Our faces respond to exercise so try yoga to heal your lockdown visage

Staring at screens can give you tech neck, along with a dose of FaceTime frown. Christine Manby has discovered that 20 weeks of face yoga can knock three years off your visual age

While there is no doubt that a period of lockdown has been necessary to protect us all from the horror of Covid-19, life lived within four walls has its own unfortunate physical consequences. There’s the Quarantine 15: that extra stone in weight that’s the inevitable result of days spent working within sight of the bread bin. Then there’s the Self-Isolation Slipped Disc. I can’t be the only person who’s put their back out while trying to follow an NHS online exercise video for people with chronic back pain. And then there’s Lockdown Face.

Have you got it? Lockdown Face is that tired, tight expression you see in the supermarket queue. It has a number of causes. It encompasses elements of “tech neck” – the postural issues that come with looking at your phone all the time – and “FaceTime frown” – the squinty expression you pull as you try to look at your own face in that mini-picture at the top of the screen. Lockdown face is also exacerbated by holding one’s teeth clenched firmly together as you try not to tell your loved ones that if they make that funny sighing sound one more time you will kill them with your bare hands. Lockdown has magnified all of life’s small stresses and turned them into wrinkles, dark circles and incipient jowls.