Author:Jessica L. YarbroughPublish date:Jun 13, 2019Updated onJun 12, 2019Dr. Amy Wechsler would rather you didn't call her a psychodermatologist, thanks. "My friends tease me; it's not a great term," she says with a sigh. Unfortunate double meaning aside, the portmanteau deftly describes Dr. Wechsler's line of work. "I'm a psychiatrist and a dermatologist. I think that stuff that goes on in the mind can make skin conditions worse — or better.
It's true: A mind, body and spirit approach to skin care has been front and center in Eastern cultures for centuries , which mainstream Western doctors have largely dismissed. And then there's the big one: stress. "If I had to give you one word that is the root of all evils today, at least when it comes to beauty, it's stress," Dr. Wechsler says. "Stress," admittedly, is a broad term; but while the evolved mind may have specific names for nuanced conditions — anxiety, depression, sadness, overwhelm — the primitive body processes them all in the same way: with a stress response.
"I noticed my patients weren't so happy," he told the crowd at a panel about the connection between sleep and skin-care earlier this year, hosted by Lunya in Los Angeles. "They weren't smiling, they were downtrodden, saying, 'There's traffic, work is hard, so much is expected of me, things are more difficult than they used to be.
It's a sentiment echoed by Dr. Murad, who packages written "affirmations" — or repeated positive statements — with his skin-care products. "Dance even though you can't hear the music," advises one. "Forgive yourself. Love yourself," reads another. The doctor even has an app that customers can download for daily positive reinforcement.
"It's the rare person that's stressed and is sleeping well," Dr. Wechsler explains. "You need seven and a half to eight hours of sleep a night, there's no getting around that. Sleep is when we're bathing all our organs in anti-inflammatory molecules. It’s healing the brain, the mind, the skin, all the organs — it affects everything."
"An example is lavender essential oil," she says. "When inhaled, it's shown to act as a sedative, to slow down the breath and heart rate and promote relaxation and stress relief — tangible, scientific, researched benefits for the mind and emotions." While those features alone could help assuage any brain-skin stress, the plant extract has topical benefits, too.
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