Taking care of your skin doesn’t just start from the outside with all the skincare products we can get our hands on to address our skin concerns. Aside from using skincare products, watching what type of food you eat, and staying hydrated, medical professionals recommend having between 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night! There has to be a reason for that right? Besides sleep deprivation causing your immune system to lower as well as many other chronic illnesses/diseases, a big problem with having a lack of sleep is that it can negatively affect your skin. Your skin is the largest organ of your body and one of its biggest job is to act as a protective barrier between the external environment and the inside of your body. So why wouldn’t you want to protect it? Here is how lack of sleep affects your skin and how knowing this can help you (and me especially) choose healthier sleeping habits.
1 – Your Skin Looks Tired And Aged
Probably the most telling sign of how a lack of sleep affects your skin, or your entire face, is that it looks tired and sometimes even aged the next day. With not getting enough sleep, it can also cause skin dehydration which means a loss of elasticity. And that means your skin can look saggy, leathery, or wrinkled. This is because you’re not providing your body enough time to repair itself overnight. You may see an increase in fine lines, dullness, and uneven pigmentation. It can even disturb your collagen production which affects the strength of your skin and how youthful it can look.
Like food and water, sleep is also essential in providing nourishment for your body so that you can recover as well as produce new blood cells and brain cells. Your brain gets rid of toxins when you sleep which helps you become rejuvenated in the morning. When you sleep, your body is actively working to help your memory and rebuild your body.
2 – Your Skin Becomes Imbalanced
I find that this usually takes more than one night of little slumber and is an accumulation of a lack of sleep, but it affects your skin by making it imbalanced with this type of stress. Imbalanced in the sense where you will have breakouts and redness. When the pH levels of your skin drops, it causes an imbalance in the skin, its moisture levels get affected and your skin becomes more dry. Then as your skin is trying to make up for it with sebum production, you start getting clogged pores. This hormone in our body that regulates stress is called cortisol. When you don’t have enough sleep, this hormone spikes and increases sebum production and leads to breakouts.
Did you know that a lack of sleep is one of the leading triggers to an acne flare up? This alone can cause people to take a step back and think twice about sleeping late. Acne and blemishes can be very hard and annoying to get rid of. And I definitely went through this phase in university where there were nights I didn’t sleep for almost 72 hours trying to get all my projects done on time – and my skin paid the price. You can read about it in My Skincare Journey Part 1.
3 – You Get Dark Circles And Puffy Eyes
The eyes are like the window of the soul, and it is undeniably one of the most obvious ways to tell when a person is tired or haven’t slept enough the night before. With a lack of sleep, it affects your skin through blood vessels under your eyes dilating and causing dark circles. Liquid can also stay in the under-eye area which causes puffiness, kind of like bloating. Admittedly, dark circles and puffiness can sometimes be genetic. But not getting enough rest will certainly make it worse. And for those who don’t have this genetic issue, you can have this negative side effect when you aren’t giving your body what it needs. Also, longer you keep up with the late sleeping habits or not giving your body the amount of hours it need to recover each night, the more your dark circles and puffiness become prominent and tends to stay for the long run.
Luckily, dark circles and puffiness are easy to fix for the short run – in a bandaid-on-the-situation kind of way. Here are 2 Products To Instantly Improve Dark Circles and Puffy Eyes, but this will only work for a short while and is a cosmetic fix. Aside from these products, an easier way is to cover it up with makeup – namely concealer. It won’t help your body get more rest just because you’re fixing the signs of tiredness, but at least it improves your appearance if you don’t want it to look obvious. But if you don’t want to continue to have dark circles or puffy eyes, get enough sleep before it’s too late to reverse the effects. Here is also Why You Need An Eye Cream In Your Skincare Routine.
How To Start Making Up For A Lack Of Sleep
Getting enough sleep may be very difficult for some people. There are sleeping conditions, the busyness of life where there just isn’t enough time in a day, sleep disturbances because of the environment you’re in, or other reasons. If you feel you aren’t getting enough sleep every night and it’s clearly showing through your skin, these are some ways on how you can start making up for your lack of sleep:
- Take a nap. This can instantly refresh your energy levels or how awake and cognitive your brain can be. A lot of people don’t like taking naps during the day because it can ruin their sleep at night or just don’t want to waste time doing so, but if your body needs it don’t fight it. Sometimes your nap can even turn into a really early night, but that’s okay because your body clearly needs it and you’ll function a lot better the next day! I’m guilty of this – sometimes I’m so tired I just fall asleep, but I feel so much better after since I didn’t realize how exhausted I was.
- Sleep in on the weekends. (Or on a day where you don’t have to wake up early to work and do things.) Give yourself a break and the time off needed to recover from a lack of sleep to improve your body and mind and of course, your skin. It’s like making up for what you put your body through during the week, but it isn’t a long-term fix!
- Plan your sleep schedule. If you want a certain amount of sleep every night, start planning when you need to wake up and work backwards from there to determine what time you need to sleep. I find it especially useful to have a Fitbit in particular to track your sleep (or even an Apple watch or other brands). You can set it to remind you when you need to sleep in order to get a certain amount of hours, and it tracks your sleep through the night and lets you know how long you slept and the quality of your sleep. It’s a good motivator as well as you start to reach your sleep goals. Depending on the model you get (I have the Charge 2 and they’re currently at a Fitbit Charge 5), they can be pretty understated and out of the way so it won’t bother you when you sleep. When you start understanding your sleep pattern, it’s easier to make improvements.
- Lower your stress levels if possible. This may be tough for a lot of people, me included, but as you may already know, stress is a killer and negatively affects your skin and body. It can also cause you to stay up at night and lose sleep, which then affects your health as well as your skin health. Whether it’s exercise, meditation, or other forms of stress relievers, do your best to find a way to lower your stress levels in order to get a restful night.
- Lessen your screen time. One of the hardest things to do these days as our lives are filled with an inundation of technology. Working on the computer all day, having a laptop you can take everywhere – and now tablets, smartphones, smart TVs, etc. It’s almost impossible to get away from screens. That’s why it’s even more important that you make an effort to do so. Screens strain our eyes and the blue light emitted will affect your from being able to fall asleep or sleep well at night. Try to avoid screens at least half an hour before you go to bed to prevent having a lack of sleep the next day.