The Sneer Complex: How Facial Muscle Relaxation Can Lead to Social Conflict

I had a nose injury that made it so that I sneered heavily. After the injury, I developed strain and knots in my smiling/sneering muscles. I was able to reduce much of this strain by actually massaging the muscles. However, I then took it too far by combining the massage with acupuncture. I removed, not just the strain, but also the healthy tone in my sneering muscles and it resulted in social conflict. This is because sneering is a fascinating psychological complex that can be traced back to aggressive displays in monkeys.  Here is the whole story:

 

I’ve had a nervous smile since I was young. Many people do, but mine was more pronounced than most. This could be due to getting hit and needing stitches in my nose at age 4. But the problem was made worse after getting hit and having my nose violently broken at age 17.  The impact fractured the nasal, septal, and the maxillar bones. The doctors said there were numerous small bone fragments that they had to pick out of the tissue. My face still feels numb and fuzzy, and it tingles sometimes. These things are indicators of muscle and nerve damage.

 

So, the muscles and nerves surrounding my nose were damaged. These include the “nasalis” and the “levator labii” muscles. The levator labii lifts the top lip. It is involved in the smile and the sneer and thus is really important to how mammals get along with each other. In nonprimate mammals, it is involved in flashing the canines, which is a threat signal. However, humans, apes, and monkeys use tension in this muscle to convey many things including fear, disgust, and even affection, depending on the context and the extent of muscle contraction.

 

After the accident, I further strained the muscles by grinning politely. I did it all the time and the muscles around my nose were stuck in partial contraction leaving them tense, stiff, and sore. Massaging them with a knuckle was intensely uncomfortable. When I realized that it might be possible to massage this soreness away, I spent many months, trying to get all the tension out. I used my knuckles and other tools to compress the muscles surrounding my nose. This includes the nasalis, procerus, levator labii, and others. I massaged them, using techniques from myofascial release. It worked. My smile became easier. The tension was reduced. The swollenness and puffiness around my nose went down and I found myself sneering less. So, I felt like I had good reason to massage them back to normalcy. I focused on what felt the achiest, determined to get out all the aches and cramps.

 

In 2016, I took this too far. I used acupuncture needles I had bought on Amazon all around my nose. Working on other muscles throughout my body, I found that acupuncture can take massage to a whole new level. I would stick 20 needles around my nose and leave them for up to an hour. Then when I use my knuckle to dig into these muscles, I could feel popping and crackling as I worked through the muscular adhesions and restrictions associated with “adaptive muscle shortening” which is a consequence of intensely bracing muscles over many years.

 

Combined with paced diaphragmatic breathing, those needles really dissolve default, resting tension. I would place a needle in every square centimeter and then lie down and breathe at a rate of 16 second inhales and 16 second exhales while focusing on the interface between my muscles and the needles. You can feel the muscles minutely quivering and pulling against the needles and I would lie there concentrating on it until it subsided. Focusing on the sensations while breathing with the diaphragm teaches the muscles to stop exerting themselves. Then, once relaxed, the muscles can be thoroughly released through physical compression (massage). At first my levator labii muscle on both sides of my nose had a knot the size of the tip of my pinky. They were just above, and lateral to, my nostrils. These hard knots were oddly shaped and painful. Normal massage did nothing to them. But using massage after acupuncture allowed me to shrink them, until they gradually broke down to nothing.

 

In my self-care system, Program Peace which you can find at programpeace.com, I recommend that people massage their entire face, including the nasal muscles. I think it’s truly beneficial. It helps people develop the ability to act more calm in public and to keep a straight face. The link below spells this routine out. But I think that acupuncture takes it way too far. I strongly discourage anyone from using acupuncture on these areas And I’ll explain why.

 

https://www.observedimpulse.com/2015/03/myofascial-release-for-face-composure.html?showComment=1735286059192

 

After maybe five sessions of using acupuncture and myofascial release on my nasal muscles, I went to sleep one night and kept waking up in fear. I was intensely fearful and was having nightmares. The nightmares I was having were about people becoming angry after they saw my face. My body unconsciously realized that my sneer had been erased. The tension in our steering muscles is submissive. Apes and monkeys that grin a lot have tense sneering muscles and tend to be the submissive ones. So, it was probably good that I removed the strain in my sneer, but I had taken it too far and removed the natural, healthy resting tone in these muscles. In obliterating my sneer, I had removed my friendly demeanor. I looked bold faced, aloof, and insolent all the time without trying to. Unfortunately, instead of stopping, I continued the “treatment.” I continued because I previously had so much success in using this method to rehabilitate other knots and cramps.

 

The dreams started coming true. My social interactions were tense and awkward. People thought that I was intentionally looking dismissive of them because my steering muscles were so relaxed. Even my own mother voiced concern. “Why do you look like that? What are you upset about?” It was nice to have a calm face free from sneering. But after repeated negative interactions with people, I became less calm inside. My chest and gut would become tight during these tense social interactions. Encounters that should have been friendly and rewarding became unpleasant.

 

Smiles and sneers facilitate interaction. They show humbleness, embarrassment, humor, and friendliness. Without my sneer, I looked more confident and poised but I also looked haughty and disdainful. Smiling politely felt very fake and this made it harder to connect with people. I could tell that some strangers didn't like me after just a quick glance at my face. Now I could have taken this in a different direction and tried to act bold and cool. I could have “faked it till I made it” trying to get people to accept it. To some extent, I did. It was nice that I could finally keep a straight face, but the rest of my body wasn’t comfortable with it. This is because this stony face didn’t fit well with my personality. So, I displayed my discomfort and tension leakage in other ways, including breathing shallowly and remaining quiet. This caused me to eschew social interaction more and more. I would tell myself that I found people uninteresting, but a large part of this is that I couldn’t feel at ease with anyone.

 

I became too calm for comfort. Some people think I look checked out, bored, or like I think I am better than others. Some people think it look “lemon-faced.” On the other hand, when someone has proper tone or a light contraction in those muscles, a person looks affectionate, fun, and sociable. This tone is integral to most positive interactions. For most people, it is effortless. But for me, it is difficult. When there is normal tone there, it looks like a resting smile and it is endearing. Unfortunately, I am missing this resting smile. When there is no tone there it looks stoic or like a “stiff upper lip,” at best, or at worst it looks detached or standoffish. I was certainly not trying to be haughty or standoffish.

 

My resting face can make people angry, and I have had multiple strangers attack me in the street simply because of how my face looks to them. Upon seeing my countenance some people looked freaked out. I can tell that some have a strong emotional reaction to something I can’t control. This happens regularly for me. Some people hate my face. I feel like a lot of people are disappointed by it every time they see me. However, certain people don’t seem bothered by it at all, and they just let the tension in their levator labii go when they are around me.

 

This issue can make it draining for people to be around me. Also, they think I am intentionally being rude and so they try to punish me. I notice that people are often pushy and weird around me even though I am not doing anything rude myself. People are constantly offended by my nose posture. They take it like a put-down, and it makes them want to retaliate. A lot of people are offended by it. Sometimes people even ask me, “why are you making that face.”

 

I could tell that my friends were taking offence at how my face looks. Honestly, I think that some of them were trying to help me and get me to stop making the face because they knew it is not good for me interpersonally. They tried to give me negative feedback to help me stop doing something weird that is crippling me socially. But the thing is, I cannot control it. In some ways it is basically a social/expressive handicap. I often try to leave others alone because I don’t want to have a negative encounter or give others a negative vibe. It is actually one of the main reasons that I am single, work by myself, and spend 95% of my time alone.

 

Within a few weeks of those acupuncture sessions, I developed cracks in both of my thumbnails. I never had an injury to either hand or any of my fingers, but the stress from losing my sneer created nail bed trauma. You can see it in the picture below. I think the situation affected my HPA axis so strongly that it manifested in this way. Trauma takes many forms. I show you this here to emphasize that a simple change to my sneer must have taken a large physical toll on my body. I have had these cracks in my nails for around 10 years now.

 

I believe that the unease created from losing my sneer contributed to chronic stress and systemic inflammation which, once I was exposed to the virus in 2021, caused me to develop persistent long Covid. I detailed my experience with long Covid at the link below. Now in 2025, nearly 10 years later, I am still uncomfortable in social situations and prefer solitude. I live and work alone and rarely reach out to friends to meet up. Even my relationships with close friends and family are strained. However, my resting face is more peaceful, I am less meek in many ways, it is easier for me to negotiate, and I am no longer afraid of telling people "no" which has been empowering.

https://www.observedimpulse.com/2024/06/my-experience-with-persistent-covid.html

 

Another muscle that you might want to think twice before rehabilitating is the frontalis. The frontalis lifts the eyebrows which is another submissive display in humans and mammals generally. Reducing strain in this area by massaging tension in the forehead can make you look dull, disinterested, or angry.

If I could go back, I would never would’ve used acupuncture on my face. I wanted to blog about this episode because I think it’s interesting scientifically. The sneer is a fascinating phenomenon, an example of embodied cognition, and I think this post helps paint a larger picture of it in light of some of my other writings.