Of Brains And Breakouts

This is Dr. Claudia Aguirre. She’s a molecular neuroscientist, and today she’s going to be educating us about skin.

What? Why?

When we say “neuroscience”, we generally think of the brain. And indeed, that’s a very important part of it.

We might think about eyes, which are basically an extension of the brain.

We don’t usually think about skin, which (just like our eyes) is constantly feeding us a lot of information about our surroundings, via a little under three million nerve endings. Guess where the other ends of those nerves lead!

There’s a constant two-way communication going on between our brain and our skin.

What does she want us to know?

Psychodermatology

The brain and the skin talk to each other, and maladies of one can impact the other:

• Directly, e.g. stress prompting skin breakouts (actually this is a several-step process physiologically, but for the sake of brevity we’ll call this direct)
• Indirectly, e.g. nervous disorders that result in people scratching or picking at their skin, which prompts a whole vicious cycle of one thing making the other worse

Read more: Psychodermatology: The Brain-Skin Connection

To address both kinds of problems, clearly something beyond moisturizer is needed!

Mindfulness (meditation and beyond)

Mindfulness is a well-evidenced healthful practice for many reasons, and Dr. Aguirra argues the case for it being good for our skin too.

As she points out,

❝Cultural stress and anxiety can trigger or aggravate many skin conditions—from acne to eczema to herpes, psoriasis, and rosacea.

Conversely, a disfiguring skin condition can trigger stress, anxiety, depression, and even suicide.

Chronic, generalized anxiety can create chronic inflammation and exacerbate inflammatory skin conditions, such as those I mentioned previously.

Chronic stress can result in chronic anxiety, hypervigilance, poor sleep, and a whole cascade of effects resulting in a constant breakdown of tissues and organs, including the skin.❞

~ Dr. Claudia Aguirra

So, she recommends mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), for the above reasons, along with others!

Read more: Mind Matters

How to do it: No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness

And as for “and beyond?”

Do you remember in the beginning of the pandemic, when people were briefly much more consciously trying to avoid touching their faces so much? That, too, is mindfulness. It may have been a stressed and anxious mindfulness for many*, but mindfulness nonetheless.

*which is why “mindfulness-based stress reduction” is not a redundant tautology repeated more than once unnecessarily, one time after another 😉

So: do try to keep aware of what you are doing to your skin, and so far as is reasonably practicable, only do the things that are good for it!

The skin as an endocrine organ

Nerves are not the only messengers in the body; hormones do a lot of our body’s internal communication too. And not just the ones everyone remembers are hormones (e.g. estrogen, testosterone, although yes, they do both have a big impact on skin too), but also many more, including some made in the skin itself!

Dr. Aguirra gives us a rundown of common conditions, the hormones behind them, and what we can do if we don’t want them:

Read more: Rethinking The Skin As An Endocrine Organ

Take-away advice:

For healthy skin, we need to do more than just hydrate, get good sleep, have good nutrition, and get a little sun (but not too much).

• We should also practice mindfulness-based stress reduction, and seek help for more serious mental health issues.
• We should also remember the part our hormones play in our skin, and not just the obvious ones.

Did you know that vitamin D is also a hormone, by the way? It’s not the only hormone at play in your skin by a long way, but it is an important one:

Society for Endocrinology | Vitamin D

Want to know more?

You might like this interview with Dr. Aguirre:

The Brain in Our Skin: An Interview with Dr. Claudia Aguirre

Take care!