Stress, Mindfulness and Your Skin with Dr. Trevor Cates

Hi there. I’m Dr Trevor cates. Welcome to the spa doctor podcast. On today’s podcast, I’m going to do something a little bit different. I know last week we talked about with Dr Donnie Wilson. We talked about the importance of managing stress and how stress plays a role in our health, so today I want to share with you some of the information that we oftentimes don’t cover in this podcast. The information that comes from my book clean skin from within the with this specific tools to help with stress management and mindfulness practices and that is the clean mind section of my book, clean skin from within, so I want to delve into the information why stress plays such a big role in our skin and at what we can do about it to help address that root cause to address those imbalances that it can occur internally. That show up on our skin specific practices that I want to share with you today and I was just.

I just had my first ever holistic skincare leadership training. This was a live event I put together for skin and wellness professionals and I wanted to share some information with you that I shared with them and I’m excited to really put forward a holistic skincare movement, so that’s why I did this event, this live event last weekend, and I’m going to keep doing these. I also want to make sure that I’m sharing valuable information with with you, with my followers, my, my spot doctor, family, all of the people that are part of my tribe and I really think that this clean mind section is a key important part of this and I think that this time of year when the seasons are changing, there are some changes to the whether kids are back at school and we’re also getting ready to go into the holiday season and cold and flu season.

This is a really important time to hone in on your stress management skills. What are the ones that you’re doing on a day to day basis? Because really it says daily lifestyle choices that make the biggest impact. So what would help you with that today? First, let’s talk about why we even want to have this conversation. If you, if you watch the podcast last week, you got a glimpse of that and want to share something specifically having to do with skin. So many of our nerve endings are connected to our skin and other organs. So with, with our stress system, with our body’s reaction to stress, it is, it impacts our entire body and we can notice it, we can feel it, we can see it in our bodies and even on our skin when we have any kind of sense of heightened emotion like sadness, anger, other upset, it really can play out on the skin and it actually becomes this vicious cycle because skin problems affect us on an emotional level too.

But stress affects our skin. So because so it creates this vicious cycle of worsening skin issues and a number of skin conditions, both cars and are triggered by stress, right? So acne, Eczema, Rosacea, right? This has been a Lego. Even premature aging are connected here. So when, when we’re stressed, the adrenal glands release the hormone cortisol and a surge in cortisol can actually increase sea bum production that wheels in the skin. So that’s one of the reasons why it can trigger acne when it comes to Eczema, high cortisol levels actually trigger inflammation and aggravate skin inflammation, those external skin signs that are triggered by inflammation, skin inflammation. So eczema is an example of that. Also things like Rosacea, you could be dealing with visible signs that are triggered more by flushing, flushing can be triggered by stress, more of that Rosacea, those you have, rosacea are probably already aware of that.

And for people that tend to get cold sores, for example, stress is one of the big triggers for that. For those, for those cold or eruptions that are actually due to, um, a herpes or oral herpes virus that lays dormant in the body. And when certain triggers happen such as stress, then it can cause an eruption of those cold sores. So, and also when it comes to autoimmune skin, conditions like Vitol, Lego and psoriasis, stress can negatively impact our immune system. So being anxious or stress can auto can aggravate these autoimmune skin conditions and also again going into cold and flu season, we want to make sure we’re doing things to balance our immune system and not wear it down. So no car, chronically high levels of cortisol, not only impact our skin as you probably are aware, it impacts our body on a number of different ways.

It also triggers sugar cravings and so that is another thing that can happen with high cortisol is we trigger triggers us to be wanting to have more sugar and then of course eating more sugar leads to more skin problems. So hopefully that gives you an idea of how important that stress management is on skin and our overall health. And again, skin is just an outer, not just but is an outer reflection of what’s going on internally with our health. I call skin our magic mirror that gives us great clues and when we’re overly stressed, this can be one of the. Some of the clues when we start to have more of these types of skin issues might be a sign that your body’s trying to tell you, okay, it’s time for us to really pay more attention to our mindfulness practices. What are we doing to manage stress?

Because even with healthy skin, even if you don’t typically have skin issues, being stress can trigger that. It also can trigger bad habits like picking at your skin and also lead to more inflammatory conditions and infections and premature and sorry, all of that can, when you’re picking out your skin can create, um, more, more scarring and maybe even premature aging. So again, I’m not going to spend the whole time talking about the problem here. Let’s talk about the solution. What are we going to do to help manage our stress and to be sure that we’re doing things on a, on an ongoing basis that help us. So in my book, clean skin from within. You can find six practices for a clean mind. And I want to talk with you about those six practices today and I’m going to give you a bonus practice that’s not in my book, something new that I shared with my holistic skincare leadership training this past weekend at the live event and it got a great response.

So I want to share it with you also. You could also get the benefits of this and so with with these six clean mind practices, here they are, breath work, release, breath is so important to. So I’m going to share with your breath, work release, exercise, forgiveness, writing exercise at 10 minutes, 10 minute meditation, relaxing, bedtime ritual, gratitude journal, and in nature excursion. So these are the six clean mind practices that I talk about in my book. I want to go through each one of these and sometimes it’s helpful for me to actually talk it through rather than you just reading about it in my book. Most of these just take 10 minutes or less a day. Here’s the thing, I know that we’re busy. You’re busy, I’m busy. We’re all busy with things in our lives with our work, with our social life, with our families, all of that keeps us very busy and we don’t have a lot of time for this, so we think some of us might set aside more time than others, but if you don’t currently have some sort of stress management practice every day, I encourage you to start developing one, so I’m going to give you six today and I would encourage you to try all six and they only take 10 minutes or less a day.

You could certainly spend more time doing these things if you have that time, but what I want you to realize is it doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s really easy and it’s easy to find time. I often recommend these at the beginning of the day or at the end of the day. I think the best time is the beginning of the day because then it helps you set the stage for your entire day. You know that you’ve incorporated this already at the beginning of sort of sets the stage for the rest of your day. Same thing with healthy eating, a lot of these things, if you start your day right, it’s going to probably fall into place. A lot of things are going to fall into place and a lot easier for you. Then it also becomes a habit when you do it on a regular basis. When you don’t do it, it feels different.

You actually start to miss it, so try it and see how it goes and I can’t wait to hear back when you get a chance to do this. Come back to the podcast and either on the spot dr website or on Youtube, wherever you want to go. Wherever you watch the podcast, go and leave a comment. Let us know how it is for you, what you have found with doing these practices. I’m really curious to hear about or just send me a message. So I want you to do with these practices and and you could definitely incorporate them into the two week plan, my two week program, but it’s really those ongoing practices that I want you to incorporate into your daily life. So I want you to notice afterwards to what happens with your body, your mind, what happens in your life, and make note of that.

So let’s talk about the first one, breath work release. Now we actually did a breathwork exercise and the last podcast with Dr Donnie Wilson. So if you want, you can, you can skip this one if you’ve already tried it, but I’m going to share with you the way that I like to to do it. So. So you had to start by sitting in a relaxing position. With your eyes closed, I want to encourage you to put one hand on your chest and the other hand on your lower abdomen and focus on your breathing. For the next five to 10 minutes you would have noticed the inhalation and exhalation as you inhale. Inhale, allow your lower abdomen to your belly to swell like a balloon. Just feel it, especially down into your belly. And then with each breath out, practice relaxing your jaw and your shoulders and notice how your your chest expand with your breath into your belly.

Might change with your breath and just focus on that. If any thoughts come in, just bring them back to your breathing. Okay, so that is a breathwork exercise. She can see. It’s a very simple something that you can do every day. You could do it really anywhere that you can find a relaxing place where you can close your eyes, but even if you’re driving, for example, don’t close your eyes, but you can become just more aware of your breath. And and as you take a deep breath in and a deep exhalation, just being mindful of your breath helps bring you back into your body, helps calm your mind and distress. So it could be a great exercise to do throughout the day. You don’t have to just do it one time. Okay, so let’s go into clean mind practice number two, which is forgiveness exercise. This is such a powerful tool.

I learned this when I was at the University of Santa Monica, do doing their spiritual psychology programs. There’s a master’s degree in spiritual psychology. I did, and this was one of the exercises that they taught us and this is Kinda my little bit of my own take on it, but this is a more abbreviated version of what I was taught there, but that’s where I got the idea for it and I think it again, it is so powerful because so many of us, it is human nature for us to walk around with, with, uh, misbeliefs misunderstandings, judgments, grudges, upset that does not serve us. And so being able to forgive, even if we’re not, we’re not really happy about the situation, but if we’re able to forgive any part of it, it can be extremely rewarding in the end to see the shift that can happen within us. So even if it’s baby steps for you, even if it’s the first time you’ve done something like this, I encourage you to try it, try it out, see how it feels, see what you notice.

So here’s what you do on a blank piece of paper. And this is loosely paper, not in a journal, not in a anything bound that you can’t take out. You want it to be something you can tear out or loose leaf paper. What you’ll do is you’ll write down any negative thoughts or judgments or feelings, and this is particularly good exercise to do. If something has happened that’s really triggered you, that’s making you upset, angry, sad, bitter, all of those things, and you just having a hard time letting it go, then this is a great way to do it and do it in the moment. If you can take some time and sometimes people like, I’ll do it right it as a letter to the person, somebody who’s upset me, I’ll write it as a letter that I know I’m never going to give the person because it’s not really necessarily the things that I would I would totally want to say to their face, but things that maybe I’m thinking or I’m an emotional upset that I have.

So what you do is you take the paper and whatever thoughts come to you, any of those negative thoughts, his judgment, any of that, write it down on the paper. This is important. You just write it down as much as you want, but don’t read it after you’ve written it, written it all down. Don’t read it because this is a release. You’re letting it go. Getting it out of your system. It’s almost like, you know, when we talked about how we need to vent about something, it’s almost like that people will do this verbally. Like, oh my gosh, you won’t believe what happened to me today. And they’ll talk about it and talk about it, talk about it. And then after you talk about, I’m so glad that I’ve gotten that off my chest, but the problem with talking about it to someone else, unless that person’s a therapist, sometimes you’ve just unloaded your baggage onto that person.

Now they’re walking around with all that weight. So this is a nice thing to do that you can do on your own to kind of let it out without putting onto somebody else. And I mean, I love seeing a therapist, but not. We don’t always have a therapist available every moment of the moment of the day. So this can be something that you can do. In the meantime, I’m so write down everything that comes to your mind, get it all down and just keep writing and keep writing until there’s nothing left. Once you have written everything down again, don’t read it, but what you want to do is burn it. Maybe you can build a fire in the fireplace is time of year. We’re going into fall and winter. It could be a time and build a fire and go ahead and burn that piece of paper.

Or you know, if you don’t want to build a whole fire, you can use the. Use the fireplace to burn it, burn it someplace safe, of course, right? Another thing you can do is use a shredder and you could put it through a shredder and the idea is that you’re just letting go. Whatever it is that you just wrote. It’s a release of that. It’s Kinda like that venting and letting it go. And then once you’ve done this, then you can also any kind of positive things that come up, you can write those down and that’s what you can keep. Any kind of positive messages or thoughts of realization of learning opportunities or anything like that, you can write that down and keep that, but it’s those negative thoughts that you’re going to be burning and releasing, so that is clean the clean mind exercise number two, the third one is doing a 10 minute meditation.

You don’t have to spend hours in meditation to get the benefits at least to start a course. If you have that time to do hours of meditation, that’s great and I encourage you to do that. If you can take time for that for yourself, get as much meditation time as possible, but in to start, a lot of times a good place to start is just 10 minutes and it’s super simple. All you have to do is again, find a quiet place for off electronics so you don’t have any interruptions and you want to sit in a relaxing position, but I don’t recommend lying down because meditation is not the same thing and nap times, not the same thing as meditation. It’s of course nap times are great. That can be another stress management tool, but meditation is his unawareness and so you want to actually be awake when you’re doing this, so what does it in a relaxing position, sitting up with your back supported maybe or if you want to sit on the floor with your legs crossed, maybe pillow under you, whatever’s comfortable for you, and then what you want to do is pick a focus.

You’ll want to focus. A lot of people will will pick a word so you could pick the word, for example, gratitude or peace or whatever kind of comes to your mind is something that is positive for, you know, don’t focus on a negative word. Focus on a positive word, and you can also do that with music. You could play some sort of soothing music and just focus on the sounds of the music. You can be listening you if you have a, you can listen to wave sounds. If you have those recordings or a river, anything that is soothing to you. Some people also will focus on a candle or an object in front of them and they’ll do it with their eyes open. Some people will do walking meditation. So you’re actually moving and you’re focusing on your footsteps and the sound and the feel of your footsteps on the ground.

Anything that helps you focus and, and what, when you’re first learning to meditate, often time the mind will wander. So you just kind of bring that back, your focus back. And, and if you do have limited time, one of the things that’s helpful that, that I do, I know if I know that, um, I have to be somewhere at a certain time and I’ll have a certain limited time to meditate. I’ll set an alarm so that I’m sure that I’m not going to have to be checking the time wondering what time it is. And those sorts of thoughts aren’t going to be coming to me. And as you get used to doing these kinds of practices, you’ll be kind of aware that the time has kind of come to come out of the meditation. So I’m with meditation, don’t expect to necessarily have some sort of epiphany if it comes to that’s great, but don’t expect some sort of major epiphany doesn’t always happen.

Sometimes it does, and if it does, encourage you to write it down. Okay, so that’s clean mind practice number three. Now let’s talk about the relaxing bedtime ritual, which is clean mind practice. Number four. Sleep is so crucial to our health for our skin, for healthy skin and for for our, our just our health and our mindset, our mood, all of those things, our energy, our focus throughout the day. And I know it’s not always easy to get a good night’s sleep, but there’s some things that you can do to help set you up for success for a good night’s sleep. So I’m going to share some of that with you now and I also encourage you to check out some of the other podcasts like Dr Michael Bruce, who is known as the sleep doctor and he’s come on and talk specifically about sleep. We’ve done whole podcasts on sleep.

So if you are struggling with your sleep, you want to look for the root cause and so watching that podcast, looking at what more you can be doing to help support yourself, to support your body physically in a way that helps set you up for sleep. Maybe you have some hormonal imbalances which like high cortisol or if you have a imbalances with your sex hormones, those also could cause you like low progesterone for example, can cause you to have difficulty sleeping. So you want to figure out ways that you can support your body physically to be able to help you with sleep. But it is an essential component of the clean mind. So to help you with help you emotionally, mentally, and this plays into the physical role. So again, you want to address those root causes if you have anything holding you back from sleep.

But I’m going to give you some general things to help some tips to help out. I think what’s really helpful is creating this ritual. So that’s what this is about, the relaxing bedtime ritual. So to do that, there are some things that can be great. Part of that, listening to soothing music, what, what kind of soothing music can you incorporate? What can you listen to before bedtime? As you’re starting to think about bedtime, what can you be doing to help transition at that time? So listening to say the music is a great thing to be doing as you’re getting ready for bed and as maybe as you’re laying in bed as you’re preparing, also turning down the lights and making sure that you don’t have any excess lights that are suppressing your Melatonin level, so Melatonin is the hormone that helps us with sleep and it changes based upon our light exposure, so start dimming down your lights as well.

Start turning off electronics to help transitioning to bed. This becomes part of your bedtime ritual, and again, this is. I can only take 10 minutes of this before you get get to bed before you actually lie down in bed. You could also take a warm bath and I, I talk in my book on on page 91 a clean skin from within. I talk about the mineral bath and how did you that and some of the benefits of that. I’m going from a warm bath to a cooler temperature when you get out of the bathtub is one of the ways that your body is signal to help it transition to sleep, and Dr Michael Bruce Talks about in the podcast, but I wanted to remind you of that as being a really. It could be a really great part of your bedtime ritual. You don’t necessarily have to do all of these things as part of your bedtime ritual.

I’m just giving you some ideas of way of things that you can start incorporating for yourself. You might want to consider doing some gentle stretches, maybe some gentle flow yoga to help, um, help you relax. Yoga though can be stimulating. Stretching can be stimulating that. Sometimes it’s better for some people to do in the morning to help get them up. So it depends on you. If you can do some gentle stretches that are relaxing for you, that can be a great part of your ritual. Performing the breathwork, relaxation exercises, those also can be very helpful. There’s some great apps and some programs to give you breath work and relaxation techniques to help you part be part of your bedtime ritual. So sorry, start thinking about some of those things. Okay, so that was number four. Now time for a number five. This is one of my very favorites, clean, clean mind exercise.

Number five is a gratitude journal. Gratitude is so key to helping us with mindfulness, for mindset, for stress management, and it can can break apart upset, worry, judgments, negative thought patterns, misunderstandings, misbeliefs very quickly, there’s this great quote by Eckhart, totally acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance. It’s true. We create so much more abundance when we have gratitude, so it’s very simple. You can get by a new journal, maybe you already have one that has positives, positive thoughts in there, and just write down one to three things every day that you’re grateful for. Best time to do this is in the morning when you first wake up or in the evening before you go to bed, and I love doing it in the morning because it sets the tone for your day. Notice what happens when you start doing this practice.

You probably will start bringing in more opportunities for gratitude as you started to incorporate this, especially when you get to 30 days, end to at least two weeks in, but 30 days in. Okay, so that was cleaned mind practice number five. We’ve also got clean practice number six, the last one, and that is a nature excursions, super easy. Get into nature, step away from your computer, your phone, fluorescent lighting, any energy zapping things and our environment and escape into nature. Even if it’s a quick walk around the block, take a moment, few moments to get out in the sun, the fresh air. This is great for your mood. Get a vitamin D of course using some high quality sunblock on your face to protect your face from any sun damage. Best to do this or in the early morning, I think, or later in the day.

So you don’t, you’re not going out in the peak hours of the day or wear a hat, go in the shade, whatever you can do to, of course protect your skin. But there is, um, great, great studies on the importance of getting into nature, getting outdoors and exercise and how this helps with your energy, your mood and your sleep. So I encourage you to get out, get into nature. How can you start getting into nature more? Even if you live in a city, I’m sure there’s some trees nearby, there’s a dirt path, uh, get. Take your shoes off, put your feet in the dirt and enjoy the skin microbiome benefits that you can get from that, from those good bacteria that are living in the soil that are actually good for your body. Okay, so that’s the six clean mind practices. Now I have something new to share with you.

Something that I have only shared with the people that were at my holistic skincare leadership training. And this is something that it was a guided imagery visualization exercise that just came to me that just popped into my mind while I was doing the event the night before, the last day of the event was getting ready to go to bed and this image came to me. And so I turned it into a guided imagery and visualization exercise. So I want to share this with you. And it’s, it’s, I think it could be a very powerful tool. Now, if you are driving, if you’re busy or really right in the middle of something, I want you to pause the, um, this audio or the video and do this when you have time to do it in a quiet space. Because the key with this one is that you actually do it as I’m walking you through it.

So what you’ll be doing is you’ll be visualizing. You’ll be on this journey with me as I’m walking you through it. So take some time to do what you need to do to prepare to do this. Because what you’ll want to be doing is the UN, a quiet place without distractions. It, it’s not going to take long, but I want you to be able to go on this journey with me, so when you’re ready, I want you to sit in a comfortable position and close your eyes. Start by taking a few deep breaths and take a few deep breaths. Really feel your presence in your body to feel that you’re in your body with your eyes closed, feeling your body relaxed, and as you take these deep breaths, imagine that you’re on a train and this train is going up a mountain and it’s winding up and around the mountain. As you’re going up on this train, you know you’re on an important trip. Going somewhere that you know is both exciting and that you’re curious about. You see the train winding around the mountain going up higher and higher on the mountain and you know that you’re safe and there’s no harm.

You can hear the sounds of the train as it’s clicking along the tracks. You pass by trees and rivers flowing and wild flowers that you can see. There’s even a window open on the train and with the window open you feel the breeze against your face feels refreshing and cool, and as you feel that breeze, you catch some of the sense of nature. You can smell the earth wild flowers and the sense of the pine trees. Now as you walk through the train, you notice that there are people there again. You feel safe, you feel secure, you feel happy. As you’re walking along, you see that there are cabins and you stop to go into one of the cabins of the train you feel called to open the door and go in. When you go into the cabin, you sit down and you look beside you and you see someone who looks familiar and friendly and wise. You see this person clearly. They smile and hand you a gift. This person that’s handing you the gift, it may be someone you already know or it may just feel familiar, but it feels warm and helpful and this gift is something important.

When they hand you the gift, you open it and you find something inside for you. Inside that gift is a message. There’s a message that something specific for you and as you have received that gift, as you open it up, you may hear words expressed. You may hear that person sharing a message verbally with you. You can also ask the person for a meaning behind the gift. There may even be a note inside, so take some time to look at this, to look at the gift, enjoy the message, the gift and all that it contains. After you’ve had some time to enjoy this gift, take a moment to think your wise friend and asked for any parting messages, anything that they want to say before you go, any parting messages and as you think your friend and you say your goodbyes at this point, you realize that the train you’re on, we’ll keep going and you can choose to stay along for the ride or you can get off at the next stop. Either way you get to take this gift with you.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed this visualization exercise. I hope you’ve enjoyed the clean mind practices and you’re able to incorporate some of these on your daily and your daily lifestyle and your daily practices. It’s all part of the clean skin from within approach. To find out more about clean skin from within or to get your copy of clean skin from within. You can go to the spa Dr. com slash freebook. There you can find a way to get my book for free. Just pay the shipping and handling to get the book to you there. You’ll find the clean mind practices. You won’t find this last visualization exercise that I just walked you through, but you could always refer back to it by coming back to this podcast and listening to it. Again, thank you for joining me today and I invite you to join the spa doctor community. If you haven’t already, you can go to the SPA Dr. Com and join the community there. You could also join us on social media, on facebook, twitter, instagram, pinterest, Youtube, and join the conversation and the holistic skin term movement. I’ll see you. If you haven’t already taken the skin quiz. We can go to these skin quiz.com, find out what messages your skin may be trying to tell you about your health and what you can do about it, and I’ll see you next time on the spot. Dr. podcasts.