Stress totally messes with your skin, causing breakouts, flare-ups, and even wrinkles. Here’s how stress affects your skin and what you can do to stay in the clear.
1. Stress hormones wreak havoc on your skin
When you are stressed, your body pumps out stress hormones as part of your fight-or-flight response. These hormones direct blood away from your skin, sending it to fuel your muscles and organs instead.
Chronic stress deprives your skin of oxygen and essential nutrients, which leads to skin conditions and inflammation. One stress hormone in particular, cortisol, can also cause your oil glands to go into overdrive, so if you are acne-prone, you may notice more breakouts.
2. It makes you lose sleep
When your brain is going a mile a minute, it can be hard to power down at night. But don’t skimp on sleep, because sleep is super-important for healthy skin (and healthy everything, really). Sleep is a key time for your body to repair itself from the day, and a lack of sleep can boost your cortisol levels, which along with oil-overload can make it even harder to sleep.
Not getting a good night’s sleep, paired with more stress, can weaken the immune system and leave you with dull skin and more pronounced lines.
3. It makes any skin issues you already have worse
If you deal with chronic skin conditions like eczema, psoriasis, or vitiligo; you may notice they flare up when you are feeling overwhelmed. It’s usually not the sole cause for these conditions, but in someone who is already genetically predisposed, stress can be the last straw.
Read More: VITILIGO: The Skin Condition You Should Know About,
4. Nervous habits that are hard to break
The ways you cope with stress could actually be damaging your skin. You may start biting your nails or picking at your skin without realizing it. All that nail biting and pimple popping can transfer bacteria onto your skin, making you more prone to breakouts. And instead of pop soda – soft drinks -, it will do you well to drink more of water.
Read More: Should You Pop a Pimple? Before You Answer, Read This!
5. It increases your skin cancer risk
Don’t panic — stress won’t give you skin cancer. But it can raise your risk. Stress lowers the immune system in general, but now researchers have found that the immune system’s response to fighting basal cell skin cancers can also affected.
6. It speeds up aging
Okay, so you are probably not counting your wrinkles just yet. But too much stress now could translate to more fine lines in a few years. Because stress hormones lead to accelerated aging in the skin, because your body is busy fighting stress instead of protecting you against environmental elements like UV rays, cigarette smoke, and pollution.
“You only have so many natural defense systems in your skin, and if you deplete them because of internal stress, then you use up your resources. A few simple stress management techniques could work wonders for you though, such things like leisure walking, deep-breathing exercises, or opening your heart to a supportive friend when you are stressed.
These can all lower your cortisol levels which can help clear your mind and your skin.
From seventeen.com
