Our faces respond to exercise so try yoga to heal your lockdown visage

Staring at screens can give you tech neck, along with a dose of FaceTime frown. Christine Manby has discovered that 20 weeks of face yoga can knock three years off your visual age

While there is no doubt that a period of lockdown has been necessary to protect us all from the horror of Covid-19, life lived within four walls has its own unfortunate physical consequences. There’s the Quarantine 15: that extra stone in weight that’s the inevitable result of days spent working within sight of the bread bin. Then there’s the Self-Isolation Slipped Disc. I can’t be the only person who’s put their back out while trying to follow an NHS online exercise video for people with chronic back pain. And then there’s Lockdown Face.

Have you got it? Lockdown Face is that tired, tight expression you see in the supermarket queue. It has a number of causes. It encompasses elements of “tech neck” – the postural issues that come with looking at your phone all the time – and “FaceTime frown” – the squinty expression you pull as you try to look at your own face in that mini-picture at the top of the screen. Lockdown face is also exacerbated by holding one’s teeth clenched firmly together as you try not to tell your loved ones that if they make that funny sighing sound one more time you will kill them with your bare hands. Lockdown has magnified all of life’s small stresses and turned them into wrinkles, dark circles and incipient jowls.

Fortunately, Lockdown face doesn’t have to be permanent. Just as you can jog off the Quarantine 15 or protect your back with consistent workouts designed to strengthen your core, it turns out that our faces respond to regular exercise too. While we concentrate on our abs and biceps, we forget that there are 57 muscles in the head, busy helping us to chew, swallow, breathe, speak and smile. And just like the muscles in the rest of our body, our facial muscles can change shape according to under – or over – use.

Those deep grooves between your eyebrows are being held in place by muscles in just the same way as the lines in David Gandy’s six-pack are. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as easy to stop the aptly named “corrugator” muscles making you look permanently angry as it is to slack off on your sit-ups. But perhaps Danielle Collins has the answer. face yoga.

Collins bills herself as the “world leading face yoga expert”. Like many practitioners, Collins began her wellness journey after a period of personal ill-health. Shortly after graduating from university, she was diagnosed with ME. Told there was no known cure, Collins spent two years struggling with the condition before deciding to take her health into her own hands. She overhauled her diet and fitness regime and found yoga and Pilates, completing diplomas with the British School of Yoga.

She also trained in Thai yoga massage, Indian head message, the Alexander technique and EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) among others. She combined elements from all these disciplines in creating her own face yoga method, which incorporates face exercise with acupressure and massage techniques to reduce lines and wrinkles, improve skin tone and engender a “holistic feeling of wellbeing which can benefit the mind and body”.

Collins explains that face yoga has been scientifically proven to be effective. She cites a study by dermatologists at the Northwestern University of Illinois, which found that 20 weeks’ worth of face yoga can knock three years off your visual age. Closer to home, Collins’ method was trialled on BBC’s Twinstitute, which found that after just one month, the twin who followed a face yoga regime ended up looking a year younger than the twin who underwent a series of expensive “vampire facials”.

Alas, I think that it will take more than a month of it to eradicate the effect lockdown has had on me. But it’s been fun trying and I’d recommend it

For the uninitiated, a vampire facial involves having blood drawn from your own body, which is then whirled in a centrifuge before being reapplied to your face. It’s sort of a relief to hear that when it comes to anti-ageing, vampire facials don’t work as well as gently tapping your orbital bone with your fingertips or covering your teeth with your lips and making like a guppy (which are two of the face yoga exercises I tried).

I know that I carry stress in my jaw. I’ve woken up some lockdown mornings feeling like I’ve spent the night dangling by my teeth from a rope over a ravine. It was fear of emerging into the post-Covid world looking like David Coulthard or worse, with a cracked tooth, that convinced me to give face yoga a try.

Collins was unsurprised, telling me: “Stress manifests itself in the face in different ways for different people....The jaw is the main area we hold our tension. Other areas tend to be across the eyes, between the eyebrows, in the forehead and across the top and back of the head. The neck is also a huge area in which stress can be felt.”

For all these various concerns, Collins has devised a variety of workouts, ranging from two to 40 minutes long – try this one to reduce stress in jaw – but I asked her what one facial expression offers the most instant relief? Would, for example, a yawn or a wide grin have the biggest instant relaxing effect?

“I would say two expressions,’' Collins replied. "Firstly, a completely neutral one. So taking just one minute and bringing the face in to a completely relaxed position, eyes closed and scanning the face with the mind, allowing every muscle to be as relaxed as possible. Secondly, a big exhalation through the mouth (almost like a sigh but saying 'haaaa'). Start by inhaling through the nose and then exhale through the mouth completely relaxing the jaw and the rest of the face.”

Collins is certainly a great advertisement for her own technique. She has a serene, line-free visage and her resting expression is an enigmatic half-smile of a Renaissance Madonna. This despite the lockdown. Naturally, she credits face yoga with helping her get through it. “We have two little girls at home with us and we’re running a business too. The things that help me most are daily face yoga, yoga and meditation. Having a structured time for work and family and getting outdoors once a day is great. We have started family bike rides, which is so nice as I rarely went on a bike before lockdown but it’s a new habit I hope to continue!”

Face yoga is the new habit I hope to continue. Alas, I think that it will take more than a month of it to eradicate the effect that lockdown has had on me. But it’s been fun trying and I’d recommend it. Even if the only effect it has is to give your housemates a belly laugh when they catch you earnestly tapping at your puffed-out cheeks when you thought no one was looking.