Blog

The Importance of Getting Your Beauty Sleep

26 January 2016

You yawn your way out of bed in the morning, blurry-eyed, often looking and feeling more exhausted than before you hit the hay the night before.

The CDC calls it sleep insufficiency and you’re not alone. Approximately 60 percent of adults don’t get enough shuteye at least a few nights a week, or more, and the personal costs are high.

Tired of Looking Tired

According to Six Things Your Skin Is Doing When You’re Sleeping, when we don't get enough sleep we experience more stress, more collagen and elastin breakdown, skin dullness, dryness and wrinkles, hollowness under the eyes, and even weight gain.

Snoozing soundly for seven to nine hours a night allows for much-needed repairs on the cellular level by boosting collagen and human growth hormone production. Beauty sleep benefits include:

Fewer Wrinkles: Skin makes new collagen when you sleep, which prevents sagging. That’s part of the repair process. More collagen means skin is plumper and less likely to wrinkle.
Healthy Glow: Your body boosts blood flow to the skin while you snooze, which means you wake to a healthy glow. Skimp on sleep and your complexion can look drab, ashen, or lifeless.
Less Puffy Eyes: Get enough shut-eye and stay well-hydrated and you'll have less puffiness under your eyes.

How To Get A Good Night’s Sleep

Creating nightly relaxation rituals is just one of the many helpful tips for getting a good night’s sleep you’ll find at Get In (Circadian) Rhythm and Sleep Well. And, as fitness and sleep hacking guru Ben Greenfield warns, be careful of lights and sounds in your bedroom that may interfere with the soundness of your sleep.

But Watch Out for Sleep Wrinkles

Even while you slumber peacefully, your pillow can be your skin’s enemy. As we warned in Seven Surprising Things That Are Wrecking Your Skin, persistently pressing your face into a pillow can cause sleep wrinkles – permanent creases for which wrinkle creams and derma-fillers are ineffective. The good news is you can avoid getting sleep wrinkles by using a supportive anti-wrinkle pillow that provides comfortable back sleeping and side sleeping and prevents facial contact. Check out who’s calling JuveRest the pillow helps maintain a youthful appearance.

Look Well Rested With These Beauty Tricks

Even when a full night’s sleep eludes you, you can restore your glow with these skin care tips from sheknows.com.

Eye cream. Use a peptide-containing eye cream with light-diffusing ingredients to mask dark circles, the hallmark of lack of sleep.
Exfoliate. Dead skin tends to make the complexion look dull, gray and tired. Use a daily sonic cleansing system, exfoliating pads with glycolic or salicylic acid or a facial mask.
Cold water. Splashing very cold water on your face in the morning will help reduce the puffiness that has accumulated overnight.
Lack of sleep literally causes skin to be drier. A gentle, rich moisturizer will soak into the outer layers of your skin and plump up the cells so you won't look as dry and wrinkly.

If You Still Need It - One More Reason To Get More Sleep

Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, once fainted from exhaustion. Hitting her head on her desk, she broke her cheekbone and needed five stitches on her right eye. It was then that Huffington began her journey of rediscovering the value of sleep. “And I'm here to tell you that the way to a more productive, more inspired, more joyful life is getting enough sleep, she said in the TED Talk How To Succeed? Get More Sleep. “So I urge you to shut your eyes and discover the great ideas that lie inside us, to shut your engines and discover the power of sleep.”