The Brain-Skin Doctor

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Our skin and our brain are very much connected (by a little under three million nerve endings, amongst other channels of communication), and that communication is a two-way street.

  • The state of our brain health, and indeed our mental health, can have a big impact on our skin—and vice versa.

  • Today’s main feature looks into these things and more!

• Today’s sponsor Hims is offering well-evidenced hair-loss remedies, with minoxidil and finasteride as active ingredients. Check them out!

  • There are, by the way, interesting pros and cons to different methods of combatting hair loss. We’re going to do a main feature on those tomorrow, but please do check out Hims meanwhile, as our sponsors really are what keep 10almonds free! Many thanks :)

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

🤫 A WORD TO THE WISE

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

Exercises For Aging Ankles

Liv (of LivInLeggings fame) is here with ankle mobility tests, and exercises to reverse ankle deterioration:

You’ll notice that we’re now hosting these videos on our website, so that we can have room to provide a bit more context. Watch and enjoy!

YOU MAY HAVE MISSED…

• The 7 Approaches To Pain Management

• What To Leave Off Your Table (To Stay Off This Surgeon’s)

• Managing Sibling Relationships In Adult Life

🧠 MAIN FEATURE

Of Brains And Breakouts

This is Dr. Claudia Aguirre. She’s a molecular neuroscientist, and today she’s going to be educating us about skin.

What? Why?

When we say “neuroscience”, we generally think of the brain. And indeed, that’s a very important part of it.

We might think about eyes, which are basically an extension of the brain.

We don’t usually think about skin, which (just like our eyes) is constantly feeding us a lot of information about our surroundings, via a little under three million nerve endings. Guess where the other ends of those nerves lead!

There’s a constant two-way communication going on between our brain and our skin.

What does she want us to know?

Psychodermatology

The brain and the skin talk to each other, and maladies of one can impact the other:

• Directly, e.g. stress prompting skin breakouts (actually this is a several-step process physiologically, but for the sake of brevity we’ll call this direct)

• Indirectly, e.g. nervous disorders that result in people scratching or picking at their skin, which prompts a whole vicious cycle of one thing making the other worse

Read more: Psychodermatology: The Brain-Skin Connection

To address both kinds of problems, clearly something beyond moisturizer is needed!

Mindfulness (meditation and beyond)

Mindfulness is a well-evidenced healthful practice for many reasons, and Dr. Aguirra argues the case for it being good for our skin too.

As she points out,

So, she recommends mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), for the above reasons, along with others!

Read more: Mind Matters

How to do it: No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness

And as for “and beyond?”

Do you remember in the beginning of the pandemic, when people were briefly much more consciously trying to avoid touching their faces so much? That, too, is mindfulness. It may have been a stressed and anxious mindfulness for many*, but mindfulness nonetheless.

*which is why “mindfulness-based stress reduction” is not a redundant tautology repeated more than once unnecessarily, one time after another ;)

So: do try to keep aware of what you are doing to your skin, and so far as is reasonably practicable, only do the things that are good for it!

The skin as an endocrine organ

Nerves are not the only messengers in the body; hormones do a lot of our body’s internal communication too. And not just the ones everyone remembers are hormones (e.g. estrogen, testosterone, although yes, they do both have a big impact on skin too), but also many more, including some made in the skin itself!

Dr. Aguirra gives us a rundown of common conditions, the hormones behind them, and what we can do if we don’t want them:

Read more: Rethinking The Skin As An Endocrine Organ

Take-away advice:

For healthy skin, we need to do more than just hydrate, get good sleep, have good nutrition, and get a little sun (but not too much).

• We should also practice mindfulness-based stress reduction, and seek help for more serious mental health issues.

• We should also remember the part our hormones play in our skin, and not just the obvious ones.

Did you know that vitamin D is also a hormone, by the way? It’s not the only hormone at play in your skin by a long way, but it is an important one:

Society for Endocrinology | Vitamin D

Want to know more?

You might like this interview with Dr. Aguirre:

The Brain in Our Skin: An Interview with Dr. Claudia Aguirre

Take care!

YOU MAY HAVE MISSED…

• HRT: Bioidentical vs Animal

• Exercise Less, Move More

• Dr. Greger’s Anti-Aging Eight

❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

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Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

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📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Felt Time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time – by Dr. Marc Wittmann

This book goes far beyond the obvious “time flies when you’re having fun / passes slowly when bored”, or “time seems quicker as we get older”. It does address those topics too, but even in doing so, unravels deeper intricacies within.

The author, a research psychologist, includes plenty of reference to actual hard science here, and even beyond subjective self-reports. For example, you know how time seems to slow down upon immediate apparent threat of violent death (e.g. while crashing, while falling, or other more “violent human” options)? We learn of an experiment conducted in an amusement park, where during a fear-inducing (but actually safe) plummet, subjective time slows down yes, but measures of objective perception and cognition remained the same. So much for adrenal superpowers when it comes to the brain!

We also learn about what we can change, to change our perception of time—in either direction, which is a neat collection of tricks to know.

The style is on the dryer end of pop-sci; we suspect that being translated from German didn’t help its levity. That said, it’s not scientifically dense either (i.e. not a lot of jargon), though it does have many references (which we like to see).

Bottom line: if you’ve ever wished time could go more quickly or more slowly, this book can help with that.

Click here to check out Felt Time, and make yours count!

May today and every day give you good reason to love the skin you’re in,

The 10almonds Team