Stress causes a lot of problems from high blood pressure, to making you more susceptible to illness, and flaring up acne.  Even if you follow the ultimate skincare regime containing the best ingredients possible, it won't be very effective if you are highly stressed.

Why is that? Stress does a few things that completely throw our hormones out of balance because our androgen levels shoot up when we experience abnormal amounts of stress.  This leads to the large cystic pimples we all hate. The increase in hormones affects our sebum glands by making them overproduce oil causing pores to clog and acne to flare up.

What is stress?

We can get stressed physically and emotionally.

Physical stress includes sleep, exercise, or pretty much anything that makes you feel physically exhausted.  Emotional stress is when you're angry or upset about something, or feeling nervous about going on a first date, or a job interview.  

There are ways to combat stress quickly and easily.  

5 ways that help you destress your life

1. Go To Bed 

Get good quality sleep.  Place your phone somewhere you can't reach to distract yourself and turn computers, laptops, and tvs off.  It makes a big difference in how you feel and how your skin will look.

2.   Focus On Your Breathing

Tune everything out for 5 or 10 minutes, focus on breathing and take slow breaths in and out. A few minutes of meditation a day can help alleviate daily stress.

3.   Eat right

Don't have coffee 6 hours before bed. Caffeine can take 8 hours to completely break down in the body.  

Eat fresh vegetables and fruits daily.  They're full of nutrition and go with foods that have a good balance of omega 3's to 6 ratio to reduce inflammation in our body.  Other stress lowering snacks include asparagus, broccoli and nuts like cashews or almonds.

4.   Watch something funny

When we laugh we release endorphins which decrease stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Laughing makes you feel good too!  

5. Get a Plant

There have been studies that showed people who are in a room with plants had their blood pressured lowered by 4 points compared to the group without plants who's blood pressure lowered by 2 points. An extra bonus is that plants also help remove organic compounds that aren't so good for you in the air, and rooms with plants have been shown to have 20% less dust.   Easy to care for indoor plants that don't really need sun are Lucky Bamboo plants.

Good luck and take care of yourself!