Reasons Why Lack of Sleep Affects Your Skin Health

Like having good quality makeup, having good skincare on your side can truly make the difference. This will change things not just in terms of how you look, but can also impact on your self-esteem levels, and ultimately, how you feel about yourself.

At this point, sleep takes center stage. When you give gaining top quality sleep a key role in your life it will help in both beauty and skincare. You’re literally taking one of the largest steps towards obtaining your goal of having glowing, healthy skin.

The fact is, unless you’re extremely fortunate, living with sleep-deprived nights, will cause your body to produce higher amounts of cortisol. This is a stress hormone and essentially shifts to bring about unwanted increased stress levels and inflammation in your body. These types of knock-on effects will damage the quality of your skin.

More on Sleep, Beauty and Skincare

For many people who live with issues related to their skin, it’s a matter of having the ability to break the cycle. It can be something you don’t even know you’re doing, but for these skincare desires to be met, moving into a positive cycle is essential.

A prime example of a bad cycle that people tend to be know all too well, sounds something like; people notice their skin isn’t great, and this keeps them up at night, and then when they wake up, their skin has subsequently not improved or rejuvenated, they then lose sleep through stressing over this. The cycle then continues.

In order to help you develop an improved understanding of the importance of beauty sleep, you should take away some insight on how bad sleep affects skin health.

Here, we have a handful of the biggest issues that play a part in hindering skin health:

Sleep

When you enter deep stages of sleep, your growth hormones increase in numbers and this is what helps to repair your damaged cells.

If you aren’t able to reach these phases of slumber then your body won’t be able to repair and rejuvenate itself and small daily breakdowns will start to happen and become more prevalent. As such, more noticeable signs of aging will far easier to see by you and others.

It’s important to have everything you need to facilitate a good night’s sleep, and these things include:

• A quiet, dark space
• A cool temperature for optimal sleep
• A quality mattress for your sleeping style
• A duvet and pillows to optimise high-end slumber

Beauty

This sounds vain, but when don’t get enough sleep, higher numbers of inflammatory cells are produced and these cause a greater amount of hyaluronic and collagen acid breakdown processes.

When you lose these molecules, your skin goes without that beautiful translucency and glow that they help to provide, and this is what gives people their natural beauty.

What’s more, regardless of whether you think you’re going to win a beauty contest or not, the relation to sleep and your beauty counts for everyone. While you sleep, your body’s hydration rebalances, in turn giving your skin the chance to recover moisture that may need ‘topping up’.

So, if you don’t get the recommended 7-9 hours of sleep adults are advised to get then you won’t have the correct water balance. This can become particularly noticeable through puffy bags under your eyes combined with dark under-eye circles, as well as other issues such as dryness and more visible wrinkles.

Skin Conditions

Many people suffer from a more reactionary inflammatory response; this is shown in the body by causing more frequent acne breakouts, inflammation of skin sensitivity and also more problems with allergies and irritants. Some people may need to see a dermatologist if their case is on the more extreme end of the scale.

Weight Gain

This might follow on to make your skin suffer more issues and worsen the vicious circle we mentioned at the start as lack of sleep makes you feel hungry, excess snacking and calorie consumption goes up and you’ll have poor skin, ultimately.  

Handy Sleep-Related Skincare Tips

Finally, we thought that we would offer up some proven tips to help you stay in the positive cycle and enjoy better sleep and skin:

• Drink lots of water throughout the day.
• Turn off all smart devices and TVs 1-2 hours before bedtime.
• Wash your sheets often to avoid dust mite and bacteria accumulating.
• Swerve big meals too close to bedtime and opt for smaller ones instead.

Looking and feeling good is closely related to getting enough sleep, so follow our advice and you’ll be on the road to success in no time at all!