If you have a chronic skin condition and have been putting off starting a meditation practice, here is information that might change your mind. There are many proven health benefits to meditation that can also make a positive difference in the health of your skin. The best news? You don’t have to set aside hours or spend a fortune, its free and takes only 5-10 minutes each day.
Meditation’s Health Benefits
Several research studies provide evidence for the health benefits of meditation. Here are a few that can influence your health in ways that help with chronic skin conditions:
- Reduces Stress and Stress Hormones.
Stress is a big factor in many skin flareups, including acne, psoriasis, eczema or TSW. Stress increases the release of cortisol, which in turn ramps up our inflammatory response. A daily meditation practice can help keep stress levels in your life more manageable, thereby reducing flareups.
In fact, the stress/flare-up connection is so strong that Dr. Olivia Hsu Friedman of Amethyst Holistic Skin Solutions will give a presentation at the National Eczema Association’s Expo 2023, on “Eczema is Stressful: What is the science behind meditation, yoga, positivity and much more.”
- Improves Sleep
Skin flareups often impinge on our sleep quality due to depression, anxiety and the pain and itching from the condition. Meditation can reduce insomnia and improve sleep quality, and may help train us to refocus our mind away from the racing thoughts that sometimes keep us awake.
- Reduces Depression, Anxiety, and Chronic Pain
Struggling with a severe skin condition can often affect us in deep emotional ways. Meditation may help us cope. Partly because of its stress reduction effect, meditation helps improve the symptoms of depression, anxiety, and chronic pain.
- Reduces High Blood Pressure
Healthy and balanced blood circulation is a key to skin health. Meditation is shown to naturally lower high blood pressure.
Your Body Listens
Each part of your body is connected to every other part, and they work in concert together to keep you going strong. If one part is out of balance, it will affect the whole system. This truth is a key foundation of traditional Chinese herbal medicine.
Meditation is a gentle way to help bring your whole body into balance. Why? By deliberately spending a few moments to calm your mind, listen to your breathing, and center yourself, you’re sending a message to your whole body of calmness, balance, self-care, self-love and attention. It’s also a time of reconnection to your body and noticing how you feel inside as you quietly focus inward.
A Simple Meditation You Can Try
There are many different ways to meditate and many different meditation systems (think yoga, Taichi, mindfulness, mantra chanting, guided visualization, and more.)
The simplest form of meditation is one you can try right now.
- Start by sitting comfortably on the floor, or in a chair, and close your eyes for a few minutes.
- With eyes closed, breathe normally and naturally. Watch your breath and follow your inhale and exhale. Pay attention to how it feels, how it sounds.
- If distracting thoughts arise, let them simply float by without fighting them or entertaining them. Keep drawing your attention back to your breathing, feeling and watching each inhale and exhale.
- If you can, try to breathe from your lower abdomen rather than your chest. Feel your lower stomach expand and then relax with each inhale and exhale.
Try the above for five minutes or so. How do you feel after you’re finished? You might find you feel more relaxed, centered and alert.
This simple meditation practice will also naturally encourage your breathing to become deeper over time. Deeper, slower breathing provides more relaxation as it signals the body to switch out of the “fight or flight” mode of the sympathetic nervous system and turns on the calmer stress-relieving “parasympathetic” nervous system.
Conclusion
Meditation is a very simple, cost-free addition to your wellness routine that anyone can do. We hope you’ll give it a try and that you, too, will experience the calmness, greater focus, and emotional balance that so many others who meditate now enjoy!
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About the Author
Olivia Hsu Friedman, LAc, Dipl.OM, DACM, Cert. TCMDerm, is the owner of Amethyst Holistic Skin Solutions and treats Acne, Eczema, Psoriasis, and TSW. Olivia treats patients via video conferencing using only herbal medicine. Olivia is Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Society of Acupuncturists, serves on the Advisory Board of LearnSkin, and is a faculty member of the Chicago Integrative Eczema Group sponsored by the National Eczema Association.