Botox® has been a go-to cosmetic tool for more than two decades now and it’s helped millions of people to turn back the clock on aging skin by relaxing wrinkles and fine lines. It seems that turning your frown upside down by getting rid of frown lines might also improve your mental health.
Here at Institute for Advanced Psychiatry, Dr. Diana Ghelber and the team are big believers in leaving no stone unturned when it comes to addressing mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety. For example, we offer noninvasive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), alongside traditional psychotherapy, and we also offer Botox injections as part of our mental health toolkit.
Here, we take a look at how Botox injections might boost your mental health.
The key ingredient in Botox is onabotulinumtoxinA, which is a neurotoxin that, when used cosmetically, quiets the muscles that contract to form dynamic wrinkles. These wrinkles include crow’s-feet, forehead lines, and moderate to severe frown lines.
These treatments tend to take effect within 3-7 days and they can last for up to four months, at which point people return for another round of injections.
So, how does a cosmetic wrinkle treatment help with issues like depression and anxiety? The answer is fairly simple and direct — it improves your expression.
Over time, dynamic wrinkles like frown lines can take up permanent residence on your face as your skin ages and doesn’t bounce back. As a result, you can be stuck looking more worried or angry than you feel. And people can respond to that, creating a circle of exchanges that are more negative than they should be.
And this outward expression can influence not only how people respond to you, but also how you feel on the inside. Just as putting a smile on your face can release feel-good hormones, wearing a frown or worried look may also influence chemicals in your body that favor negative emotions.
With Botox, we target the glabellar muscles that, as one study put it, act as, “Mediators of frowning and thus play a key role in the facial expression of negative emotions, such as anger, fear, or sadness, which are highly prevalent in mental disorders like depression.”
As aesthetic providers used Botox over the years, they found that patients casually reported more positive mental health. So, studies have been conducted since and have found that Botox injections can reduce symptoms of depression.
Another study found that people who had Botox injected into four different sites on the face reported anxiety significantly less than patients who treated wrinkles in other ways.
So, as it turns out, turning that frown upside down with Botox can go much further than skin deep and improve your mental health.
If you’d like to explore whether Botox might play a role in improving your mental health, we invite you to contact our office in Fort Worth, Texas, to schedule an appointment.
