Beyond the Book #2 – Relax Your Face

Introduction

In Relax Your Face (the second exercise  in The Next Ten Minutes) I invite you to explore your awareness of your own facial musculature. The goal of this exercise is two-fold. First it’s a simple exercise in relaxation, the purpose of which is to see if you can move from this state:

into something more like this:

The second goal of the exercise is use facial relaxation as a focus for meditation. Our facial muscles are fascinating to me because they not only serve ordinary mechanical functions (like chewing, blinking, etc.), but they are also bound to our thoughts and emotions in ways that are often beyond our conscious grasp. Our facial muscles mediate between our internal experience and the outside world. As a result, when we increase our awareness of these muscles we gain access into habits of our mind that can be very difficult to become aware of in other ways.

Progressive Relaxation

The exercise borrows its core technique from a practice known as progressive relaxation. I regularly teach this technique to my patients, because it’s such a simple and effective way to achieve a more relaxed physical state. The method can seem paradoxical at first glance, because it requires you to first tighten particular muscle groups as much as possible before releasing into relaxation. The underlying principle is quite simple: in order to fully experience relaxation it is very helpful to first experience its opposite. Here’s a video which will guide you through a complete version of a typical progressive relaxation exercise:

 

When I teach progressive relaxation the facial muscles are always the most difficult for clients to do, because tightening your facial muscles makes you look really strange. If you take it as far as you can, not only does your face look contorted but your neck muscles start to quiver and shake. That intensity is a signal that you’re doing it right. It guarantees that when you let go of that tension you’ll experience genuine relaxation. The energy which expands as you let go of the tension propels you forward into relaxation.

Proprioception

In addition to its calming effect, progressive relaxation also increases our awareness of our implicit bodily states and our awareness of the space our bodies inhabit. This form of awareness is called proprioception – a word with Latin roots meaning the perception of one’s own self. While we all vary in our degree of innate proprioceptive awareness, and in our capacity for this awareness, it is definitely a capacity which one can develop and strengthen. Athletes, for instance, develop specialized awareness of the particular physical mechanisms relevant to their sport. In fact, as I write this I’m sitting in my son’s Aikido class, in which all the activities are largely aimed at increasing the student’s proprioceptive awareness of their body in motion, and in relation to other bodies.

Personally, I have always struggled to maintain a full awareness of my own body. I’m not entirely certain why this is. To some degree, it’s probably an inate tempermental tendency. But as a psychotherapist I’m always very aware as well that awareness of our physical body is partially regulated by emotional factors. People who have been physically traumatized – particularly those who have survived sexual abuse – not uncommonly develop a disconnection from their awareness of their own bodies. This sort of dissociation commonly starts during the abuse itself as a self-protective reflex in which the mind blocks awareness of the body during a physically traumatic experience. The problem is that this pattern persists in a generalized way even after the threat is gone. As a result, abuse survivors sometimes have little access to information about their physical state because awareness of the body in and of itself has become a traumatic trigger.

This explains, by the way, one theory about the basis for self-injurious behavior such as cutting (a behavior which is not uncommonly correlated with sexual abuse). People who cut often describe an absence of physical sensation during the act. It’s for this reason that whenever I work in therapy with trauma survivors, part of the work is aimed at re-awakening the relationship with their own body. The goal is to re-enliven proprioception.

Facial muscles

Our facial muscles are unique among the muscles of our body because of their extraordinarily intimate relationship with our thoughts and emotions. While it could be argued (and it is certainly true to some degree) that our emotions are embodied throughout our musculature, there’s no question that our facial musculature is uniquely expressive.

Research into the relationship between facial muscles and emotions goes back to Charles Darwin,  who held that specific facial expressions provide specific evolutionary advantages. From this starting point, a rich literature has developed on the nature and function of facial expressions. One key revelation was the early research of Paul Ekman, which demonstrated that human expression of major emotions is universal across cultures. A surprised face looks like surprise whether it’s in Borneo or Canada. A scared face looks scared in Germany or in Ghana. The importance of this finding is that it shows how deeply programmed the activity of our facial muscles is. It is defined at the level of species, which means that it is not easily subject to conditioning. To put it more concretely, you would be hard pressed to train yourself to look delighted every time that you felt fear. If you want a better understanding of how this all works, this video goes into more detail.

The facial feedback hypothesis

This is not to say that our physical expression of emotion is completely outside of our own control. Obviously there are times when we attempt to consciously alter the expression of the emotion we are experiencing. We try to mask our excitement when we’re leading a friend to a surprise party. Or we try to hide our fear when we’re standing up to a bully.

Researchers talk about three “uses” of facial expression. The first is “veridical” – when we our facial expressions is  authentically communicating our internal emotional state. Second is “deceptive” – when we express an emotion that we’re not actually feeling. It can be advantageous, for instance, for an army drill sergeant to look angry even when he is not actually feeling that way.

The final function of facial expression is that it provides the individual with information about their own emotional state. At first glance this might seem paradoxical – how is it that we wouldn’t know what we’re feeling? But in fact we all have moments in which we are feeling a particular emotion without being conscious of it. Often this is the result of a sort of internal censorship of negative or “unacceptable” feelings like envy or rage. Or it might be an over-riding of emotions which can create vulnerability, like sorrow or desire. I’ve found that this is a particularly difficult issues for men, who are socialized to suppress awareness of their own emotions.

What’s particularly interesting about this is that the relationship between facial muscles and emotions flows in both directions. It’s a feedback loop. So it’s not just that we smile because we’re happy…becoming aware that we’re smiling can actually make us realize that we’re happy.

This is known as the ”facial feedback hypothesis.” One implication of this idea is that it’s possible to fool ourselves into feeling an emotion by holding our facial expression in a particular way. You can see a wonderful example of this is in laughing yoga exercises like this one, in which an emotional state is manufactured through the use of physical feedback:

Another implication of this feedback loop is that it’s possible to modulate the intensity of a particular emotional experience by regulating our facial expression. Research studies have demonstrated, for instance, that those who suppress the facial expression of pain during a painful experience will actually feel the pain less intensely. Conversely, those who exaggerate the facial expression of pain will feel the pain more intensely. If you’re interested in diving further into this material, you might start with this paper.

Lie to me

This brings us back to Paul Ekman. Many people have some awareness of Eckman’s  work through the television program Lie to Me, which is based on his extensive research on the “micro-expressions” which reflect our internal state with startling accuracy. Ekman trained himself to be able to recognize subtle shifts in facial expression which reveal a person’s inner state even when they are trying to conceal it. He gained this knowledge through a rather maniacal effort to understand how each of our facial muscles operates, sometimes by giving himself electrical shocks in order to stimulate facial muscles which cannot be controlled voluntarily. (You can read a fascinating account of this process, written by Malcolm Gladwell for the New Yorker, here.)

So think of Relax Your Face as an attempt to unwind all of the conditioning which automatically activates our facial muscles in conjunction with certain thoughts and feelings.

Of course it’s impossible to do this for more than a few seconds. Every passing, fleeting thought activates some sort of response in our facial musculature. Which leads us to the deeper purpose of this exercise. Relaxing your face begins as a practice in progressive relaxation but it ends as an exercise that has much in common with mindfulness meditation. Here, instead of focusing on the breath the object of your attention is the activation of your facial muscles. You begin by simply relaxing your face, trying to feel it in its native state. Achieving this state, even for a moment, gives you the opportunity to track the ways in which your facial musculature persistently pulls you out of this pleasurably relaxed state, thrusting you back into a million little thoughts, fantasies or worries. And just as in mindfulness meditation, the goal is not really to be able to remain blissfully relaxed but rather to give yourself the opportunity to observe the automatic and unconscious activity of your own mind.

Face song

The theme song I’ve chosen for this exercise comes courtesy of Little Richard. It doesn’t actually have much to do with the exercise itself. But it’s irresistible, and that’s a very good quality in a theme song:

 

As always, if you have other suggestions for theme songs for the exercise, let me know.

Further reading

The individual reading references for this article are:

 

 

 

 

 

You can find the full Amazon list of references for this exercise here. These are the books that inspired me the most as I was contemplating this exercise, but of course there are many other possibilities. For instance, books on facial anatomy, or on progressive relaxation. So if you’ve got suggestions for books I should add, I’d love to hear them. Please leave them in a comment.

Open questions

• What is the most relaxed state that you have ever been in? How did you get there?
• And what is the most physically tense that you can ever remember being? How did you get there?
• If you had to choose one word that would serve as a cue for you to enter into a state of completely relaxation, what would it be?

Read the next post in the Beyond the Book series – Go Into Another Room – here.