The Stress Connection
As we have already showed, not surprisingly, stress has a starring role in the ongoing acne drama. “Ninety percent of my patients complain about what stress does to their skin. It has a huge impact, and it’s becoming a bigger problem every day,” says Katie Rodan, MD, a clinical professor of dermatology at Stanford University. Unfortunately, people complain more and more about stress’ effects, but they seem to ignore stress itself and its inner causes. Instead of doing something against these causes, people tend to go to the doctor’s for receiving prescription against all kind of diseases that stress triggers.
However, how can stress, that is the emotional anxiety caused by any number of factors in your life, show up on your face? The connection is purely chemical. When you become tense, your adrenal glands start working, flooding your bloodstream with the hormone cortisol.
Then cortisol triggers the sweat glands in your face to produce more oil. When your sebaceous glands go into high gear, there’s a higher probability that this excess oil will mix with dead skin cells and clog your pores, trapping bacteria inside.
The result? The result is no longer a mystery. It consists of more acne, primarily inflamed papules rather than blackheads or whiteheads.
But stress may go further…, beyond all expectations. After it triggered acne inflamed papules, stress can make people further pick on these papules, which will make acne even worse. The sufferers will then get even angrier and more irritated and will increase the already existing stress factors.
This way, people enter the vicious circle of stress and only a great inner power and their self consciousness will be able to save them.