Stress, Sleep and Skin: How Your Lifestyle Impacts Aesthetic Results
Following aesthetic skin treatments, you’ll want to make sure you’re doing everything you can to maintain the results. This starts with following aftercare advice, such as avoiding strenuous exercise or sun exposure in the days after treatment. Beyond the healing phase, there are simple steps you can take to support your skin and enhance the effects of injectables, fillers and boosters.
Simple steps like ensuring you are well hydrated will have a considerable impact on the efficacy of treatments like fillers and anti-wrinkle injections. You can achieve this through drinking enough water and ensuring you apply topical moisturisers that are designed to lock in moisture.
These might be common knowledge for those in the know, but there are some unexpected ways you can help your aesthetic treatments last longer. Ensuring you get enough sleep while also keeping stress under control can have a significant impact on skin health. Let’s explore these factors in more detail.
The impact of poor sleep on skin health
Sleep quality has been linked to premature ageing, transdermal moisture loss and impaired recovery. Sleep is time for rest and renewal, so it makes sense that long-term chronic sleep loss is linked to wider health problems, including issues with your skin.
Loss of moisture due to skin barrier damage is perhaps one of the biggest risks when it comes to aesthetic treatments. For treatments like anti-wrinkle injections, you need adequate moisture levels to plump up the skin and make the results more pronounced. Anti-wrinkle injections can only do so much to help skin that is severely dehydrated.
Sleep also helps with recovery following UV exposure and helps to maintain normal moisture levels by ensuring adequate moisture barrier recovery. It’s not just the duration of sleep but also the quality. One of the best ways to improve sleep is to focus on getting to bed earlier and removing all distractions from the bedroom, including screens. Rather than making time to stay in bed longer, you’ll feel better if you prioritise getting to sleep earlier and avoiding waking up in the night.
Stress and skin condition
Another factor to consider when maintaining your skin treatments is stress. While stress doesn’t cause skin conditions directly, it can contribute to issues that make skin conditions worse.
The main culprit is cortisol, the stress hormone. While short-term exposure to this is not linked to any negative health outcomes, it can become problematic if your stress is unmanaged. Excessive cortisol production can make it more difficult for your body to repair itself.
This could mean damage to the skin’s moisture barrier due to exposure to environmental factors like UV and pollution. Stress leads to inflammation in the body, which makes it more difficult for your body to tackle free radicals, which can accelerate aging. Stress will also contribute to poor sleep.
Stress can have a negative impact on aesthetic treatments as it can delay wound healing, meaning that you’re at higher risk of developing an infection following your initial treatment. Stress is also known to impact collagen production, which can make your boosters and dermal fillers less effective.
Learning some coping methods to help you to handle stress more easily will do wonders for your health, while also making your aesthetic treatments more effective. Stress busting activities could include meditation, yoga or other types of gentle exercise. You could also limit caffeine intake, which will have a positive impact on stress levels and your sleep patterns.
Final thoughts on sleep, stress and skin
If you want your facial aesthetic treatments to last as long as possible and for them to be as effective as possible, it’s vital that you take a whole of body approach. You shouldn’t think of aesthetic treatments as something you can use to fix the damage done by poor sleep and high stress levels.
Instead, use facial aesthetics as a method for improving your overall health, starting with improving your sleep and lowering stress levels. Hydration and a healthy diet will also go a long way in improving your skin health.
Once your skin is healthy and the moisture barrier is working effectively, you can then look at facial aesthetics as a way to turn back the clock and erase the early signs of aging.