The result of removing of heavy non-equal mass particles from the theory can be described, at low energy, by the effective action, which is a series in inverse-square powers of the mass. We propose a new efficient tool to calculate the leading terms of this series based on the Schwinger proper-time method. Unequal masses give rise to a large number of effective vertices describing the explicit flavor symmetry breaking effects with well-defined coupling constants. Our method is pertinent to the theory with explicit and spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, chiral gauge theory, standard and beyond standard model effective field theory, the theory of critical phenomena, cosmology, etc.