Stress and Skin Care — Is There A Connection?
Have you ever noticed how when you are stressed out about work, friends, or life in general, your skin would suddenly break out? Your perfectly moisturized skin would turn out feeling and looking dry, flaky even and worse, small pimples would show up all over your entire face? What’s more stressful is that skin breakout adds more stress!
So, what do we do about it? We try, try as hard as we can to control our stress on top of having to continuously remind ourselves to make time to exfoliate-cleanse-tone-moisturize two times a day no matter how much in a hurry we are in the morning or how dead tired we are when we get home at night.
What Is Stress?
We hear a lot of people expressing how stressed they are at home, in school, at work, yadda yadda. But what is stress and what are its effects to those who constantly feels they are under this feeling?
• Increase in heart rate; palpitations
• Difficulty breathing; dilated airways
• Constricted blood vessels
• Mood swings; irritability
Now, what do all these effects have to do with our skin’s health? As we all know, all our body parts, organs, are all connected with each other. Connected not just attached but connected as in they all have relation with each other and with stress, the effects are sort of a short domino that has an effect to our health.
Difficulty in breathing results in reduced amount of oxygen in the bloodstream which causes our heart to beat faster and well, causes limited supply of oxygen to the skin as well. Stress also affects our sleeping habits which is the most common problem that has a noticeable impact on our skin. When we are under stress we also tend to take in more caffeine, caffeine makes our nervous system more active so better stay off caffeine and just drink water and lots of it.
What To Do With Stress?
The cause of our feeling stressed out may not be that easy to eliminate all at once or completely avoid, but the feeling of stress itself can be somehow released out of the body.
Here’s how:
• Exercise; move that body, sweat out all the stress you are feeling and you will feel good afterward
• Meditate; you can do this at home, before going to sleep, on your office chair, just close your eyes and try deep-breathing exercises and clear your mind
• Eat healthy; the skin would love this too
• Ease those muscles and get a massage every often We can’t just keep stressing out about stress, we have to do something about it and let it out of our system in a healthy way.
Take Care of Your Skin
Do not neglect your skin just because you are too stressed to move or even care, you should care. Do the whole routine before leaving your home and after your busy day. You need to wash off all the dirt and oil that your face accumulated the entire day and if you are wearing makeup, so much more you need to cleanse. Use products that don’t contain harmful ingredients and effectively removes skin impurities like Obagi products.
Just do all these stress-releasing tips that we’ve talked about while you still take good care of your skin and you won’t notice that pesky breakout from happening.
Written by Maria Constantine. For more details on Obagi products click here.
