The rumor is true! Anxiety and stress can actually affect your skin complexion, causing those ever-hated eye wrinkles. Whenever you have something wrong with your complexion, stress only adds to the problem.
How does stress affect your complexion and cause eye wrinkles?
When you are stressed out, your body starts to react to its external stimuli. Stress causes an adrenaline surge that elevates your cortisol level, a hormone in your blood that regulates how much sugar your bloodstream is absorbing. The more cortisol that is released, the more energy you will have. While this is great when you are in actual physical danger, your body reacts the exact same way when you have a lot of stress and anxiety. As it turns out, your body can’t tell the difference between the 2 stressors.
In as little as a few months, new wrinkles can start to appear on your face as a result of this cortisol process. Want to know why is affects your face and skin? As said earlier, cortisol tells your cells to put more sugar in your blood to give you that extra energy in times of physical danger and stress. This same sugar can actually bind to proteins in your body and make them stop working. Collagen, the wonderful substance that maintains our smooth skin, is just one of the proteins that is affected.
If this isn’t depressing enough, when your body is stressed, it repairs your skin before it regenerates new skin. Therefore, all of your damaged collagen is getting fixed first and your body is not manufacturing new collagen. As a result, your skin starts to look less youthful and a lot more wrinkly. That wonderful thing called stress also slows cell turnover and increases your dryness which makes wrinkles appear more prominent.
Don’t fear, there is hope! There are somethings you can do to help this! Try to relax as much as possible. Do what you need to do in order to relax. If you need to hit the gym, get more sleep, read a nice book, do what works for you! Leading a more relaxing lifestyle have been shown to reduce cortisol levels. Always wear sunscreen when you are outdoors. If you have less skin damage from the sun, then your body will not have as much repairing to do.
Make sure to add a collagen booster to your eye wrinkle cream. This will help your collagen proteins that added boost they need to work. The best eye creams can actually be strong enough to increase new collagen.