To help you manage your stress, we’ll provide a few tips – stress busters. By engaging in specific activities that promote a stress-free life, you will be doing your share to keep acne away.

• Spend some alone to meditate or practice yoga – we can’t say enough about the benefits gained from regular meditation. Even 10 minutes a day will have a profound effect on our sense of well being. By learning to relax, we tend to fret less over our acne and instead focus on our treatment and the positive ways we can get rid of it. Discipline yourself to think that acne is a temporary phase and can be controlled with a healthy lifestyle. Some helpful exercises are neck stretches (tilt your head from left to right, and then forwards and backwards as you sit quietly) and forward stretches (stretch your body forward with your arms as far as you comfortably can. Hold that position for 30 seconds, close your eyes, and resume normal sitting position. Repeat).

• Build up on your sleep bank! - Sleep deprivation is not only bad for your overall health but also for your skin. Sleep tips include going to bed at the same hour consistently,treating your bedroom as a sacred place to sleep and rest, and not as a work center or entertainment hub.

• An hour before going to bed, do not undertake activities or carry on conversations that may provoke additional stress. Instead sit quietly with soothing music or a feel-good book.

• Make your bedroom as comfortable as possible. Having an air purifier also makes sense. If your sheets need to be changed more frequently because of medication you apply on your skin, do so. Clean sheets not only give you a warm comfy feeling, they make for better hygiene.

• Many people suffer from insomnia. If you are experiencing a bout of insomnia, do not toss or turn (or count sheep). Get up and do something that will occupy your attention. When you eventually feel tired, go back to bed.

It has been said that efficient stress management is a rare gift, although people are now making sure that they are at least informed of the many ways they can combat stress. We’ll offer the old-fashioned advice: reach out to people! Scientific studies have proven that people with good support systems (family, friends, community, school) are better equipped to deal with everyday stress. When you give and receive love for example, and make a habit of it, you feel tiny amounts of joy. Gradually, those tiny amounts become larger until the essence of joy itself becomes habit-forming.

It is impractical advice to say, "eliminate stress from your life" because stress IS part of life. No being on the planet is spared from stress. The best approach is to accept it. Once we accept it, we can manage it better. The first sign of acceptance is to view it as a positive force – a force "…stress has a whole raft of negative impacts on the body. In fact, it has been found to be a significant factor not only in all the diseases mentioned previously but also in the development of depression. And, amid all of these problems, as if they were not serious enough, stress also aggravates acne." (Dr. Terry J. Dubrow, 2003) that motivates us to action. By viewing it as a negative, we are immobilized and hence, helpless.

Take a piece of paper and divide it into three columns: the left column is for the hours of the day you are awake – include the hours you are unable to sleep), the middle column is for a description of the origin of your stress (examples would be: argument with mom, got a grade of C for my power point presentation, was short changed at the store, etc). The third column is for you to describe what kind of negative physical or emotional effects you felt from that stress event (e.g. headache, heavy perspiring, palpitations, tight muscles, etc). If you don’t have any major physical or emotional discomfort, leave the column blank.

Prepare a new sheet for each day. Dr. Dubrow says that over a few weeks, you will see two patterns recurring: one is that of repeating stressful behaviours and the second is a revelation of which stressful events are followed by negative reactions. Her point is that there will be certain events that you truly cannot avoid like holding training sessions in your office or visiting an aging parent in the facility. You can manage this type of stress by thinking that these activities are good for your professional career and giving you the chance to be with a loved one whenever you can. In your tension diary, you will also notice certain events that you CAN control and create a solution for. For instance, if you were late for the train, you could re-set your alarm clock to get up 10 minutes earlier.

The tension diary suggested by Dr. Dubrow serves a useful purpose. This way, by jotting everything down related to your personal stress, you can detect a pattern and you’ll have something to work with. It is pointless to go around feeling sorry for yourself and repeating to friends and family that "I’m stressed out" or "I can’t deal with stress anymore." With a tension diary, you’ll find the proof in the pudding. Speak to your dermatologist. He or she will not only help you with your acne, but will also share bits of wisdom about the "other" factors related to acne and how you can stay on top of things.