I know I’ve written on this topic many times, but I just can’t express how much anxiety and stress can add to the likelihood of your skin breaking out. For some people, the correlation between anxiety and acne may be a little less conspicuous, but for others, like myself, it is an obvious and undeniable relationship.
The funny thing is, that as I get older and my skin matures, my breakouts as related to stress and anxiety have changed a bit. The breakouts seem to migrate to different areas of my body over the years. In my teens and twenties, whenever I was experiencing a lot of anxiety about something, my face used to always be the location of choice for my skin to express itself.
Now, the manifestation of acne due to stress and anxiety seems to be either on my tummy or my back of all places. Very strange, but this development just recently occurred. I, like many others, have been going through an extremely stressful time at work because my employer is not replacing people that leave and therefore, the people that are left are picking up a lot of the slack.
It’s a difficult and frustrating period where I, a self professed perfectionist, do not have the adequate time I feel I need to thoroughly address people’s needs and questions at work, not the proper time to put in to my own workload. This frustration has definitely impacted my skin.
The first day of high stress, rapid heartbeat and shallowness of breath, I came home to find that my tummy had broken out in red, irritated bumps that resembled acne, but may have also been a rash. I treated it with topical acne cream and it seemed to help, so I believe it was a cortisol hormone triggered breakout.
I also felt a large acne pustule coming out on the side of my forehead. That one luckily went away pretty quickly, but was painful in its formation.
I then noticed that the breakout that first appeared on my tummy seemed to have migrated to my back. I only noticed this because when I applied lotion, it burned, and I put my hand back there and felt bumps all over.
It is critical to contain your anxiety and stress by doing things that you know help you through those difficult periods. This way, you can also minimize your hormonal acne breakouts.
Reader Comments