“I’ve never seen so many wrinkly faces in my life"...
…announced a Team Costhetics member when she arrived at work earlier this week. She reported seeing an explosion of forehead furrows, eye crinkles, marionette lines, and other face-ageing wrinkles on the men and women she encountered during her morning commute. Was she just imagining things? Not according to news reports.
The High Price of Worry
The long slog through COVID has turned even the most serene folks into worry warts, biting their nails over health, rising costs, and just about everything else. That concern has led to an explosion of what many people have accurately named worry lines. Medical professionals call them stress wrinkles and put the blame for their formation on telomeres. These are part of an evolving field of research called psychodermatology, which seeks to clarify the connection between mind and skin health.
Research has shown that psychological stress is linked to shorter telomeres. Without going into too much mind-melting detail, telomeres are protective caps at the end of DNA strands. When telomeres shorten due to stress, they ultimately enter an unhealthy state known as senescence. In this state, the cells are unable to reproduce and that creates fertile ground for ageing skin. Before long, shorter, exhausted telomeres combined with facial expressions such as frowning and furrowing your brow turn your face into a patchwork of lines and wrinkles.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Prescription – Mindfulness
You don’t have to be a wrinkly victim of stress, at least not according to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop. “A special enzyme in our cells, called telomerase, protects telomeres, and actually rebuilds, and lengthens them. A small handful of studies suggest that mind-body activities, done daily, may increase our telomerase levels!”
Mind-body activities can be useful to anyone at any age. They can be performed anywhere at any time. What’s more, mindfulness training can:
- Help people respond constructively to stress
- Help us to have a healthier psychological relationship to stress
- Interrupt the stress-stimulus cycle (where every situation creates stress)
- Increase self-awareness and self-love
If you need help getting started, simply Google meditation for healthy skin and take your pick from a wide range of visuals and voices. You might find this one useful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIxgLUnXDqM
In addition to mindfulness meditation, the use of mantras can help you relax and focus on the good, not the stress. Mantras are phrases that can be repeated whenever stress rears its ugly head. They can be said out loud or internally to help you find the focus to look past whatever stress is clouding your vision.
What to Do with the Wrinkles You Have
Costhetics hopes the information in this article will help you improve your state of mind and the state of your face too. Still, we have to be candid, some wrinkles simply won’t budge without a more aggressive solution than meditation. If you need more help, say in the form of aesthetic enhancement, or other beauty treatments and procedures, please reach out to us. We can help you find a doctor in your area, including specialists in wrinkle reduction.