Does sleep affect my beard growth and health?
The short answer is yes. Sleep has an impact on the health and growth of your beard.
Here are 3 ways that sleep affects your beard:
#1 – Testosterone:
Not getting good sleep will negatively affect your testosterone. In a 2004 study in order to increase testosterone (testosterone being an essential foundation for beard health and growth) is sleep dependent. They found that a minimum of 3 hours of slow wave sleep was required to see an increase of testosterone. However that is the minimum, we learn from a 2003 study as men age the amount of testosterone production decreases. So while 3 hours is the floor – you are likely older thus needing more sleep in order to see an increase in testosterone production.
#2 – Growth:
A 1987 study had a group of men stay awake for 48 hours straight. Prior to the 2 days of no sleep they measured the amount of growth their facial hair saw so that way they had a measurement for what was normal. After the 48 hours of no sleep they measured the growth and saw that due to what they perceived as lack of sleep caused a 19% reduction in growth. Not ideal for someone that is looking to grow out their facial hair.
#3 – Stress/Anxiety:
When we are stressed or have heightened anxiety that will cause a disruption to our healthy sleep patterns by keeping you awake, causing you to wake up prematurely or causing a restless night sleep. When that happens your body begins to release more of the cortisol hormone, also known as the stress hormone. Cortisol when released will cause a lack of testosterone to be produced which we learned at the beginning of the article is a foundational need for beard health and growth.
So now that we know 3 ways lack of sleep can negatively affect our luscious facial fur, what can we do to have improved sleep
Here are 4 suggestions:
#1 – Develop a healthy bed time/wake up routine.
- When you have a standard time you go to sleep and wake up your bodies internal clock doesn’t get out of whack causing internal stress, which as we learned in item #3 will negatively affect our body’s testosterone production.
#2 – Remove distractions from your room
- Distractions such as light on our cell phone or the chime of a notification and the glow of the TV can interrupt our sleep cycles by not allowing us to fall asleep or waking you in the night.
#3 – Help ease anxiety and stress
- If you are like me, then some of your final thoughts before bed is what you have going on tomorrow. Take a moment before bed to write down your tomorrow’s “To-do” list in order to remove the worry about forgetting something from your mind. In addition you can create a thought journal. A thought journal is a simple way for you to brain dump all the things you are thinking about onto a piece of paper and get it out of your mind.
#4 – Use aromatherapy to help stress management
- Our senses can play a very important part in our sleep. By introducing scents that help relax and destress your nerves will help your body relax. And a relaxed body is a good resting body.
We created a scent directly around the belief in aromatherapy:
We united the essential oil scents of lavender and bergamot which are known in the aromatherapy world to help relieve stress with the nerve relaxing scent of peppermint to create Unwind. A night time/stress relieving scent in both our beard oils and beard butters that is beneficial for:
- Reducing stress and anxiety
- Feeding your beard with necessary ingredients to hydrate, strengthen and soften your beard.
Add our Unwind scent to your bedtime routine:
Unwind Beard Oil: https://affectbeard.com/product/unwind-beard-oil/
Unwind Beard Butter: https://affectbeard.com/product/unwind-beard-butter/
