3 ways sleep affects your beard growth and health
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/
