Moisturizing, cleansing and applying sunscreen is a great start, if you’re hoping to have a great looking skin throughout the day. But, they are many other factors that affect the way our skin looks.
One of such factor is sleep. Yes, recommended amount of sleep is essential to maintain radiant and glowing skin. The quality and quantity of sleep you receive every night can have profound impact on your skins overall health.
While you get plenty of rest, your body undergoes in to repair mode sending fresh cells to epidermis to give your skin a youthful glow. It also helps to restore and eliminate the toxins from your skin to keep it healthy.
Lack of sleep will not allow the body to do its original functions which keeps your body healthy and even decreases the functionality of metabolism and makes you feel sluggish and weak.
In this article, we are going to see how lack of sleep is affecting our skin. The following are the some ways insufficient sleep can wreck havoc on your appearance.
How Lack Of Sleep Affects Your Skin
1. It Causes Dark Circles Under Your Eyes
One of the most common signs of sleep deprivation is dark circles under your eyes. This is because lack of sleep causes your blood vessels to dilute that causes inflammation and formation of dark circles under your eyes.
Less sleep during nights will also result in poor water balance that also leads to formation of dark circles under your eyes.
2. It Makes You Look Older
When you don’t have minimum amount of sleep required for your body, it often results in applying stress to your body. Chronic stress harms the integrity of the collagen production in your skin.
Collagen is an important compound to maintain skin elasticity and structure. When it is broken down, the skin shows more noticeable signs of ageing by becoming thinner and firmer.
Our cells in the body regenerate while we sleep, if we don’t get enough amount of sleep they are unable to repair themselves and leave us looking older, according to Dr. Moran.
3. It Dehydrates Your Body
During deep sleep, the body adjusts its overall hydration levels. It drains and processes excess water by sending moisture in to the skins vital layers. Well, lack of sleep messes your body hydration levels and leads to dull and dry complexion.
4. It Can Affect Hair Growth
Lack of sleep can cause your hair to start thinning out due to release of stress hormones in the body called tilogen effluvium. This is also called as non permanent hair loss that happens due to the release of high amount of stress hormones and results in hair loss across your scalp.
5. It Can Make Existing Skin Condition Even Worse
Unfortunately, if you are one of those persons who fight against skin conditions like psoriasis, eczema etc, then lack of sleep worsens and higher the levels of anxiety and in return results in inflammation and breakouts.
It is crucial to maintain 8 hours of sleep regularly in addition to medical therapies of these conditions.
Tips For Better Night’s Sleep
As we have seen how skin is is effected by lack of sleep, here are some useful tips who are struggling to get a good night’s rest.
All these tips were suggested by National sleep foundation.
- Establish a routine bed time that involves 7-8 hours of sleep per night.
- Limit the consumption of alcohol and smoking before bed.
- Keep all your electronic devices away from your bed.
- Avoid heavy meals and caffeine before bed.
- Set the room in comfortable temperature, so that you can have sound sleep.
- Sleep in light clothing.
