Naturopathic Beauty's Clear Skin Sessions
Clear skin and aging beautifully conversations, trainings and challenges by Dr. Stacey Shillington ND.
Naturopathic Beauty's Clear Skin Sessions
Breaking the Skin-Picking Cycle: Achieving Clear Skin Through Self-Awareness and Healing with Dr. Stacey Shillington ND
Can overcoming the urge to pick at your skin truly transform your battle with acne? Join Dr. Stacey Shillington in this enlightening episode of Naturopathic Beauty's Clear Skin Sessions as she blends personal anecdotes with professional insights to tackle the phenomenon of dermatillomania. This episode sheds light on the intricate relationship between anxiety, serotonin levels, and the compulsive behavior of skin picking. Dr. Shillington offers a compassionate, step-by-step guide to breaking free from this damaging cycle, providing listeners with a practical workbook filled with journal prompts to aid in self-reflection and awareness.
Empower your journey towards clear skin with actionable strategies from self-affirmation techniques to balancing blood sugar levels to manage anxiety effectively. Dr. Shillington's holistic approach includes removing tools that facilitate skin picking and reinforcing positive behaviors through consistent self-check-ins. Tune in to learn about her free clear skin masterclass and the comprehensive Clear Skin Program designed to support you every step of the way. This episode is not just about treating acne; it’s about fostering self-belief and healing from within.
Check out my new FREE Training: Clear Skin Mastery, where I share the different types of acne and how to treat each one. Click here to watch it now.
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Welcome to Naturopathic Beauty's Clear Skin Sessions, where we heal your acne from the inside out. Hello, beauties, and welcome to Naturopathic Beauty's Clear Skin Sessions. I'm Dr Stacey Shillington. I'm a naturopathic doctor. For the last 18 years, I've been helping women heal their acne from the inside out, and this podcast is for you. It's to help you on your clear skin journey. Because I've worked with so many women over the years, I have a vast amount of experience and knowledge and I want to share it with you because I understand how traumatic acne can be and the bottom line is you actually don't have to live with acne.
Speaker 1:I've been doing this for many years. I understand the root causes of acne. I understand how to heal acne and, no matter how deep and bad you feel your acne is, how many things you've tried to solve it, if you give your body the tools it needs to balance itself, you can absolutely solve your acne. There are no exceptions as far as I'm concerned. So this podcast is all about skin picking. I don't know if you're a skin picker or not, but if you are, it is one of the things that is holding you back from clearing your skin, and stopping skin picking is difficult. It's very rare that somebody wakes up in the morning and says I'm never going to pick my skin again and they never do. This is because it's a complex behavior, and in this podcast, I'm going to teach you how to overcome this complex behavior so you can stop your skin picking. Because when you pick your skin, you're spreading bacteria, you're increasing inflammation and that makes conquering acne incredibly difficult.
Speaker 1:So I'm a former skin picker myself and I remember those skin picking sessions when I would go into the bathroom I'd look at my skin in the mirror and I'd be like, okay, I'm not really digging my skin right now and I start picking it. And by the time I'm finished I would look in the mirror again and it would be 10 times more inflamed, 10 times redder, and it would be far more painful than when I started, and I would immediately sink into feelings of guilt, feelings of shame. I would think how could I do this to myself? I'm so stupid, like, this is the stupidest thing ever, and I would just feel even worse about myself than when I started, which sometimes I didn't think it was possible, but it was possible. So skin picking is not pleasant and it's a form of self-sabotage that we really have to overcome and we have to understand it before we can stop it. Because, as I said, if you want to heal your acne quickly, you cannot pick your acne.
Speaker 1:Skin picking makes acne worse. It's the ultimate form of self-sabotage and it makes us feel worse about ourselves than we already do, because it triggers feelings of shame, frustration and self-loathing. And so why do we do this to ourselves? Why are we actually hurting ourselves more than necessary? So let's talk about what skin picking is first.
Speaker 1:It's an expression of anxiety. It actually has its own name, it's called dermatillomania, and it's not a huge surprise that skin picking is a manifestation of anxiety, because acne patients have higher levels of anxiety and higher levels of depression than the general population, and this has been shown in research. And when we have a lot of anxiety, we actually have reduced levels of serotonin, and this is a neurotransmitter that's made in the gut and in the brain and it's responsible for us feeling happy and calm. Acne and lower serotonin levels go hand in hand, likely because there's typically a lot of gut issues and acne, but there's also a lot of nervous system issues when acne is present as well. But the good news is that skin picking can be overcome. Therapies that are used to deal with anxiety tend to be very effective for skin picking, and I'm going to share the step-by-step strategy that I help my patients go through when they're skin pickers. And this step-by-step strategy works. It will help you overcome your skin picking if you actually go through the steps, and in the show notes there's a link to a workbook. You can download it, and in the workbook I go through the steps to stop skin picking and there's journal prompts and you can use this as your tool to overcome skin picking.
Speaker 1:Okay, so this is something that I think is very interesting. I've learned this and understood it more and more over the years. But we actually become addicted to our thoughts, our feelings and the resulting behaviors, and I think that this is what happens to us when we're chronic skin pickers we actually become addicted to it. We become addicted to things that we do not want to experience in our lives, and it works this way. So when you have a thought, these thoughts trigger chemicals and these chemicals trigger feelings in our body. The more we think certain thoughts, the more we experience certain feelings, and these feelings actually trigger corresponding thoughts. So what happens is we get caught up in a vicious cycle of thinking and feeling and we become addicted within this cycle, and these are thoughts and behaviors and feelings we don't necessarily even want, but we're addicted to them. So we keep feeling and thinking a certain way, just because our bodies are addicted to these chemicals. So we need to break this cycle and that's what my steps are going to help you do.
Speaker 1:And this is why change is so hard, because there's actually an addiction that we have to overcome and there's neural pathways that we have to rewire. And it takes time, and that's okay, you know. It's okay because it's part of our journey. It's part of our growth, and growth doesn't happen overnight. It's actually a process and this is our journey. So let's jump into our journey and let's take this step by step. Let's break it down. So the first step in overcoming skin picking is simply awareness. I want you to step into awareness without shaming and without judging. Instead, I want you to adopt curiosity. Let curiosity be the overriding emotion and behavior that you're experiencing as we're diving into this skin picking journey. It's the only way to solve skin picking. We have to become aware of the behavior, we have to understand it first, and then we can shift the different things that contribute to it.
Speaker 1:So if you have a journal, I think this is a great place to record your skin picking behavior. Is there a time that you usually pick your skin? Write it down. Maybe it's after work, or maybe it's after school. Maybe it's just before bed. Is there a place that you usually pick your skin? Is it in front of the bathroom mirror? Maybe it's a magnifying mirror in front of a really bright window where you see every single thing on your face. Just write these things down. Journal the behaviors and the most important things that I want you to think about. What are you thinking just before you pick your skin and while you pick your skin? And what are you feeling just before you pick your skin and while you pick your skin. Write these things down and if you have another skin picking session in the future, I don't want you to feel bad about it. Instead, I want you to journal about it. I want you to use that experience as a really insightful, insightful thing that's going to help you develop even more tools and more insights into your behavior.
Speaker 1:Okay, step two is acceptance. We are just going to accept that you pick your skin. That's it, and you know, let's be curious. We're not shaming ourselves, we're not judging ourselves, because that's not loving, and this is a really great opportunity for us to learn how to cultivate self-love. You know, cultivating self-love is such an important part of the Clear Skin journey and it's situations like this that teach us to cultivate it. Self-love isn't something we just all of a sudden wake up with in the morning. It's something that we have to learn, and if you're a skin picker, this is a great opportunity to learn self-love, because you are not going to shame, you're not going to judge, you're going to be curious. What a gift to have this opportunity to learn curiosity, and trying to forcefully stop yourself from picking your skin isn't going to work. We need to understand and accept thoughts and feelings that surround this behavior and, of course, never let another skin picking session derail you. Use it as an opportunity to be curious and gain more insight.
Speaker 1:Okay, step three we are going to do a deep dive into identifying your thoughts and feelings surrounding skin picking, and this is based on the journaling exercise we discussed in step one. So you've written down your thoughts and your feelings. Now we're going to deeply identify them and we are going to counteract each thought and feeling with a love note. And then you're going to take these love notes and you're going to place them wherever you tend to pick your skin, whether it's your bathroom mirror, whether it's your magnifying mirror, maybe it's in front of a window, maybe it's in your car. You're going to write your love notes on sticky notes and place them where you can see them.
Speaker 1:So let's go through an example. Let's say you tend to pick your skin after you get home from work or school and you feel as though you are the only person in the world that has to deal with acne and you think that everyone else has perfect skin except for you. So you may write a love note that says you were brave and beautiful. Today, many people deal with acne and your skin is getting better each day. I love you. And then you're going to put this note wherever you tend to pick your skin so you can see it before you start this behavior, and you are going to write yourself as many notes as necessary, and you may change your notes as you come to understand your thoughts and your feelings more and more. You may be able to write notes that are more targeted to counteract those thoughts and feelings, because the thing is, the brain is going to keep coming back to old thoughts, feelings and behaviors until we're able to rewire those neural networks, and you have to keep writing these love notes and keep identifying these thoughts and feelings that are triggering this behavior until we rewire those neural networks. This means this has to be a daily ritual that is going to be practiced until we overcome the wiring in your brain, and you can absolutely do this.
Speaker 1:I want you to understand how powerful you are, how you can actually change the way your brain thinks. You can change your behaviors. You can heal your body. You are so very powerful, and the steps that we're talking about today are steps that you can apply to any situation in your life that no longer serves you. I can't emphasize this enough. You are incredibly powerful. Often we just don't know our own power, and it's not until we've gone through a process such as this that we understand how we can really shift and direct our lives.
Speaker 1:All right, step four we're preparing the location where you normally pick your skin, so you know where that is. We are going to remove magnifying mirrors, throw out blackhead removers or any other tools you use to pick your skin. You're just going to get rid of them. I swear, getting rid of my magnifying mirror is probably one of the best things I've ever done to help me feel better about my skin. Magnifying mirrors I swear. They are not our friend.
Speaker 1:When we have acne and when we're feeling bad about our skin already, you're also going to take any tissues or cleaners or anything else you use to pick your skin and you're going to store it in a location other than the place where you pick your skin. This is because, if you're tempted to store it in a location other than the place where you pick your skin, this is because, if you're tempted to pick your skin, you are going to have to go and retrieve these items. And during that time, when you're actually going to retrieve the items, you are going to have to think about what you're going to do. You're going to have to think about that sticky note that you just saw on the mirror or wherever it is, and you're going to take that opportunity to shift that thought or that feeling, because I'm going to teach you a technique in just one moment to do that, but it gives you time to shift your thoughts, feelings and behaviors and if there's any other ways that you can think of to make skin picking less convenient. Be sure to implement these strategies. Get creative about this. I mean, there's a lot of ways just to make skin picking highly inconvenient, so do whatever you think will work.
Speaker 1:Okay, step five we are going to check in with ourselves around the time that you normally pick your skin. So we've already identified the time of the day that you tend to pick your skin. It might be before a meal, before bed, after work or school. You're going to set an alarm on your phone just prior to these times and do a quick self check-in. So what does this look like? You're going to ask yourself how am I feeling right now? And if you're not feeling great, maybe you're feeling like you're the only person in the world with acne and you're feeling unlovable and you're feeling unattractive. Then you're going to have to ask yourself what do I need to do right now to feel good? And you have to have some activities in your back pocket that you know you can turn to to help you shift your energy.
Speaker 1:It doesn't need to take a long time. It can be very, very simple, but it has to be something that you know shifts your energy. Maybe it's going outside in nature, for a walk or just, you know, for a few moments to ground yourself. Maybe it's having a healthy snack or making yourself a cup of tea. Maybe it's calling a good friend or somebody that makes you feel wonderful, having a healthy snack or making yourself a cup of tea. Maybe it's calling a good friend or somebody that makes you feel wonderful, having a shower, playing with your pet, maybe even putting on a really great song and dancing around the house. Whatever it takes to make you feel good. I want you to just jump into that behavior, and the other thing that you can do is a gratitude practice, and I'm going to. You can do is a gratitude practice, and I'm going to talk about that more in one second, but this is something that will absolutely shift your energy and make you feel amazing.
Speaker 1:Okay, step six you want to make sure your blood sugar is balanced, and when I came upon this piece of research quite a few years ago, I was surprised. I knew that insulin dysregulation and acne were connected, but I did not know that insulin resistance and skin picking were connected. But it turns out that when your blood glucose and when your insulin are dysregulated, this means serotonin levels are dysregulated and this leads to more anxiety. And if skin picking is the way that you express anxiety, it's going to lead to skin picking. So when we regulate insulin levels, this regulates our serotonin levels. This reduces anxiety and prevents skin picking. So be sure you're not hungry. Be sure you're eating balanced meals three times a day. Don't overload on carbohydrates and sugar, because those foods are going to spike and dysregulate insulin. Be very mindful of how you eat and as part of my Clear Skin program, we really emphasize this and we give you so many tools, tips and tricks to help you balance your blood sugar and insulin levels.
Speaker 1:Okay, step seven let's talk about practicing gratitude. So practicing gratitude is an effective way to deal with stress and it's the perfect practice if you feel the urge to pick. It's incredibly simple. It's very effective when you start to feel gratitude. Gratitude is actually the highest vibrational frequency emotion in the world. If you can feel gratitude, there's no way in the world that you will feel like skin picking. Research has shown that if you simply write down three things that you're grateful for and do this for 21 consecutive days, you are going to have reduced anxiety and increased feelings of happiness and well-being. It takes moments to think of three things that you're grateful for, but the thing is, you can't just think about them, you have to feel them as well. So if you're grateful for a person that you love in your life, you have to feel that gratitude. If you're grateful for a pet, you have to feel it. If you're grateful for your home or anything in the world, feel that gratitude, and that is going to shift you out of an energetic vibration that can predispose you to skin picking. Okay, so those are my seven steps to help you overcome the skin picking behavior.
Speaker 1:A few things to remember. Number one skin picking must be understood before it can be stopped. Don't feel frustrated if you've said to yourself a million times I'm going to stop skin picking, but then, lo and behold, a few hours or a few days later, you're right back at it. That's completely natural, because we have to understand the behavior and take steps to counteract the behavior on a neurological level for it to really be effective. Number two do not shame yourself when you skin pick. Instead, use it as an opportunity to cultivate self-love and to understand more about the triggers and behaviors.
Speaker 1:Embrace curiosity. If you can embrace curiosity more in your life and shaming less, it's going to shift everything radically. It's going to help you love yourself more, and isn't that what we're all trying to do? I really truly believe that the clear skin journey part of the reason why we're experiencing it is to learn how to love ourselves. So this is such a great opportunity. And number three be prepared. Check in with yourself. Leave yourself love notes. Have replacement activities in place if you're feeling negatively. Throw out your magnifying mirrors. Eat well, practice gratitude. These are such great practices to put into place. I really hope that this session has helped you.
Speaker 1:You can download my skin picking workbook. The link is in the show notes and this workbook is going to take you through these steps, one at a time. There's journaling prompts. You can use this as your guide to stop skin picking. So download it, use it, overcome this behavior. You are so powerful. You can create your own reality. You can shift your thoughts and your feelings and behaviors. You can shift your life, your feelings and behaviors. You can shift your life. It's really exciting work.
Speaker 1:So I want you to do this, love it, and I want you to see the fruits of your labor. First and foremost, prove to yourself that you can do this. And if you want to get more tips and tricks to heal your acne, watch my free clear skin masterclass, where I share my four pillars of clear skin with you, and, if you're ready to start your clear skin journey, check out my Clear Skin Program. It's a group program. I've tried to make it as affordable as possible for everybody. There's tons of support. I share all my strategies with you. I don't leave anything out, so the link to everything is in my show notes. I'm so grateful for you for listening to this podcast, sending you all my love and all my healing energy, and I will see you in the next podcast.