not because I think you need to exercise your face into submission, but because it makes you pay attention.

Most of us have a default face

Not your resting face. Your concentrating face.

Your driving face. Your scrolling face. Your stressed-out face. Your “I have 14 things to do and someone just asked me another question” face.

For some people, that means raising the eyebrows. For others, it means tightening the jaw, pursing the lips, squinting or pulling tension into the chin.

The interesting part is that after a while, you stop noticing it.

Your face can stay busy even when you think you are relaxed.

The jaw is usually the first place people notice

If I had to pick one area where people are consistently surprised by how much tension they carry, it would be the jaw.

A client will be completely relaxed on the table, I will begin working around the masseter and suddenly I hear, “Oooooh, I didn’t realize that was so tight.”

That happens all the time.

The jaw is involved in chewing, talking and swallowing, but it is also one of the places a lot of us seem to hold stress.

Face yoga can help simply because it gives you a reason to notice it.

Are your teeth touching when they do not need to be? Are you clenching while concentrating? Are you pressing your tongue upward or tightening everything around your mouth?

You cannot change a habit you never notice.

The forehead has habits too

Take a second and look at your screen without changing anything.

Are your eyebrows raised?

A surprising number of people spend a lot of their day lifting the forehead while reading, talking, applying makeup or looking at their phone.

That does not mean facial expression is bad. Your face is supposed to move.

The point is awareness.

If a muscle is working all day, every day, learning how to relax that area can be just as useful as learning how to activate something else.

Your phone is involved more than you think

I know. The phone gets blamed for everything.

But think about the position you are in while scrolling.

Head forward. Chin down. Shoulders rounded. Maybe one side of your neck doing more work than the other.

Then add jaw tension on top of it.

Your face, neck and shoulders are not separate systems. That is one of the reasons my facial massage does not stop neatly at the jawline.

The muscles and fascia continue into the neck, scalp, shoulders and chest. It all talks to each other.

Face yoga does not have to be complicated

You do not need to memorize twenty facial exercises.

Start by noticing.

Relax your forehead. Let your teeth separate. Drop your shoulders. Take a slow breath. Move your neck gently. Then notice whether your face feels different.

That alone is useful.

From there, you can add intentional facial movement or exercises that focus on specific areas, but the awareness comes first.

Stop thinking about your face as a collection of problem areas

This is probably my favorite part of the whole conversation.

We are constantly being encouraged to find something wrong with our face. Fix the jawline. Fix the forehead. Fix the eyes. Fix the neck.

I would rather start with curiosity.

What is your face doing all day?

Where are you holding tension?

Are you sleeping well? Are you stressed? Are you clenching? Are you spending eight hours looking down at a laptop?

Your skin and your face are part of you. They are not isolated little problems to solve.

At Moonflower Skin Lab in South Austin, that is the approach I take with facial massage too. We work with the skin, but we also pay attention to the jaw, neck, fascia, lymphatic flow and the places you are carrying tension.

Sometimes the most useful thing is simply realizing what you have been doing without knowing it.