For many years, it was believed that humans only make six basic facial expressions: happy, sad, disgust, anger, surprise, and fear (contempt is sometimes considered a seventh).
Facial expressions that give clues to a person's mood, including happiness, surprise, contempt, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger.
When you're extremely stressed, you produce more cortisol, which flows freely through your body. This can make your blood vessels more fragile and means that skin cells don't form as quickly, slowing down sometimes by as much as 50%. Essentially, you can blame stress and cortisol for a lot of premature skin ageing.
Upper Back = Grief, Sorrow, and Sadness
Unexpressed and unreleased sadness tends to build up within the upper back region. As this area is close to the heart, it is also where emotions connected to heartbreak and loss are stored.
Emotional information is stored through “packages” in our organs, tissues, skin, and muscles. These “packages” allow the emotional information to stay in our body parts until we can “release” it. Negative emotions in particular have a long-lasting effect on the body.
Facial tension is a common response to stress and can also be linked to a TMJ-related problem. If you feel stressed, you might experience tension in various parts of your body, such as the face, neck, and shoulders. This tension is a completely natural — and common — response to stress.
Take time to slow down and be alone, get out into nature, make art, listen to music while you cook your favorite dinner, meditate to cleanse your mind and relax your body, take a bubble bath or a nap to restore.
Like anger, sadness weighs heavily on the face, and can cause wrinkles from repetitively frowning and furrowing brows.
Specifically, the universality hypothesis proposes that six basic internal human emotions (i.e., happy, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sad) are expressed using the same facial movements across all cultures (4–7), supporting universal recognition.
They include sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust.
Suffering from severe fear, anxiety, or depression. Unable to form close, satisfying relationships. Experiencing terrifying memories, nightmares, or flashbacks. Avoiding more and more anything that reminds you of the trauma.
Symptoms of Unresolved Trauma
Lack of trust and difficulty opening up to other people6. Dissociation and a persistent feeling of numbness7. Control issues, to overcompensate for feeling helpless during the traumatic incident8. Low self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness9.
The most common areas we tend to hold stress are in the neck, shoulders, hips, hands and feet. Planning one of your stretch sessions around these areas can help calm your mind and calm your body. When we experience stressful situations whether in a moment or over time, we tend to feel tension in the neck.
Facial tension can cause the face to change shape, along with headaches, heavy eyes, and jaw discomfort.
And when the effects of stress show up on your face, the results can be debilitating. When you experience an outbreak of acne, hives, eczema, puffy eyes, dark circles, dull and lifeless skin or a myriad of other skin conditions, you are seeing the toll that stress can take on you.
Ever since people's responses to overwhelming experiences have been systematically explored, researchers have noted that a trauma is stored in somatic memory and expressed as changes in the biological stress response.
Stretching the hip muscles causes a release; pent-up emotions may resurface, suppressed memories may arise, unconscious tension still held onto from a traumatic event may bubble up. All of which may unleash a seemingly inexplicable barrage of tears.