Staying happy is often credited as being one of the best ways to maintain your health. There’s something to the notion as well given the fact that an unhappy and stressed life tends to result in your body being less adept. This is because of the potential impact stress has on a lot of important functions in your body. Mood is directly tied to your overall health as a result. This means your skin is also tied to your overall mood. The various effects that your mood can have on your skin are tied to different factors depending on your prevailing mood most of the time. They can happen due to particular muscle configurations or even the hormones that your body is releasing in response to particular moods. Let’s take a look at some of the most pronounced moods that can affect your skin.

Stress
Stress can have a profound impact on your skin. It releases particular hormones in your body that begin to degrade various parts of your body over the course of extended exposure. The clearest impact is on your skin’s oil production. Stress hormones actually encourage your skin to produce and release more oil. This can easily end up dulling your skin as it builds up. A thicker layer of oil troubles your skin in other ways as well. Breakouts become more common with all of their associated problems. Stress can also promote a generalized, low-level inflammation in the skin that gradually inflicts damage that needs to be healed by your skin. This reduces its overall ability to repair itself and as a result, can make wrinkles and others signs of aging begin to form or become more pronounced. In short, stress is potentially very damaging to your skin.

Anxiety and Depression
These two moods often end up paired together in people’s lives. It makes it hard to separate the effects of one from the other, but most professionals agree that each plays a part in reducing your skin’s natural, healthy glow. Studies imply that anxiety tends to trigger the releases of hormones in the body that reduce blood circulation and as a result lead to a blanched and dull looking appearance. Depression’s dangers are often caused by the reduction in the ability to care for yourself. However, it can cause a more pronounced impact in the long term as depression often affects our ability to get restful sleep. A loss of restful sleep gradually begins to leech away at your body’s ability to reduce and manage inflammation. After all, your skin heals itself the most when you’re sleeping. This is compounded by the fact that less sleep can lead to puffy and eyes and skin thinning that leads to dark circles.

Anger
Remember the archetypal motherly advice to “Stop making that face or it will get stuck that way”? Whoever it was that actually told you that is actually more correct than they know. Anger and disappointment often make our faces particularly expressive. Deep frowns and notable furrows of frustration clearly mark these moods. They each result in the damaging of the collagen beneath the skin as they fold the skin. People with chronic anger issues are the most likely to encounter this problem as they will be making this faces more frequently. The collagen damage builds up over time and can lead to early wrinkles in the areas most affected. Notably, anger also produces hormones in the body that degrade your body’s ability to heal itself and thereby magnifies this effect.

Your general mood is tied to your overall health in more ways than you’d think. Moods result in particular cues in the body with far-reaching consequences. Your skin is subject to these consequences and as a result it can lead to changes to your skin. Don’t worry about brief periods of time when it comes to moods affecting your skin though. They need to be sustained to cause any true damage. Consider this another reason to try to maintain at least a neutral disposition towards life as a whole.