To Botox or not to Botox - the happiness impact

Botox is localized botulism that is often used in the forehead  to paralyze your muscles so you lose its wrinkles. You may look great with a little Botox but it could be costing you your happiness.

One of the effects of Botox is a loss of empathy and compassion. Empathy is the ability to understand how someone is feeling. Compassion is the ability to see when someone is suffering and do something to help them. Our capacity for empathy is connected to our capacity to mirror emotions.  If eyes are the mirror to the soul, eyebrows and the crinkles and wrinkles around the eyes  are the mirrors to emotions. Eyebrows and those little crinkles and wrinkles around the eyes  are a hot spot for micro expressions. 
 
Without conscious knowledge, you are able to pick up if a person is happy, sad, stressed, or frightened  by the tiny signals they send when their eyebrows spread slightly  apart, or dip down toward each other, scrunch together and lift up or spread to either side. You are able to pick up another person's feeling not because you think; oh their eyebrows are scrunched this way or that but because your face naturally mirrors theirs, which conveys to your mind and heart what they are feeling.  

Botox prevents you from mirroring another person's expressions, which can cause you to lose clues about how those around you are feeling. It also prevents you from true expressions of your feelings.  The reason it is so  important to have empathy has to do with relationships. 

The most important thing to happiness is relationships. The famous Harvard study that followed people across a lifetime tell us that a good relationship is key to a happy life.  

And what is friendship for - whether with your life partner or anyone else?  Most often people will say to have someone who understands you and will be there in the tough times. In other worlds, to have someone who has empathy and compassion to turn to in bad times and good. Botox robs a person of the ability to discern the small moments or things just under the skin, and so steals away a myriad of little opportunities to connect and show care and love to another.   

So if you feel drawn to Botox or any of its kind to smooth out those wrinkles in your face, consider this: maybe those wrinkles are a good thing. Maybe they are there to say I care and I value how you are feeling, and my own feelings.