Botulinum toxin (the toxin in Anti-wrinkle injections) is typically understood as a neurotoxin that can be injected into your skin and temporarily paralyse your muscles, acting as an anti-wrinkle treatment by effectively erasing any lines or wrinkles that appear. While this wasn’t what it was originally approved for, it has become it’s more commercial use over time.
Since it’s conception as a treatment for tics, spasms and sweating the noticeable side effect of reduced wrinkles led to a whole new cosmetic use for Botulinum toxin, so that it was finally approved for this in 2002. 19 years later and botulinum toxin is used frequently in a multi-billion dollar business.
How could Anti-wrinkle injections
help with your mood?
As with any treatment like this, there are continual discoveries for what it can offer us, and new results have people thinking that botulinum toxin could treat anxiety and depression. You might be wondering how a cosmetic procedure could help to treat your mental health, but it’s partly all to do with the effects of the ‘look good, feel better’ philosophy. Part of the appeal of having botulinum treatments is the feeling of seeing your reflection improve slightly after the treatment.
But it’s more than that – doctors have proven that with the facial feedback hypothesis (created by Charles Darwin himself) using the muscles that form your smile play a part in the way your brain evaluates your mood. So if the muscles that you use when you’re anxious or annoyed are relaxed, then you shouldn’t feel the same intense emotions as you usually would.
The Journal of Psychiatric Research has published the results of studies that have concluded that botulinum toxin is a viable way to start to treat depression. A study was conducted in 2003 that used patients all diagnosed with depression who hadn’t had botulinum toxin treatment before and weren’t particularly bothered with lines on their face. The patients were split into two groups, with one group being treated with botulinum toxin and the other with a placebo. Results showed that over 6 weeks there was a significant improvement in the symptoms of the group who had been injected with the toxin over the placebo group. The natural conclusion was that it is possible to influence your mood by restricting your faces ability to frown.
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