Facial tension can be sneaky. You can hold a frown between your eyebrows or clenched in your jaw for hours — while concentrating hard during a study session or while battling stress or anxiety — which causes your facial muscles to feel tense, tight, and weary. And even when you do notice your facial tension, getting rid of it is no easy feat. When you're so used to holding these muscles tight and tense, relaxing them feels almost impossible. How do you even start?

"Everyone has some kind of tension," says face yoga instructor Koko Hayashi. "You just don't realize it because you've been doing it a long time, unless you get a lot of pain." Face yoga, Hayashi explains, is a way to help "wake up" the less active muscles in your face, like those around your eyes and cheekbones, and release tension in the overworked ones in your jaw, forehead, chin, and between your eyebrows. Relaxing those tense muscles and working the underused ones not only feels good, but can actually make your face appear fuller and more youthful, as one 2018 study found. Face yoga "can be a natural alternative to Botox or plastic surgery," Hayashi says.

Aesthetic benefits aside, face yoga may also help you relieve the stubborn tightness in your facial muscles. If facial tension in your forehead, eyebrows, and jaw is what's bothering you, try these seven exercises, stretches, and tips from Hayashi. They're designed to loosen these muscles and release the tension you didn't know you were holding around your eyes and mouth.

The jaw is a common source of facial tension, especially if you tend to clench or grind your teeth. Retaining tension in your masseter muscles (the big muscles at the corners of your jaw) can lead to related tightness around your temples, or temporalis muscles, as well as painful tension headaches.

One way to release some of this tension is to change the way you hold your tongue, otherwise known as your tongue posture, Hayashi says. Ideally, when you're at rest (not eating, drinking, or talking), you want your tongue to be pressed flat against the roof of your mouth — not just the tip against the roof of your mouth, not sitting low between your bottom teeth. To get the right position, try making an "ng" sound.

"When your tongue is down, you get downward tension," Hayashi explains. By keeping your tongue flat against the roof of your mouth (also known as "mewing"), you lift up the top portion of your jaw just slightly, creating a small gap between your upper and lower teeth. This position also forces you to activate different facial muscles: instead of overworking your masseter muscles (which are what cause clenching and soreness), this position forces you to use the muscles above your cheekbones, which Hayashi refers to as "sleeping" muscles because they don't typically get much use. "Tongue posture is so important to reducing the tension from this masseter muscle," she explains.

There are also a few stretches you can do to release jaw tension, especially if you notice it in the moment.

Forehead tension typically involves the corrugator muscles, a pair of muscles under your eyebrows that control their movement. These are the muscles you activate when you push your eyebrows together, whether you're concentrating, exerting a lot of effort, confused, upset, or even crying. If you've been working hard up until bedtime, you might even notice these muscles feel tense when you're trying to sleep at night. Tension in these muscles is hard to let go of and can eventually cause vertical wrinkles in between your eyebrows.

If you struggle with relaxing your eyebrows and corrugator muscles, Hayashi has a few tips:

If you lift your eyebrows or crinkle your forehead frequently, you may also hold some tension in your frontalis muscles, the muscles in your forehead above your brows. You may not realize it, but sometimes we even rely on the frontalis and corrugator muscles to open, close, or squint our eyes, which actually causes the muscles around our eyes to become weaker — something that already happens naturally when we age, Hayashi says. In other words, the frontalis and corrugator muscles are taking over some movements that your eye muscles should be in charge of. To relax and take some of the load off of your forehead, Hayashi recommends an exercise to activate your eye muscles.

Wherever you have it, facial tension can be tricky to pick up on and can lead to pain and soreness if you don't address it. Identifying your own personal areas of tension is the first step, then you can move on to these exercises and stretches (Hayashi recommends doing them every day, if you can) to target those sore areas and help you relax your face. After all, you strengthen and stretch the rest of your muscles — why not do it for your face too? Of course, if you still have persistent pain or headaches from facial tension, be sure to speak with a doctor to identify the cause and discuss more specific treatment options.

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