The Impact of Stress On Your Skin & Nervous System & 4 Ways To Deal With It
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Your skin responds to stress.
You’ve seen it and felt it; your skin breaks out right before a big meeting or you start to itch like crazy during an emotionally fraught situation. That’s not a coincidence. It’s visual proof that your skin is a dynamic organ responding to your environment. Your skin responds to stress because your nervous system connects it to your environment and the rest of you. Your nervous system innervates every part of your body, from your head, heart, and gut to the tips of your nose, fingers, and toes.
Your skin and gut are connected and your nervous system plays a pivotal role in their health and function.
Your nervous system controls how your body responds to stress, digestion, and inflammation. When you’re stressed, your nervous system is stuck in fight-or-flight mode and your body releases cortisol, a hormone that tells your body to focus on immediate threats, not the digestion of food or skin repair. If you don’t digest food properly, nutrient absorption decreases. Prolonged periods of stress that leave you stuck in fight-or-flight can lead to malnourishment and skin that is dull, dry, sensitive, inflamed, and itchy.
In fight-or-flight, cortisol weakens your gut and skin barriers.
Weakened barriers allow undigested food particles, pollen, dust, and microbes into your blood stream, triggering inflammation. Chronic stress leads to chronic inflammation. This inflammation shows up on your skin as breakouts, redness, and rashes. Because stress triggers inflammation, it also triggers flare-ups of conditions related to the immune, gastrointestinal, and nervous systems that show up on the skin, e.g., eczema, rosacea, and neuropathy.
What is neuropathy?
Neuropathy is nerve damage. Peripheral neuropathy is damage to any part of the nervous system outside your brain and spinal cord.
The leading cause of neuropathy is diabetes.
Diabetes affects roughly 830 million people worldwide, approximately half of whom experience some form of neuropathy, the most common being peripheral neuropathy.
Neuropathy affects your skin in multiple ways.
It can cause dryness, itching, ulcers and infections, color changes, and an inability to sense and regulate temperature appropriately.
Regardless of whether you live with neuropathy or not, managing stress appropriately is key to feeling your best.
Here are four ways to manage and reduce stress:
1. Become Aware of Your Stress
Your body tells you when it’s stressed, but have you noticed the signals? Pay attention to when your skin flares up and what your stress levels were like in the days leading up to the flare. By becoming aware of these patterns, you can start addressing stress before it shows up on your skin.
2. Use Your Breath To Stimulate Rest-And-Digest
With your mouth closed, place your tongue on the roof of your mouth, behind the bumpy part of your upper palate and inhale deeply through your nose for a count of 4. Allow your breath to travel down to your pelvis so your belly and back expand. Exhale slowly through your nose for a count of 6. Repeat for 5 minutes twice a day.
3. Express Your Stress
Sway, dance, run, hop on one foot, punch a pillow, break a plate, paint, sing, scream, cry, do something that constructively moves stress out of your body.
4. Reduce Environmental Stress
You can’t control what other people do. You can control what you put in and on your body. Take inventory of your environment: what you’re putting on your skin, eating, drinking, and breathing. Many ingredients used in cosmetics and personal care products (skincare products, perfume, deodorant), and household products (laundry detergent, air fresheners, cleaners) and foods are unnecessary chemical stressors for your body. Swap them out for products that accomplish the same task, but with less stress to your body. Even better, choose products that decrease stress on your body and provide it with the building blocks, the nutrients, it needs to function properly, repair, and grow. My go-to product for alleviating the burning and tingling that is a result of peripheral neuropathy in my feet is the Body Milk.
Try The Body Milk
Have questions? Need help? Schedule an exploratory skin revitalisation call with Dr. Bexi here.
A deeper dive into the nervous system and peripheral neuropathy.
The nervous system is artificially separated into two parts: central (brain and spinal cord) and peripheral (everything else). The peripheral nervous system is further split into the somatic and autonomic nervous systems. The somatic nervous system is made up of the nerves that innervate all the muscles you can control and the organs responsible for sound, smell, taste, and touch. The autonomic nervous system innervates your eyes and muscles you cannot control and connects your brain to most of your internal organs. Your autonomic nervous system is further broken down into your sympathetic (fight-or-flight), parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) and enteric nervous systems. Therefore, your skin and internal organs are filled with small nerve fibers that are part of your peripheral nervous system and can be damaged easily by chronic stress and inflammation.
Symptoms of peripheral neuropathy often show up in your skin and internal organs as pain that fluctuates in nature and intensity. Examples of the kinds of pain you might feel when you have peripheral neuropathy include, but are not limited to, stabbing, tingling, burning, and electric shock-like pain. Associated symptoms of peripheral neuropathy include numbness, weakness, lightheadedness, and sensitivity to touch, light, sound, smell, and taste.
Autonomic neuropathy, more commonly known as dysautonomia, is a form of peripheral neuropathy, specifically, damage to the autonomic nervous system. Your autonomic nervous system controls involuntary functions such as heart rate, blood pressure, pupil dilation, digestion, breathing, temperature regulation, and mucus, tear, and sweat production.
Diabetes is the leading cause of dysautonomia, Sjogren’s disease is the second-leading cause, but long Covid may soon replace Sjogren’s disease. Dysautonomia is not rare, over 70 million people worldwide live with it.
There are many types of dysautonomia. Although neurocardiogenic syncope (a type of fainting) is the most common form of dysautonomia, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) is the most commonly diagnosed. I live with neurogenic orthostatic hypotension.
Dysautonomia can cause lightheadedness, dizziness, fainting, headaches, cognitive impairment (brain fog), insomnia, nausea, chest pains, blood pooling in the extremities (blue feet), trembling and shaking, too fast or too slow heart rate, too fast- or too slow-moving gastrointestinal tract, too much or too little sweating, poor bladder control, and poor blood flow to the heart, brain and other organs.
Dysautonomia is a hidden, dynamic disability that lacks medical care and support, which makes it isolating, frustrating, and overwhelming. Dysautonomia is often misdiagnosed or psychologized as anxiety, panic disorder, or functional neurological disorder, despite the fact that these debilitating symptoms are rooted in biological, not psychological factors, as described by Dr. Blitshteyn and her team in, “Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome and other common autonomic disorders are not functional neurologic disorders”.
October is Dysautonomia Awareness Month. Two years ago, I founded the Hidden Illness & Disability Directory of Entrepreneurs and Nurturers (HIDDEN) to address the lack of support for people disabled by dysautonomia and other invisible illnesses.
This year I joined the board of The Empower Network (TEN), a non-profit that fosters economic independence for people the traditional workforce excludes through education, community connection, and tangible support for those pursuing self-employment. Almost everyone who volunteers with TEN lives with disability, many of us live with dysautonomia caused by Sjogren’s disease or long Covid. Please support TEN by making a donation, becoming a member, volunteer, or sponsor, and/or telling someone about the organization.
Schedule an exploratory skin revitalisation call with Dr. Bexi here.
Read other articles on Bexi's Blog.
A version of this article can be found in my local newspaper, The Davis Enterprise.