With the increasing pace of life, stress, anxiety, and depression are becoming the major turning points of life. Increased stress may lead to severe health issues, like – cardiac problems, fatigue, etc. One of the majorly affected areas of our body due to stress is our skin. Depression can leave a visible impact on your face by making your skin, dry, dull, and prone to acne.
Stress is a powerful component that comes to us through all the versatile ways and remains unavoidable in our body and mind. Work, relationships, financial needs, global pandemic like – COVID-19, and many more factors can effectively elevate the stress levels along with certain body dysfunctions.
How Does Your Stress Level Reflect on Your skin?
There is a huge list of stressors that causes the stress level to increase. Excessively increasing stress may lead to hypertension, severe depression, and anxiety attacks. Whatever the reasons may be, here are the results that clearly show what stress can do to your skin.
Irritated & Dry Skin
Your skin consists of multiple underlying layers. Different skin layers have different functions to contribute to the skin. The outer layer is called the stratum corneum that contains sufficient lipids and proteins for the skin to maintain its hydration. Being the outermost skin layer, the stratum corneum protects the underlying skin layers as well. It prevents dryness and itchiness by protecting the skin barrier.
According to multiple recent studies, stress disrupts the natural skin barrier and creates a deep impact on the stratum corneum. In that case, the water retention capacity of the skin slows down due to stress, which results in dry, irritated skin.
Breakouts & Acne
The rapid increase of the cortisol hormone secretion leads to extreme depression, stress, and anxiety. Cortisol stimulates the hypothalamus (a part of your brain) to increase the production of the corticotrophin-releasing hormone (CRH). This CRH influences more sebum production around the hair follicles.
Excess sebum secretion from the sebaceous glands may gradually leave to acne and breakouts by clogging pores.
Stress acne is quite normal these days in between the age gap of 18-25. According to skin experts, the increasing stress level can certainly correlate with acne severity. Apart from that, excessive alcohol and junk food consumption, lack of sleep, and menstruation can also contribute to severe acne breakouts in male and female both.
Wrinkles & Aging
Stress gradually increases the cortisol level, which causes severe depression, trauma, and anxiety. This undoubtedly gives rise to the free radicals that are called the collagen killer. The collagen count naturally decreases with age. However, constant stress can certainly speed up the degradation process and contributes to wrinkles formation.
The skin collagen maintains and fixes skin elasticity, which tightens the skin tone and makes you look young. Apart from lack of elasticity, skin dryness is another major symptom of stress. As the skin moisture starts to decrease, it naturally gets more prone to ageing.
Visible Eyebags
The puffiness and swelling under our eyes are known as the eyebags. As the supporting muscles around the eyes weaken with time, these eye bags become more visible with age. Sagging or loose skin texture may lead to puffy eye bags due to a lack of skin collagen.
Sleep deprivation or lack of sleep is also another major effect of stress. Following that, lack of sleep or vulnerable sleep pattern eventually leads to visible bags under the eyes. Apart from that, a poor sleep pattern may also contribute to reduced elasticity, uneven pigmentation, and fine lines.
Inflammation & Irritation
The mind, skin, and gut have a very clear connection with each other. When your mind is all stressed and worried, it certainly creates an impact on your gut health. The digestion process slows down and gradually invites more bacterial penetration in your gut. Most of the skin inflammations occur due to poor digestion and irritable bowel syndrome. Therefore, stress indirectly causes severe skin inflammations and infections through your internal digestive disorders.
How Do You Cope with Your Regular Stress Factors?
Certain stress factors, like – the expected death of someone close, sudden loss of employment are completely unavoidable and sudden. Similarly, there are certain avoidable stressors as well that we often create on our own. Here are the potent ways to deal with avoidable stress with ease.
- Bring out 1 hour from your everyday schedule and practice spend time with yourself from your gadgets and other attachments.
- Eating healthy and maintaining a proper schedule for your breakfast, lunch, and dinner keeps you healthy from inside out.
- Exercise regularly to remain fit and active throughout the day. It releases your muscle tension, thus contributes to a peaceful, fresh mind.
- Say a big “NO” to alcohol and smoking. These bad practices majorly affect your overall health. Their regular consumption influences more cortisol secretion and more stress.
- In case the stress starts to become severe and turns to depression, communicate your problems with your close ones or talk to a therapist for the best results.
Though stress is mostly unavoidable, its severity may leave a long-lasting impression on your skin. Excessive mental stress may also damage the body stress ad creates oxidative stress that gives rise to a lot more health problems apart from the skin. Therefore, understand your needs beforehand and get rid of stress and depression at their earlier stages.
