The Mind-Skin Connection: How Skin Care Affects Your Mental Health (and Vice Versa)

Picture this scenario: you’ve been having an off week. Maybe you’re not getting along well with your significant other or a friend, or work has been especially stressful lately. On top of the added stress, you’ve been struggling to get to sleep so you keep getting more and more tired every day, you haven’t been able to work out as well as you’d like to, and to add insult to injury, you wake up with a breakout. What gives?

It might not just be a string of coincidental bad luck. Your mental health can affect all of those other issues, including your skin…and vice versa. There’s an intricate connection between your brain and your body, so if you’ve found yourself frustrated with your skin while you’re not in the best frame of mind, they might be linked.

The good news is that this link means that taking care of your skin health can actually help your mental health too. Let’s take a closer look at how skin care and mental health affect each other.

How Skin Care Affects Your Mental Health

Every therapist will tell you that seemingly small habits can add up and be a great help toward your mental health. Skin care is one of those little habits, for several reasons.

Taking Time to Care for Yourself

There may be a lot of people in your life who need you, but you need you too. Establishing and maintaining a skin care routine is a great way to take time out of your busy life to care for yourself. It doesn’t have to be a full home spa experience with a face mask – even just taking the five minutes to wash your face and apply a toner and a moisturizer, or whatever your products of choice are, will be helpful.

That can have a domino effect too. Have you noticed that making one good choice can inspire you to make further healthy choices? You might start with making your daily skincare a non-negotiable daily practice, and this can in turn influence you to start eating healthier, sleeping better, working out more, managing your stress better, and so on.

Confidence of Having Healthy, Beautiful Skin

It’s no secret that you feel better when you like the way you look, and seemingly subtle details can make all the difference – including your skin. Who doesn’t feel better when they have a glow to their skin, or when their skin looks more smooth, even, and healthy? Investing some time in your skin care now can give you an ongoing confidence boost that your future self will thank you for.

Creating a Healthy Daily Ritual

It’s not just the products in your skin care routine that can benefit your physical and mental health – it’s the ritual of it too. In the morning, skin care can help you feel more put-together and ready to take on the day. At night, a little cleanser and night cream can be a time to relax and enjoy some self-care while you wind down for the day and get ready for bed.

That nighttime routine can be especially beneficial. Not only can self-care lower your stress (especially if you make your skin care routine a real treat, like locking everyone else out of the bathroom, putting on some soothing music, and lighting an aromatherapy candle), but it can help you sleep better. Having a defined and consistent nighttime routine trains your brain to learn when it’s time to sleep, so you can get to sleep faster.

How Your Mental Health Affects Your Skin

The link between skin care and mental health isn’t a one-way street. Your mental health impacts your skin just as much as your skin care impacts your mental health.

Making Skin Conditions Worse

Your body is nothing short of a complex ecosystem, and essentially, everything affects everything else. Mental distress triggers an entire process involving various hormones, and those hormones and their results will impact your entire body, including its largest organ, your skin. There’s ongoing research to learn more about how this works, but we already know that stress can worsen the symptoms of skin conditions like acne, rosacea, eczema, and psoriasis.

Skin-Related Symptoms of Mental Health Conditions

Did you know that some mental health symptoms appear on your skin? For example, some people have anxious habits that involve scratching or picking at their skin. This can cause irritation and sores. Or, maybe you tend to touch your face more often when you’re feeling more anxious, as a form of fidgeting. This can bring more dirt and debris onto your skin, clogging your pores and causing pimples.

Sleep-Deprived Skin

We’ve all had mornings when we woke up from a not-so-restful sleep and we could see the long night written all over our skin – sunken eyes, puffy under-eyes, and an overall duller and more tired look to our skin. If your mental health is impacting your sleep, it affects your skin this way on a regular basis.

Your skin health does affect how you look, but that doesn’t mean that it’s simply cosmetic. Caring for your skin can impact so many aspects of your health in positive ways, including your mental health. And the best news is that all it takes is a product or two and a few minutes to start making that positive change.