How Stress Affects Your Looks And What To Do About It

That stress you feel in your mind is going to come out on your body in one way or another. Stress actually ages you, particularly if you stress often and for long periods of time. How does it affect the way you look? Let’s get into it.

Adding Wrinkles

When you get stressed, it affects how proteins work within your skin. Your skin requires proteins from the food you eat and throughout your body to work in a certain way so that your skin is elastic. Stress damages the beneficial effects of protein and can lead to wrinkles. Because your skin starts to lose some of its elasticity thanks to all the stress you’re feeling, you may notice more wrinkles over time, particularly in your face.

When you feel stressed, you may develop certain facial reactions, like frowning or furrowing your brow. These can create deep, permanent lines, and you need to be aware of how stress is affecting the way your face looks. Stress can have an effect on you that becomes more severe in time. The more stress you allow to go running through your brain, the more it will show up on your face.

Poor Skin Clarity

If you want to look your best, then you want your skin to be clear, free of spots, acne, and blemishes. Stress actually creates skin conditions in many people, particularly rashes, inflammation, eczema, contact dermatitis, and even psoriasis. It can trigger these conditions or aggravate them if they’re already there. If you’re trying to get your skin under control, that you want to get your stress under control as well.

How does this happen? Stress can affect your immune system, making it much weaker. When your immune system isn’t very strong, your digestive system’s bacteria can be out of whack. This also affects the balance of nutrients in your skin, creating visible skin issues.

How direct the effect is between stress and acne is debatable, but there’s definitely a provable link between poor skin health and mental stress.

Grey Hair and Hair Loss

Did you ever hear your parents tell you that your behavior is going to give them gray hairs or make them bald? That’s probably something a lot of us heard, and it’s not just an old wives’ tale. There’s a scientific reason why people believe this very thing. We’ve known for many years that stress can cause graying hair and hair loss, but recently we have figured out what the reason is behind these problems and the link between them. Your hair gets its color from a pigment called melanin. That melanin is produced by melanocyte cells.

As you feel stress, the stress can make your body get rid of those very cells. As those cells begin to be eliminated from the body and there are fewer of them hanging around, your hair can turn gray or start to fall out.

Graying is typically something that will happen over the short term if you’re feeling stressed. If you continue to feel stressed over a period of years, that can lead to hair loss. There’s a condition known as telogen effluvium that causes hair loss and makes it difficult for the hair’s growing cycle to continue smoothly and naturally. Chronic stress creates extensive hair loss that’s much more severe than the typical amount of hair loss expected for your age.

To boil this problem down to its simplest form, you should know that being stressed out can cause you to experience gray hair and then eventually lose hair.

Unsightly Lips

What kind of nervous habits do you engage in when you’re stressed? Some people will scratch nervously, and others will chew their lips. If you tend to bite your lips or chew on them when you stress, that can cause long term damage that’s difficult for you to heal from. You can actually create scar tissue from this habit, but you’re more likely to at least have unhealthy looking lips from time to time as you feel stressed and chew on them.

How to Deal with Stress Effectively

Let’s talk about some ways you can handle stress and reduce the amount of stress you’re feeling.

Reduce Workload– One of the major reasons why people feel stressed is because they feel there are not enough hours in the day to do everything they need to do. They feel like their workload has gotten out of control, so if you find a way to reduce your workload, give the work to someone else, or eliminate some work completely, that can help. You can do this by ordering a cleaning company to tidy your home sometimes. You could also ask for an extra day off during the week or for shorter hours at work. If you’re self-employed, you can just give yourself that extra time.

Take Time to Relax– You may be feeling stressed because you’re not getting any time to unwind. Stress can be caused by built up frustration and other emotional feelings that don’t get a time to release. If you’re not giving yourself time to relax, unwind, and work out some of that stress, it can be really damaging. Schedule time to take it easy every single day to greatly reduce the amount of stress you feel.

Avoid Drugs– There are a number of substances you can consume that make your stress and anxiety worse. You should definitely avoid cigarettes and alcohol, which can often be comfort drugs for people who feel stressed. However, using these kinds of drugs will increase stress levels when you are stressed, even though they can feel like they’re helping sometimes. You also want to be careful about the foods you eat, giving yourself a healthy diet so that your body is naturally less stressed and more able to deal with stress.

These are just a few quick tips to help you minimize stress, and there are tons of other great ways you can fight stress so that it doesn’t show up on your face as much.