The face is easier to improve because we pay a lot more attention to it, but in fact, the neck shows age more than the face, so it does make sense to take care of them as much as the face.
Tip #1: Keep your tongue up and flat to tone the double-chin
When I say tongue is down, what I mean by that is these blue muscles between the chin and neck are lazy. (Anatomy here) aka tongue muscles. You can see the differences between when the tongue is down and up.
If you have strong muscles there, but just are not activating because you didn’t know the correct tongue position or whatever reason, then you can easily do this. If you don’t have strong power in the muscles, you won’t be able to see this big difference. In that case, you would need to strengthen and stretch the mewing muscles first.
Anyway, if you don’t know what Mewing or correct Tongue Posture® is, be sure to check our Mewing 101 tutorial.
Assuming you know what it is, let’s talk about how to maintain the mewing Tongue Posture® because that's the challenging part. Achieving is relatively easier, but maintaining it is harder.
I included, a lot of people are still training for it. One of the game-changer tools I have recently had the pleasure to try on is Neck Patch. It's a simple neck patch and you just apply it on your neck whenever you like. That's it. It prevents bad body posture including neck posture, which is like a neck and mewing corset.
It helps keep standing up your head straight on the neck. If I'm wearing this and my tongue is up and flat, it makes me feel like I'm being choked. I cannot breathe easily because of course, we have to do nose breathing, right? If I'm wearing this and in a bad posture looking down or something with bad posture, I immediately notice.
The biggest reason why you get horizontal lines on your neck is your bad body posture, neck posture, and tongue posture because you keep folding the skin for a long time, which results in folded lines.
To be honest, wearing the patch for hours of time is not comfortable. It's just not comfortable, but if you can wear this even for a short period of time, you get the idea and remind me to keep the neck up, keep my head above my butt. That's why I like using it from time to time. I don't do this every day but it helps to train my posture awareness. Awareness is the first step for good posture.
Tip #2: Microneedle the skin to prevent crepey skin on the neck
I would also like to talk about crepey skin on the neck. Creepy skin doesn’t come from muscles but from deteriorated skin. Here is the structure from the skin to the bones.
- Epidermis
- Dermis
- Fat
- Fascia
- Muscles
- Periosteum
- Bones
By the way, if you want to know how to stimulate the Periosteum, Glycosaminoglycan, and Proteoglycan to produce more collagen and elastin in the skin, check out the video with my sensei, facial chiropractor/dentist, Dr. Satsuma.
This creepy skin resides in the epidermis, which is the first layer. So, Exercise is not gonna do so much about it, because the targets are different. That's why I started doing more microneedling or radio frequency, microcurrent, and all kinds of tools available for use at home.
Stay tuned for more content about those tools. Microneedling especially is interesting to me. You wanna do it every 4 to 6 weeks. You cannot do it every week or every day. That would be too much because you need the time to heal. You're giving micro-injuries, micro-trauma on purpose then you can trick the skin to produce more collagen and elastin to cure the injuries.
And right after that, you wanna take collagen, because that collagen you drink or eat is gonna come to the damaged areas to heal. Also, although I do like a facial microcurrent, I do microneedling the face, microneedling the neck, microneedling the elbow today, and the knee as well.
I kind of do it all over the face. All over the body, but not all at once. You should not do it all at once. You should do like, this week you'll do this, and next week you do the other area. 4 to 6 weeks later you come to the original area or something like that. Because if you do a lot of injuries at once, the collagen you're gonna take, or nutrition, it won’t be enough and takes too long to heal. The faster you heal after the microneedling, the better. The more collagen and elastin you get, the better results you get.
By the way, you can also wear the neck patch while sleeping if it's not too uncomfortable for you. I have tried it and I couldn't do it much because it was uncomfortable, but you might be able to try it.
But what I'm trying to say is if you sleep like this without the patch, it’s easy to cause deep wrinkles. That's why you need to care about the height of the pillow. The best height? It depends because your body and mine are different. But FYI this AULA pillow is my ultimate favorite that I've been using for years, maybe three, or four years already. I keep changing every year because it might change the shape. If you are interested in it, check it out.
It's so good because when I went to Japan last year, I noticed that my face became asymmetry more. I didn't bring it at that time. Next time I'm definitely going to bring it definitely. Even though it's so bulky, I'm gonna bring it to Japan because if I didn't have it, my heads would be tilted into a side sleeping position. It’s worth it.
And also, you can adjust the height in fact. There is an additional layer that you can place underneath the pillow to heighten the pillow if you like. You can simply insert the layer or towel to adjust easily.
Keeping the right height is so important for wrinkle prevention. If it's too high, you might be sliding to the bed sheet and causing lines. If it’s too low again, you might be causing lines. Either way, you cause lines.
If possible, try to check your neck position, by checking a mirror or phone to make sure that it's not wrinkling. Keep the tongue up and flat (Mewing 101) and space between your upper and lower teeth. Don’t forget to tape the mouth and sleep.
Tip #3: Relax the overworking neck muscles in your daily lives
Neck can have a hole sometimes from overworking muscles there, aka Neck Hole. This is totally different from fold lines or crepey skin. As you can see in our Anatomy, the neck muscles below Platysma are all red (overworking) muscles.
Every time you breathe, if you are over-using the neck muscles, they get tense and harder, which develops strong shapes to create the hole. Of course, you’ll get a lot of neck pain, shoulder pain because it's overused, and vertical lines appear on the neck too. Those too-defined figures appear more quickly if you are skinnier in general.
Even when you're talking, you might want to be conscious not to use the neck muscles. If you are interested in learning more, check out our How to speak video. Especially when you say “e” out of a, e, i, o, u. “e” is the most dangerous vowel. Quickly explaining, you should speak up, not speak to the sides or down.
If I can say more, you wanna be careful with swallowing too. When you drink or eat you might be swallowing with neck muscles too much, instead of relying on the tongue. If the neck is moving too much while swallowing, you are not using the tongue muscle fully enough.
How many times do you swallow? So many times per day, right? We eat, drink, swallow saliva, etc. so many times every day. Check the tutorials for How to eat and How to drink.
I know there are many tutorials of ours. If you are overwhelmed at this point, you can check our App and/or On-Demand courses as well.
Summary:
Tip #1: Keep your tongue up and flat to tone the double-chin
Keep mewing, and this kind of neck patch helps keep mewing, as a neck corset to stand your face, including mewing muscles. Even when you are not wearing it, you remember the good position, to make that unconscious habit.
Tip #2: Microneedle the skin to prevent crepey skin on the neck
Remember the skin structure. The mature epidermis causes crepey skin, so you want to rejuvenate the epidermis by microneedling.