Category: Uncategorized

The FCC is trying to enforce Section 315 of the Communications Act of 1934, which requires over-the-air broadcast stations to provide equal on-air opportunity for political candidates. But is “The View” a bona fide news program?

EXCLUSIVE: Adam “Mr. Moo” Moskowitz had a lot of gall going to Gaul. The American cheesemonger set out to dethrone the French at their Mondial du Fromage, the Olympics of Cheese, by a captaining an upstart U.S. team. Sacré bleu cheese! This pungent story is told in the award-winning documentary The Big Cheese, directed by […]

EXCLUSIVE: Sebastian De Souza (The Great) and Adam Godley (Down Cemetery Road) have inked deals for series regular roles in Conviction, Hulu and 20th Television’s new legal drama series starring Elisabeth Moss. Character details are under wraps. Written by House and The Good Doctor creator David Shore, the show follows criminal defense attorney Neve Harper (Moss), a confident lawyer who finally […]

EXCLUSIVE: America’s first microdrama festival is launching in New York. Alza Festival will feature vertical video series premieres, creator spotlights, live conversations, and immersive brand activations, a first-of-its-kind in the U.S. that taps into the buzzy new space. Alza comes from Pete Torres, a former Tribeca COO, and Rita Vinnik, a former creator initiatives lead […]

If you’ve ever taken a yoga class or gotten a massage, you may have heard that stress is stored in specific parts of the body: Emotion in the hips. Strain in the shoulders. Anxiety in the gut. And, it seems lately, particularly online, trauma in the jaw.

On social media, videos abound of young women laying face up on massage tables with someone’s hands in their mouths. Labeled as a “buccal massage,” “jaw release,” or “intraoral massage,” the videos depict clients weeping after having their cheeks and jaws manipulated from the inside of their mouths. The caption of one recent video read: “A lot of the time when we work on the jaw, we see deep emotional releases from anger to grief and sadness. It’s as if every time we don’t express ourselves, the emotions move up through the body and end at the mouth.” “While other massages work surface-level, buccal massage reaches the deep facial muscles where we store our unspoken words, unexpressed grief, and unprocessed trauma,” said another. Recently, the singer LeAnn Rimes went viral for appearing in such a video herself, crying after a “deep jaw release.”

Experiencing tension in the jaw isn’t a new phenomenon, though, Dan Ginader, a physical therapist in New York, told Vox. Jaw pain is easily identifiable — maybe you’re a lifelong grinder — and once you notice it (or become aware of it through social media), the ache is hard to ignore. The fact that so many people are talking about the jaw’s association with emotional release right now could be rooted in the particularly stressful state of the world.

Our minds and bodies are connected, but do our jaws (or any specific body part) really hold “trauma,” as these practitioners claim? Probably not. People do experience real relief when their jaw muscles are massaged, experts say, but the intense emotional reaction happening on social media is actually fairly uncommon in the real world. 

How your jaw stores tension

Stress impacts nearly every aspect of your body; it’s a well-established cause of muscle tension, shortness of breath, increased heart rate and cortisol production, and gastrointestinal distress. These reactions are your body’s way of fighting off or fleeing from threats. 

Without a signal that the threat has passed, your body can hold onto the stress. “Over time, the brain and body begin treating tension like a baseline instead of a short term reaction,” Cheryl Groskopf, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles, told Vox in an email. “When you hear the phrase ‘our bodies store tension,’ it’s really about the nervous system repeatedly practicing certain survival responses.”

This stress might cause you to activate your shoulders, grind your teeth, and clench your jaw, all of which contribute to jaw pain. “People can store tension or store stress in all different parts of their body, the most common being the head and neck area,” Ginader said. “You hunch up your shoulders and that can create a lot of tension in your upper traps and any sort of tension that drifts into the neck will also drift into the jaw. One of my favorite physical therapy professors said that if you don’t know what to do with a case of jaw pain, just treat the neck and likely the jaw will follow suit.”

The stress can be rooted in something physical, too, according to Robert Kerstein, a retired prosthodontist whose career centered on bite alignment and muscle tension. For example, pain related to your teeth can be incredibly stressful and negatively affect your mental health. In a recent paper, Kerstein and his co-authors found that patients with jaw pain had lower cortisol levels after their teeth were slightly adjusted to reduce the amount of time their teeth were in contact when their jaw was moving. In another study, patients had lower levels of depression after their teeth were adjusted. In other words, “reshaping the teeth so that they have a lot less friction and create a lot less muscle activity” makes people less stressed and depressed, Kerstein said. 

The mental relief people feel after having their teeth adjusted isn’t due to unlocking trauma. “The depression went away, because they were no longer living in chronic pain,” Kerstein said. And, once you feel physically better, you might feel less stressed.

The emotional component of physical therapy

In his physical therapy practice, Ginader has seen patients experience an overwhelming emotional response similar to those he’s observed online, but it’s very rare and people shouldn’t expect to shed tears during a jaw massage, he said. A general sense of relief is much more common. “They oftentimes didn’t even realize how tight and tense and stressed they were until you remove it,” Ginader said. 

People who use their mouth and jaw frequently for work — musicians, actors — may have a bigger rush of feelings because their facial muscles are directly connected to their ability to earn a living, Ginader said. “There’s another layer of emotion, because you can start to become worried that you’re losing the way that you make money and you’re losing the thing that brings you life, and then, all of a sudden, somebody has given you the relief that you felt like you needed to get back to doing that thing,” he said.

Performers — and people who share their lives on social media — are also used to being vulnerable and in touch with their emotions, which may also explain the over-the-top reactions online, Ginader said.

“In some of the cases I think they might be hamming it up for the camera or they are just caught up in the moment,” Ginader said. “There is an emotional release to having longtime tension resolved but a lot of the reactions do seem to be a little over the top.”

Massage is beneficial, of course, but it doesn’t entirely address the underlying cause of the tension, which is either stress- or muscular-related. For Ginader’s patients who work office jobs, stress is typically the root issue, while performers often have tension due to physical overuse. 

If the source is stress, Ginader recommended practices that regulate your nervous system, like breathing exercises, meditation, gentle stretching, or yoga. For physical causes, Ginader suggested looking at your form in the gym to see if you’re overusing your trapezius (the muscle in your shoulder and upper back). If it’s becoming a chronic problem, you may also want to see a doctor, dentist, or both. Regardless of the specific cause, you may  benefit from a massage of your jaw muscles, too. Ginader also recommended setting periodic reminders on your phone to check in on your body and posture: Are you clenching your jaw or shrugging your shoulders? If so, “just take a few deep breaths and allow everything to relax,” Ginader said.

Ultimately, the jaw does relate to emotions, since grinding your teeth is a common stress response, Kerstein, the retired prosthodontist, said. And a facial massage feels good in the moment. “There’s an emotional elation of positivity, but the symptoms will come back,” Kerstein said. “They’ll return, which is very well-documented, and none of the external therapies have any true longevity. … So the person will have an emotional relief because they feel better, but then they’ll also have the downside of it getting worse, returning, and having to deal with those emotions as well.” 

Music is interwoven with the sounds of daily life in this West African island nation, which hosted two international music festivals in April and has been named the African Capital of Culture for 2028.

When Markwayne Mullin was still a senator, the Oklahoma Republican repeatedly endorsed a radical idea about air travel in the United States: He frequently pitched the idea of stripping all federal aid to airports in so-called sanctuary cities.

During his Capitol Hill tenure, Mullin never made much headway with this, and his rhetoric went largely ignored. Now, however, he leads the Department of Homeland Security, where the secretary is in a position to actually try to implement this idea, which he talked up again during a Fox News appearance on Tuesday night.

Markwayne Mullin: “We are currently drawing up plans to say, listen, in these sanctuary cities where the local radical left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our job and enforce federal laws, then we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities.”

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-05-27T01:50:26.024Z

“We are currently, ⁠which we’re not initiating yet, but we’re currently drawing up plans,” Mullin said, referring to airports in “sanctuary cities” with “local radical-left Democrats.” He added that the federal government “shouldn’t be processing international flights” into these cities. (“Sanctuary cities” refers to areas in which local governments limit police cooperation with federal immigration authorities.)

To be sure, it’s not uncommon to see and hear Republican officials thumping their chests during conservative media appearances, without any real intention of following through on their tough talk. But in this instance, when the DHS secretary talked about “currently drawing up plans,” he apparently wasn’t kidding.

Just last week, for example, Reuters and The Atlantic, among other news organizations, reported that Mullin had privately told U.S. travel executives his department could opt to stop customs and immigration processing ​for international travelers. Soon after, the U.S. Travel Association said that it had also spoken to the secretary and that he told the trade group’s representatives that he’s serious about these plans.

In other words, ahead of the summer travel season and World Cup games, the nation’s homeland security secretary is prepared to sabotage airports in cities that fail to cooperate with the administration’s deportation agenda by ending customs and immigration services at the facilities.

It is difficult to say with certainty when or whether the Oklahoman will follow through on this. What’s more, if Mullin actually tried to pull the trigger on the idea, it would face furious pushback from major airlines, businesses that rely on international flights, as well as state and local officials who would argue persuasively that such a policy appears to be illegal. Even Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has said the idea doesn’t make sense to him.

Given the economic impact of such an idea, President Donald Trump himself might be inclined to intervene, if only to prevent his approval rating from slipping even further.

That said, I’ve lost count of how many times in recent months I’ve thought, “That’s too crazy to happen,” only to see that very thing happen anyway. Watch this space.

The post DHS’ Mullin eyes plans to sabotage airports in so-called ‘sanctuary cities’ appeared first on MS NOW.

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