Life Stresses Harming Your Skin? Here’s How to Fight Back!

Whether the stress of the job is making your skin wrinkle like a female Gordon Ramsay, or your recent insomnia has left your skin wellness a little dull and lifeless, there’s a lot of beauty issues that you chalk up to “ageing” when actually there are sneaky, secret causes that are hacking away at your wellbeing. However, for every beauty-damaging cause, there’s also an anti-ageing wellness solution, so here’s some of our favourite tips and tricks:

 

1. Job Stress and Wrinkles: Whether you’re gunning for a big promotion or just trying to hit your crazy deadlines on time, job stress can take its toll on your skin. This is because your telomeres – the little caps on the ends of your DNA that help protect and keep cells, including skin cells, young – are negatively impacted by stress, and are shortened by work-related exhaustion. Exercising for 40 minutes a day, three days a week, is just what the doctor ordered for work-related stress, but even doing a little but more movement can help you to keep stress at bay. For a beauty fix, Dr. Amy Wechsler, a New York City–based physician who is board-certified in both psychiatry and dermatology, recommends Botox, as research has shown a correlation between Botox and happiness. This may be because freezing your frowning muscles halts the negative emotions that accompany the movement. Wechsler adds, ‘A low dose of Botox will stop small lines from turning into full-blown wrinkles.’

 

2. Insomnia and Dullness: We’ve all looked a little worse-for-wear after a big night out, but too much sleep deprivation can make dull skin a staple occurrence. Wechsler notes, ‘Transepidermal water loss increases if you’re not sleeping.’ Or, in English, your skin can’t hang onto moisture, and your cell turnover also slows down. Wechsler insists, ‘No stressful TV before bed. You can’t turn off your brain after that.’ If you’re around air-conditioners and heaters all day, this may also be causing the moisture to evaporate from your skin, so run a humidifier at night to stay hydrated.

 

3. Junk Food and Acne: When you have a bad day, you instantly reach for junk food – after all, when was the last time you saw someone stress-eat a healthy salad? Dr. Josie Howard, a San Francisco psychiatrist and psychodermatologist who studies the relationship between mood disorders and skin, points out, ‘Emotions play a huge role in what, when, and how much we eat.’ However, if you’re eating comfort foods like dairy, white sugar, and fried foods, your insulin levels will rise and cause your skin to produce more oil, which triggers acne. Try to keep junk food out of sight so that you can more easily resist temptation. Washing anything that comes into contact with your face– e.g. makeup brushes, pillowcases and mobile phones – can also help prevent acne, as this stops you spreading bacteria.

 

4. Break Ups and Sagging: A study of twins has shown that women who went through a divorce looked two years older than their identical twins who hadn’t. The researchers surmised that this was because the drama of relationship break ups elevates your cortisol levels, and this stress hormone causes collagen – the protein that keeps skin plump – to deteriorate. However, meditation can help to lower your cortisol levels. Yoga instructor Kristin McGee asserts, ‘Even five minutes a day helps. Sit, close your eyes, and pay attention to your breathing. Don’t judge yourself—there’s no wrong way to meditate.’ Another way to keep skin plump and tight is to eat more kiwis. This anti-sag beauty food delivers more than a daily dose of vitamin C, which plays a key role in collagen synthesis.

Categories: cortisol levels, Food, job stress, junk food, Sagging Skin, skin, skin plump, Stress, wechsler, work related, Wrinkles

Best Ways To Reduce Work-Related Stress

Stress is a part of every job, indeed it’s hard to imagine a job where there is no stress. This is true because there are so many stressors in our working environment. It can be anything from attempting to meet deadlines, chasing a promotion, ensuring the business is as successful as it can be or dealing with colleagues or clients that make your life difficult. But whilst we should expect at least some stress in our daily working lives, we should never find ourselves consumed by it. Unfortunately in our modern lives we often find that stress mounts up and becomes too much for us.

 

Your ability to cope with this kind of stress will be the making or breaking of you in your job, and indeed might even me the making or breaking of the company your work for. When you realise this, the stress is even worse. And then when you also have layoffs and redundancies to worry about in our uncertain economy we realise that stress can come from anywhere. It’s no surprise then that we need to learn techniques to help us manage that stress and overcome it for good. We’ve come up with some great ideas for reducing your work-related stress.

 

The first thing you need to do is examine whether you might be feeling stress at work – and whether than stress is likely to be too much for you. If you experience any of the following symptoms at work or in your day-to-day routine, you may be under too much stress. These include feeling anxious, losing interest in work, having trouble sleeping, fatigue, having difficulty concentration, muscle tension, stomach problems, withdrawal from social situations, loss of sex drive and using alcohol or drugs to cope with your problems. If you find yourself having these problems, it might be worth considering using the following techniques to manage your stress levels.

 

There is no cure-all for stress, and getting rid of your levels of stress will depend on your as a person and what it is that is the underlying cause of the stress. However, it’s worth noting that there are plenty of tried and tested ideas that can be a real help when trying to get over your problems with stress. They can help you to feel better in your daily life and make the tasks of work seem not as challenging or worrying.

 

The first great idea when trying to cope with the added pressures of stress is that you must ensure that you are staying physically active during this time. It is well known that getting regular exercise is a very good idea if you’re feeling stress as exercise releases endorphins that are a fantastic way of countering stress. It is also a good idea to start thinking about the kinds of foods that you eat. Staying on a healthy diet is a brilliant way to help you manage stress, as the increase levels of minerals and vitamins in your body really enable you to cope more easily with problems.

 

An important way of ridding yourself from stress is by organising your day more effectively. Make sure that you create a balanced and workable schedule, and that you do not over-commit yourself to too much work. It’s also a great idea to plan regular breaks and allow yourself more time to get to work in the morning – arriving late and feeling stressed as you get to work can be a real problem as it mounts up and you don’t ever start the day in a relaxed and confident way.

Categories: cope, feeling stress, nbsp, overwork, problems, related stress, Stress, work, work related

Why Employers Should Care How Well Their Workers Sleep

Sleeping may seem like something that has no bearing on the corporate world (after all, you sleep at home and you must be wide awake in the office!) but research is now suggesting that more employers should be talking to their employees about the wellness benefits of getting a good night’s sleep.

 

Evidence also suggests that the wellbeing and associated sleep of employees is often adversely affected by work-related stress. New data is emerging which suggests that whilst many people are in bed for the recommended period of between seven and nine hours, many of them are wasting much of that time worrying about work-related problems, meaning that they often only get about five hours of actual rest. This suggests that employers need to go some way towards reducing work stress and helping employees to get a good night’s sleep, if they want them to be healthy and productive.

 

In a recent survey, which showed that many Americans spend far fewer hours sleeping than they spend actually in bed, showing that people are either lying awake worrying or doing vacuum activities such as reading, playing games or watching television.

 

Whilst stress varies from job to job, the one that that most people seem to have in common is that any job stress seems to spill over and manifest itself during sleeping time. On the flip side of this, sleeping has been shown to improve significantly after retirement.

 

A poll by the National Sleep Foundation shows that more than 50 percent of people questioned have suffered from some of the symptoms of insomnia, several nights of the week. Symptoms include waking up in the morning not feeling refreshed, waking up too early in the morning and waking up regularly throughout the night.

Categories: nbsp, people, sleep, Sleeping, Stress, work, work related