For quite some time, there has been mounting evidence that BOTOX® is somewhat of a “jack-of-all-trades” procedure. While it is most commonly used to reduce facial wrinkles caused by aging, there have been many people who use BOTOX® to treat other problems as well.
There have been many studies indicating that BOTOX® can help relieve the symptoms of migraine headaches. Women have also injected BOTOX® into their feet to help reduce the pain caused by wearing high heels. For those people suffering from excessively sweaty armpits, BOTOX® can do wonders for your unsightly, odorific issue so that you do not need to squeegee your shirt halfway through that important meeting at the office.
Last fall, Sharon Stone tried to inject her 8-year-old son with BOTOX® to prevent his feet from smelling. While this use may seem absurd, especially considering it was for a young child, there may be a new use for BOTOX® that can top it on the weirdness scale. A recent study indicates that BOTOX® may help you feel happier.
It’s hard to believe that an injection of the toxin found in food poisoning can be a treatment to elevate your mood, but apparently it may be true. An experimental psychologist at Cardiff University in Wales has recently conducted a study to evaluate the effects of BOTOX® on your emotional state. The results show that BOTOX® patients scored much lower on measures of anxiety and depression than patients receiving other facial procedures.
It appears that when BOTOX® is injected into your glabellar frown lines or the furrows between your eyebrows, it can have the added benefit of making you feel happy. The psychologist running the experiment attributes this result to a phenomenon called facial feedback. The theory behind this phenomenon is that when you frown, you will actually feel unhappier simply because you are frowning. Therefore, if your wrinkling has given you severe frown lines causing your face to be in a perpetual frown, you will tend to adopt that mopey disposition all the time, feeling rather crabby, moody, and just downright bummed-out.
On the other hand, if you are constantly smiling, it will ultimately cause you to feel happier. By injecting BOTOX® into your frown lines so that you are forced into an almost perpetual smile, you will eventually believe that you are happy simply because you are smiling. It may sound crazy, but there is a clinical study to support this reasoning.
So before hitting the Prozac or Paxil prescriptions to help your dour mood, you may want to give BOTOX® a shot. It might be a cheaper fix than Prozac, and it won’t give you all of the same nasty side effects. I have never heard anyone say that BOTOX® adversely affects your sex life the way antidepressants do, and it is probably safer to suck down those free drinks at an open bar wedding on BOTOX® than on Prozac.
Of course, there might be a downside to always smiling. If you are a teacher, it will be very difficult to inspire fear in misbehaving students when you can’t get that perma-grin off of your face. If you are at a funeral, your chipper disposition may be mistaken as callousness in the face of a personal tragedy. But at least you’ll feel happy. And don’t we all want to feel happy?
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