Does Our Skin Health Impact Our Mental Wellbeing?

How do you start your day? Perhaps you start the day ahead like most of us by opening up social media and scrolling through endless amounts of selfies, perfect skin, toned bodies and pearly white smiles?

You can 100% be forgiven for feeling a little less excited about your day ahead after looking in the mirror at your unruly hair, dry cracked lips and saying hello to that extra pimple that has popped up overnight to spend the next 24 hours getting to know you.

What a fabulous way to start the day! Feeling ridiculously positive about yourself and the reflection that now looks sombre back at you in the mirror, reciting back to you everything that you are doing completely wrong with your skin care routine and once again cursing you for that extra glass of white wine and perhaps the sneaky “I’ll only have 2 squares” of chocolate that you inhaled before bedtime.

So how does the condition of our skin have an impact on our mental wellbeing? It’s quite simple really, think back to high school, did you hide your face under overgrown bangs to try and disguise the acne that was gracing you with it’s presence and taking away all of your self-confidence and self-esteem? And if you were lucky enough to be in the “popular” crowd, how did your peers react when that ugly white headed pimple showed up on your top lip right before the party of the year?

High school was tough! And it’s no wonder we carry these emotional feelings through with us into adulthood. How are we supposed to “shine from within” and “love being ourselves” when there is so much hype around body positivity and what society thinks is the norm?

Thanks to the ever growing popularity and obsession with social media, it is all becoming so much harder for us women (and men) to truly look at ourselves and love the skin that we are in.

We can sit here and preach and shout from the rooftops on how important skin health is, but in all honesty we hand on heart believe that it is. Think about how a happy and healthy glow makes you feel? The way we look impacts the way we feel, this is a given and it can really have an extreme impact on your mental wellbeing and happiness.

Issues with skin, like acne, rosacea, discolouration and premature ageing have been closely linked with self-esteem issues and anxiety. This is extremely understandable and should never be underestimated.

There is also a lot of evidence out there (just ask captain google) that the nervous system and the condition of our skin are closely linked. Think about it, the more we struggle with the health of our skin the more we start to stress, pick, scratch and make poor food choices. All resulting in self-esteem and anxiety issues, increased unhealthy skin and thus the cycle starts again.

So how can we start to shift this mindset around what society perceives as “perfect”? We start with erasing that word from our vocabulary as there is really no such thing as perfect, we are all unique in our own way and if there was such a condition as “perfect”, what a boring world we would all live in! We can also start by looking after our skin health, accepting ourselves for who we truly are as women (and men) and to internally change “the norm”. Stick it to the world and glow we say!

Beauty begins from within, what we put into our bodies, what we say to ourselves and how we look back at ourselves in the mirror. These all play vital roles in our mental wellbeing and our internal happiness.