Two bad habits that make people ugly and in a bad mood. I guess you are doing them!

Recently many people have complained online: I am just working diligently, why am I getting uglier and uglier, and still smell like a worker?

Image source: A social platform @小欧不工作

So what is this so-called "skin odor"? In fact, the skin odor may also deepen wrinkles.

These two unconscious little habits at work are the main reasons that cause wrinkles to deepen without you noticing!

Ugly habit 1:

frown

Just take a look around the work area and see the expressions of your colleagues, and you will be surprised to find that everyone is frowning! Our expressions determine our faces to a large extent. Frequent frowning is the culprit for the increasingly serious wrinkles between our eyebrows. After a day of work, the wrinkles between our eyebrows are more serious, which is naturally because we are more likely to frown when we are at work!

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Negative emotions lead to unconscious frowning

It is really difficult not to frown at work. For example, if you just can't think of a certain solution, you just frown and can't help it... Many of our unconscious frowns are caused by negative emotions. Confusion, disgust, anger, irritability, worry, etc. can induce frowning.

And unfortunately, these negative emotions tend to occur frequently throughout our day, especially on weekdays.

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The harder you work, the more you frown

In addition to being an outlet for negative emotions, frowning can also become the "atmosphere set" when we are trying to concentrate.

For example, when we concentrate on something in front of us, we usually frown unconsciously. This is because this action can reduce the exposed area of ​​our eyelids to a certain extent, thereby reducing the interference of external light, and ultimately helping us focus on the things in front of us.

Even our "Ganfan Ge" and "A Tiao Jie" who just won the gold medals had obvious frowning movements when they were concentrating on aiming.

Image source: CCTV News

The psychological pressure of concentration will also increase the tension of facial muscles and cause frowns. When we are working hard to write files or concentrating on slacking off, frowns will appear quietly.

A study analyzed the relationship between the degree of effort and the degree of frowning, and found that the harder you work, the more you frown, which is actually a quantifiable positive correlation.

On the one hand, it serves as an outlet for venting negative emotions, and on the other hand, it acts as an atmosphere group when you are concentrating and working hard. No wonder that after a day of work, the wrinkles between the eyebrows have quietly deepened more than a little.

In fact, in addition to frowning, we often make expressions related to negative emotions such as surprise, sadness, anger, disgust and fear, such as pursing our lips, sucking our cheeks, biting our lower lips, etc. at work. Once we make such expressions unconsciously for a long time and form muscle habits, it will more or less affect the condition of our facial skin and cause wrinkles to come earlier.

Ugly Habit 2:

Grit your teeth

In addition to causing wrinkles on our skin, some bad habits will also change the condition of our facial muscles, such as cheek bulge.

The fact that the cheeks swell is also related to a common action we do at work. That's right, clenching teeth.

Cheek fat can be divided into skeletal type cheek fat, muscular type cheek fat, fat type cheek fat and aging type cheek fat. Among them, the muscular type cheek fat is naturally the most easily affected by our expressions and movement habits.

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Frequent clenching of teeth will make your face look ugly

We all know that frequent use of the masseter muscles will lead to their growing strength and growth until they become a protruding curve on the jawline. But what many people don’t know is that simply clenching your teeth without chewing, commonly known as clenching your teeth, can also make your cheeks grow.

After all, teeth cannot bite together by themselves, but require the continuous contraction of the chewing muscles to maintain a clenched state. If the muscles are used too much, it is like a person exercising in the gym every day. It is difficult not to grow muscles.

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May cause temporomandibular disorder

In addition to making the face shape uglier, our chewing muscles will also become particularly tired and tense due to long-term contraction, especially the masseter and temporalis muscles, which will become stiff due to long-term tension, causing pain to spread from the cheeks all the way to the temples.

If the condition continues to develop, it may lead to the troublesome temporomandibular disorder. Unconscious clenching of teeth is both an important cause of temporomandibular disorder and a key sign of temporomandibular disorder.

Temporomandibular disorder syndrome not only brings us the inability to open our mouth, pain when opening our mouth, and snapping sounds, which are unbearable troubles. It also makes our already unsmooth face shape even worse - the problem of the temporomandibular joint will make us have an additional ugly buff of crooked face and slanted mouth.

The key is that many people don’t realize that they are clenching their teeth unconsciously.

According to a paper published in 2023, approximately 16.16% to 32.08% of adults have the habit of unconsciously clenching their teeth.

In fact, the principle of clenching teeth is very similar to frowning. When you concentrate on solving a problem, or when you are overloaded with negative emotions such as depression, anxiety, and stress, you will often clench your teeth.

Although we can release some stress and improve the performance of tasks by gritting our teeth, if you always keep gritting your teeth unconsciously for a long time, you need to be alert. You are bearing too many negative emotions and need to find a way to relieve them!

Various facial micro-expressions are the barometer of our emotions, reflecting our current and long-term emotional experiences. And this appearance that we easily ignore also affects the condition of our facial muscles unconsciously.

How to avoid unconscious bad habits?

Becoming aware of your own unconscious little habits is the first step.

Whether you put a small mirror at your workstation or put a label on your computer, as long as you can remind yourself to pay attention to your facial expressions from time to time, it will have a good effect. When you find yourself frowning/gritting your teeth/pursing your lips, consciously relax your facial muscles and gradually form a habit, and slowly you can get rid of this bad habit.

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Smile instead of frown

Of course, changing to a better expression/posture can also help us solve problems faster. The easiest way to avoid frowning is to smile, which is a solution that scientists have seriously studied.

This is because the zygomatic major muscle used when we smile has an inhibitory relationship with the corrugator supercilii muscle used when we frown. In short, the action of smiling naturally overcomes the frowning action. Replacing unconscious frowning with active smiling is not only beneficial for improving our frown lines, but also for positive emotional expression.

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Maintain correct bite posture consciously

Under normal circumstances, our teeth are actually in a naturally closed state. When our upper and lower lips are slightly in contact, a small gap will naturally separate the upper and lower jaws and teeth, forming a wedge-shaped gap from back to front. This is clinically called the diastasis reticulum. We can always remind ourselves to maintain this state.

You can also apply hot compresses and massage the relevant muscles to give tense muscles more opportunities to relax.

In addition to these conscious changes in movements, the most important thing is to pay attention to the sources of your stress and negative emotions, and solve the problems from the source of induction. Frowning or gritting your teeth are mostly just superficial. What we need to pay more attention to is our own emotions and sources of stress.

Planning and production

Author: Science Popularization Team of Xinshi Science Popularization Studio

Review | Feng Jun, deputy chief physician of the Dermatology Department of Sinopharm Tongmei General Hospital