How Stress Affects Your Hair & Skin

How Stress Affects Your Hair & Skin
​by Kerri Lee-Young
 
In our latest article, How Stress Affects Your Body, we took you on a head-to-toe journey and shared with you just how damaging stress can be on your overall health. We also shared what the three different types of stress are and how to overcome them in your life. To show you how stress affects you on the outside, we’re going to breakdown what it can do to your skin and hair if you don’t address and resolve what’s stressing you out.
 
How Stress Affects Your Skin
When you become stressed, there’s this hormone that gets released into your body called cortisol. This is an adrenal hormone that (along with epinephrine) primarily aids in “fight or flight” situations. When you become stressed, and when stress goes from acute to chronic, cortisol levels rise and go from being helpful to dangerous.
 
When you’re under an insurmountable level of stress, your skin becomes more sensitive and vulnerable. It also has a harder time healing. When the body signals the adrenal glands to produce cortisol, it causes your sebaceous glands to produce more oil. If you already have oily skin, then you experience an increase in acne and breakouts. And to make matters worse, it can also trigger a breakout in hives, rashes and fever blisters no matter what your skin type is. If you are already suffering from Psoriasis, Rosacea or Eczema, then your already severe condition is going to worsen. Having a skin condition is a stressful situation, and as your skin worsens, it can lead to feelings of embarrassment and isolation.
 
To reduce the effects of stress on your skin, we recommend the following:

• Meditate & Relax: You don’t need to don a pair of yoga pants (unless you’re always living in your activewear) and be sitting in a Zen temple to meditate. You just need a quiet space and a place to relax.
• Stretch: Stress takes a toll on your body, and one of the reactions to stress is your muscles get tight and tense. By engaging in some quick stretching exercises, you can loosen up the tension and get the blood circulating. This will help lower the cortisol levels.
• Skin Care: Don’t neglect your already established routine, especially if your stress has anything to do with time management (or lack of).
• Eat Right: Make sure you’re eating healthy and not ingesting foods that are high in trans fat. Better yet, get into the habit of eating healthy snacks. We don’t mean go eat your feelings or binge on a bowl of ice cream. We mean go make a healthy snack or take five minutes to eat one that you may have packed and taken with you before you left the house. When your blood sugar drops and hunger sets in, you become cranky, and when you get cranky you get stressed.

How Stress Affects Your Hair
We’ve all endured a level of stress that has made us scream, “This is making me pull my hair out!” But the sad reality of it all is that you don’t really need to pull any of your hair out when you’re stressed since it’s going to fall out anyways. That’s one of the main marks stress makes on your hair—hair loss. There’s actually three different types of hair loss:

• Telogen Effluvium: This is when hair follicles go “to sleep” or go into a resting phase and actually stop hair from growing. Over the course of time, the hair attached to those napping follicles actually falls out in larger than normal volume. It’s the most common of stress-related hair loss that we all experience or have experienced at one time in our lives.
• Alopecia Areata: This is a bit more serious of a condition due to the fact that the immune system goes into panic mode and causes hair to fall out in large chunks. Now, we do need to point out that there are other factors involved with this type of hair loss and it is not just isolated to stress. But, it is important to point out that stress does play a serious role.
• Trichotillomania: This is on a very serious level, because it is an actual behavior and not a mere reaction to hormones spiking or follicles resting. Trichotillomania is when a person compulsively pulls out their own hair, and this condition often develops as a coping method when someone is under severe duress, stress, anxiety, boredom or depression.

We also must point out that experiencing hair loss is not only stress-related and can sometimes be attributed to other medical conditions like Hypothyroidism and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). If you are experiencing hair loss, we do recommend you see a medical expert first and foremost.
 
Many people say that stress causes gray hair, but there’s some myth (and actually a little truth) surrounding that statement. Gray hair is genetic, not stress-induced, BUT…if you are predisposed to getting gray hair, then stress will speed up this process and make these white strands appear sooner.
 
As far as ways to combat stress and to prevent experiencing hair loss, thinning and premature graying, we recommend you follow some of the strategies we’ve already mentioned above and recommend you practice a few more like these. Sometimes, all it takes is five minutes to help feel less stressed. Surely you can find five minutes in your day to protect your health for a lifetime.
 
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