We are just coming out of Valentine’s Day, and for those of you who were single maybe it’s a sigh of relief that it fell on a weekday, or maybe you are someone who just doesn’t care too much about it. As some of you know, I recently got married, but that didn’t change my feelings towards Valentine’s Day, which is — I don’t care. But what I did care about when I was single was dealing with break-ups.
Being single was fun, but when there were break-ups, my skin got the most bruised. You are probably thinking; how do break-ups affect your skin?
Let’s rewind a bit. Growing up my parents used to tell me to focus on academics and not boys, as every parent probably does. But I used to have day-dreams of every romcom movie. Whether it was Leo saving me on the Titanic or Richard Gere coming to me with flowers or Mr.Darcy wooing Elizabeth. I was a romantic. I thought this is what romance is. Boy was I wrong. As I got older, I had my firsts’, including rejections and break-ups. You know what is terrible about rejection? No-one prepares you for it.
I had the crush rejections, the relationship rejections, and everything in between. And every time I got rejected, there was a three-step action plan:
Step 1: Crying and Low Self-worth
Step 2: No sleep
Step 3: The Junk
Doing these things, did nothing for me or my skin in the end. If anything, it probably made things worse.
CRYING AND LOW SELF-WORTH
Rejection is a hard thing, so when we go through something that tugs the heart, it is inevitable that we might have a good cry. That cry might be with friends or alone. But if that good cry turns into victimizing yourself, where you are hearing negative thoughts, you know it is BAD. It’s as if you are going down the rabbit-hole of low self-worth and depression and it is no longer a good cry. When you go down this hole, where you don’t think you are good enough, or pretty enough, we are putting our body under stress. When our body thinks it is stressed it releases a chemical called cortisol. Cortisol can have all sorts of impacts on the skin, like break outs or acne, because it causes the body to produce more oil. It can also speed up the aging process of the skin. So overall, not good. What I didn’t know in my 20s, what I didn’t understand, was that the break-up didn’t have to be a bad thing. It is important to grieve the loss of a relationship, but it didn’t need to take over my whole life and self-worth. They break-up didn’t need to give break-outs. We spend so much of our time, validating ourselves through the acceptance of others. But we don’t need anyone’s approval, especially a boys’, that we are amazing. It is so easy to forget that. Listen to your friends when they say it’s his loss. IT’S TRUE.
NO SLEEP
Many of us suffer from this as well, in many different ways. We might just become insomniacs, we sleep but it isn’t restful, or we are partying the hurt away. Not getting enough sleep has a plethora of repercussions, our mood is low, our body is stressed and again produces more cortisol, dark circles under the eyes and an overall tired look which can affect the complexion of our skin. Furthermore, to hide all of this we run to makeup, which already has lots of chemicals, resulting in all sorts of effects on our body. And then there is the obvious, of being too lazy to take the make-up off, which doesn’t help either.
THE JUNK
You know what I am referring to: JUNK FOOD, JUNK DRINKING, JUNKING IN BED ALL DAY! After a bad break-up we are all having a Bridget Jones moment, ‘a relationship with two men simultaneously called Ben and Jerry.’ But it isn’t just that, we stay in bed binging on oily foods, some of us even have one two many drinks. All in all, these foods will not help our skin. We might get breakouts, cause the collagen to breakdown, the list goes on.
I did these three steps, more times than I can count. But as I got older, I learned that letting someone have that kind of impact on my health was not good, I wish that it had hit me sooner! Of course, I was hurt, but that didn’t mean I allow this break-up to control me. It is easy to fall into an emotional trap and let ourselves go. But a break-up is not worth losing gorgeous skin. So next-time you have a break-up:
YOU LAUGH. YOU SMILE. BUT YOU DON’T LOSE YOUR SKIN.
Shubhangini Prakash, Founder & CEO of personal care company Feather & Bone.
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