Tension symptoms I can't seem to shake

[textsfromthemoon]

Really I just need to ramble for a moment, but if anyone could provide any insight or support I would be super appreciative

I've dealt with anxiety and HA for quite a while, but recently my anxiety is at a high. I've been in the process over the past few months of moving out of my families home and into an apartment with my boyfriend, this has been stressful as I've never lived on my own other than when I lived in my dorm at college which was about 2 years ago (I'm 23 now). Then just when things were getting settled with the move, my mom was recently diagnosed with uterine cancer. Her prognosis is quite good thankfully, she will have a radical hysterectomy next month and then will follow up with preventative treatment in order to give her the best shot at this never reoccuring, but still in all, she's my only living biological parent and the stress of both of these situations have just been giving me crazy anxiety symptoms that I'm not sure how to relieve.

One symptom that I've had off and on for the past few months (even before this started) is a feeling of tightness in the left side of my face, it's always the left side, it doesn't feel numb per-say but more so just tight and I sort of have this tic where I scrunch that side of my face, not sure if it's the scrunching causing the tightness or the tightness causing the scrunching but it's driving me crazy. I'm fairly certain this is a symptom of anxiety as it comes and goes and doesn't ever really worsen. Sometimes I'll have it every other day, sometimes I won't have it for weeks at a time.

Another thing I've noticed is my jaw on the left side as well has been clicking if I move it a certain way, I've heard of TMJ somewhat and I'm not sure if that can cause the feelings in the face as well?

I've also been feeling a lot of tension in my shoulders, I've noticed I sort of always have my shoulders tensed/hunched up towards my ears, I have to almost physically force myself to pull them down to where they actually should be lol but I also seem to sleep with them tensed so I guess my question is does anyone have tips on how to sort of retrain yourself to not hold so much tension?

Wow sorry that this is such a big jumbly mess, but I just really needed to vent everything out, even though I'm clearly a wreck lol I'm proud of myself that I'm recognizing these symptoms as anxiety and not allowing myself to let my HA take over, but they're still nuisances none the less so any help would be really appreciated thanks for listening to me moan if you made it this far.

[welsh girl]

I am not going to be much help I.m afraid but I will bet my cotton socks it s tension.
this happened to me once, I was worried and tense about something for quite a while and screwed up my face that I lost my wide eyes, and now they are much narrower,
Just to show what can happen, Don't worry, get it checked just to ease your mind.

[textsfromthemoon]

Thank you so much for replying welsh girl, it definitely does help to know what tension can do. It helps me to know others have been in this position, I definitely agree with you that it likely is tension as I have gone periods of time where the symptoms completely disappear so I reckon if it were something more serious that wouldn't occur.
Did your tension eventually just ease on its own?