Rosacea, Stress and Mental Health - Part 1 - Rosy JulieBC_en (auto-generated)
[Music] [Applause] [Music] hi Rosie friends its Julie I'm back and I'm making videos again and I couldn't be happier I have missed this so much I have been working on the third book for my novel series and it's out on Halloween so it is really French time right now and I have been really busy but it's a good busy so it's been worth it but it has meant that I have not made a video in quite some time thank you very much for sticking with me and for your patience that's it it has had me thinking about a topic that I've wanted to discuss for some time now it's one that I haven't really known how I want to approach it I've kind of been having a hard time getting my mind around it so to speak as you can see from the video title I am finally covering the topic of rosacea stress and mental health and when I say mental health I mean all sorts of different kinds of issues not just the ones that I currently experience there is a huge amount to unpack here so I thought instead of trying to make one unbelievably long and horribly inadequate video I would try and break it down into a multi-part series I'm thinking it's probably gonna be three parts long at the moment but I am going to ask for your help here if you have any subjects in terms of rosacea and mental health rosacea and stress anxiety depression any of that kind of thing I would love it if you would leave a comment I will see what I can do if I know anything about it or have experienced it myself then I will be happy to talk about it that said I do think that it's really important to point out here that I am not a doctor I'm not a counselor I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist or any of those things when I mean talk about it I just mean as a discussion in terms of what I know what I've experienced and what I've read about on various sites that I trust like rosacea or the National rosacea Society and the Mayo Clinic and and other really well reputed sites in addition to actual studies that I've read too because I like to read medical studies because who doesn't like that well that being said I'm not here to diagnose you I'm not here to give you recommendations as to what you should do if you think that you have rosacea or that you know that you have rosacea or you think or know that you have some sort of mental health or physical health issue and you are looking for diagnoses or advice I really strongly recommend that you speak with a doctor they are the ones who can actually help you out I'm just a patient myself just like you I may look up a lot of stuff and ask a lot of questions to various experts and doctors and things but that does not make me an expert myself for this first video what I'm going to talk about is basically sharing a little bit of my own experience and a few basics in terms of some of the concepts that I'm gonna be discussing things like that I just want to get into why I'm interested in this particular subject and how it affects me and then we can expand on it in parts two and three in terms of how it kind of affects all of us who have rosacea and who are affected by things like stress and anxiety as a trigger and as a symptom of our condition okay so to get started I wanted to actually talk about stress itself and what I'm going to mean by stress because stress can come in good and bad forms not all stress is bad some stress is actually necessary and is healthy that said a lot of kinds of stress good and bad can affect our rosacea so I thought I would actually discuss stress as a concept at its very most basic level just so that we'd know when we're talking about stress in later videos what I'm actually referring to so the first kind of stress is the most basic ground-level kind of stress and that would be the type where you feel that you are in immediate usually physical danger this is the stress is the one that you get from your reptilian brain it's the one that is the fight-or-flight response it is built indoor very physical very primal they're part of the original part of our brain that has ever developed and it is what gives us the ability to respond quickly and to think quickly and to be suddenly more alert and to have a physical boost so that we can either fight to save our lives or run to get away if you've ever yourself or if you've seen a video or anything like that of somebody who has almost been hit by a car and they've left right over of the hood or they've seen something happen and have suddenly had this almost superpower to lift something they wouldn't normally be able to lift then that's usually because of this response your body suddenly is flooded with adrenaline and that just pumps you full of energy so that you can give yourself the best chance at getting away and living to see another day so that is really unscientific but that is the most sort of basic level of what that one's all about so the first type of stress is just that fight-or-flight you feel you're an immediate physical danger and this is what helps you get away the next type of stress is the one where you want to perform at your very best you have a job interview you have an important presentation you are playing on a sports team and this is the game something else that is just life defining and you need to make a good impression or perform at your very best this stress is the one that can help you again to have better mental and physical capacity so that you can push through and perform at your very best interestingly this dress is actually based on that same original stress the one that you felt from in the previous kind where your life was in danger it is still the fight-or-flight response it just happens to be because you think that this particular goal is so important that you're having the same reaction it is a it is life or death that's how important this is to you so your body and your stress respond in the same way in those first two situations stress that you feel might not be comfortable you get that you know bracing heart you were breathing fast or your hands might be shaky that kind of thing but at the same time it's helpful it helps you to get away from a dangerous situation and it helps you to perform at your best in a situation that you feel it's really really important but there are also forms of stress that are not helpful and that is normally a chronic type of stress so you live a very very stressful lifestyle a job that has you on-call 24 hours and you just never know exactly how something very important is going to work out there could be you could have just received medical news that is long term that is something that you didn't want to hear it could be that you're going through a very uncomfortable transition in your life or a positive transition one that you're just really unsure about the income and you have a lot of worries that kind of thing when you have that kind of chronic stress that type of thing can be damaging because when stress is just constantly there day and night and it never goes away it doesn't give your body the chance to come down from that really excited state so it doesn't have the chance to relax and it doesn't have the chance to recover as well as it can there are a lot of processes that go on that are very very hard on the body and on the mind for that matter and finally there's kind of a positive type of stress if you want to call it that and that's the type of stress that you feel that's actually a very good but powerful sensation it's an excitement you've won a prize you got the job or the promotion you wanted you got really great news of some kind as much as those are all very very positive things they all actually create this very similar type of response in the body you know something really fantastic happens you still you get the increased heart rate you get the increased respiratory rate your hands might still shake you know if you if you learn something absolutely fantastic it still can give you that same rush if you experience stress as a trigger like I experience stress is a trigger absolutely any one of those kinds of stress can actually create a rosacea response whether good or bad whether I am upset and blushing because I've been embarrassed or I've just been scared or I've I'm going through something traumatic or I just had something really fantastic happen one of my risk first responses to have a flushed face and that could last for a few minutes or it could last for quite a long time in my case I know that things are exaggerated I do have a number of mental disorders if you have been watching my videos for a while then you know that I suffer from several different kinds of mental health condition and each of those can actually contribute to worsening my rosacea symptoms as well at the same time rosacea can also play a role in worsening my mental health conditions depending on how well my skin is doing it and how comfortable it is at a certain given time for those of you who haven't been watching my channel for a while I suffer from social anxiety disorder generalized anxiety disorder panic disorder obsessive thoughts and I am also prone to periods of depression so it's a lot of fun being me and it's a lot of fun being around me at the same time I was first diagnosed when I was 19 years old with my first condition which was social anxiety disorder as it turns out I've probably had that since my early childhood but that was the first diagnosis that I actually received and that was the first time that I started receiving any kind of treatment I hadn't even heard of social anxiety disorder before that point my sister just happened to hear a show about it on the radio and came home and told me that I sounded exactly like that and I went to see the doctor and it turned out he agreed over the years to try to manage this I have taken a lot of different kinds of medication and have tried lots of different kinds of therapies I've taken antidepressants including zoloft which was a little yellow and white capsule I've taken paxil which is this little pink eye here I have taken beta blockers which look like this and they are what I was given along I think I was given that one along with zoloft because their zoloft didn't control my racing heart and it felt like I was having a heart attack and I was fainting from that so I got those pills for that one and then later on when that wasn't enough I got these really tiny little things here and those are ativan and those are something that I would stick under my tongue wait for it to dissolve and that would clear up a panic attack these are all very old pills and I didn't even know that I had them but I discovered them the other day and I am returning those as well as some expired anti lrg pills and my old contact lenses that I don't wear anymore to the pharmacist so don't worry I am NOT hanging on to these for any disease and to get rid of them at the pharmacist properly I said I did break them out just cuz I thought it might provide a cool visual to show that yes I have been on a lot of medications to try to control all of my everything going on in my head I took these in various dosages and combinations over the years throughout the time that I was on these different medications I worked really hard to be able to try to control the symptoms on my own until I finally was ready to wean myself off of them and I do mean weaning myself off these drugs because they are highly addictive and I was definitely stuck on them when I was trying to even when I was just gradually reducing the dose according to my doctor's instructions I was getting withdrawal symptoms like electric shocks in my teeth and hand so that was not fun nor was the feeling of having like a nail pounded into the top of my head during the night so these are definitely very serious medications they definitely helped me but they should not be taken lightly I'm not taking anything now I'm feeling very proud of that I don't think that anybody who is taking these types of assistance to get through their struggles should think less of themselves I took them for nine years and I don't know how it would have gotten through that time without the added help the symptoms that I was experiencing were very very strong and I don't know how I wouldn't have ended up basically as a shut-in if I hadn't had that extra help so that would reduce my symptoms while I was learning to cope with them on my own that's it I have far from mastered doping I have improved it definitely I am still trying different things all I can do is try to be very very aware of my symptoms and to my responses to my symptoms to try to make sure that I'm always having the healthiest reaction that I can manage I still have a lot of triggers for my anxiety and especially for the panic the main ones are things like talking on the phone I do have a phone but I do not have a ringtone for the voice calls because I won't answer it anyway I'm just not quite there yet I am trying to build up to phone calls but there are about four people in the world that I'm comfortable talking on the phone with the top challenge is with invasive thoughts well I am able to leave my home and go to the store and go shopping and meet people and I even do attend events with my co-author promote my book I still know that when I do a lot of these things and I have appointments and things like that I probably won't sleep the night before and I may or may not sleep the night afterward because my thoughts are stopping me they're constantly telling me things like shouldn't have said something or I've probably offended somebody they don't like me anymore because of that and I've hurt somebody's feelings that I set a joke that just wasn't funny and now they think they don't respect me anymore I know that these thoughts are ridiculous consciously rationally I know that no single thing that I say in passing that small and light is going to be taken that seriously nobody thinks that the things that I say are that important but that doesn't seem to stop my brain at all and that stops me from sleeping insomnia goes hand-in-hand with that and then when I don't sleep both my rosacea and my invasive thoughts get worse if you want me to talk any more about any of the topics those topics my triggers my anxiety my individual conditions any of that kind of stuff I will happily do that in another video please request that in the comments but I know that I'm digressing right now from the rosacea a little bit and I'd kind of like to stay on track for the series I will be much more focused in parts two and three I'm just trying to create a foundation so you'll understand where I'm coming from though the whole point to all this is that stress and anxiety and depression and rosacea are all linked in a lot of ways fortunately they do create a kind of vicious cycle among a lot of us I know that this is how I experience it I know that I have been talking to a lot of you over email and over direct messages over to my different social media accounts and you've talked about this quite a lot about the anxiety that you feel from your rosacea and that it's making your fascia worse or the other way around that you feel anxiety and then it brings out your rosacea I feel at least in my case that it goes both ways one of them just feeds off the other and it gets worse and worse and worse and it's easy to get caught up in it this a common way for one of the cycles to start up for me is that I will have a flare-up from whatever it might be I've eaten something funny I've had something embarrassing happen and I blush and it just triggers the whole thing I went out in the Sun and didn't realize I would be out there for so long and it sets it off whatever it happens to be I end up with a flare-up that brings with it redness stinging burning itching bumps and all those fun symptoms that we tend to go through because of that I feel more stressed I'm uncomfortable I feel ugly I feel like other people can see it happening and especially because when I blush I blush when I'm embarrassed but then it doesn't go away so people think that I'm still upset even if I'm not and I blush a really easily it doesn't take a lot of embarrassment it just takes like and that's it then my face will flare up so as soon as I start to feel even the slightest bit stressed or embarrassed then I flush even more so any of those original symptoms will get worse and as those symptoms get worse I'm aware of them I'm more uncomfortable and I feel more stress and that just keeps building and then I become uncomfortable enough that I don't sleep very well at night I end up lying awake listening to my invasive thoughts the next day I'm less capable of coping with stress because I'm not well rested and I've been torturing myself for the last 10 hours or whatever however long I wasn't lying in bed trying to sleep and because of that it just gets worse my symptoms get worse my face keeps flushing it keeps being itchy and uncomfortable I feel ugly and so on and so on and so on so as you can see once you get into the cycle of bouncing your rosacea symptoms and your stress or anxiety off each other it's really difficult to crack your way out and it sounds like it should be easy it sounds like you should tell yourself to just calm down get over it it's not that bad it'll pass all of those things but when you're in it it's not that easy if you've ever been really upset about something you can't just tell yourself not to be sad anymore or not to be afraid and the same thing goes with stress you can't just say well I'm not gonna be stressed anymore and then it's gone because you can't lift just lift that away super easily get the the rosacea symptoms tend to stick around um as a side note I recently read a book called Turtles all the way down by John Green he's a fantastic author he is a fantastic youtuber I really have a lot of respect for him it's a fiction novel and the main character has absolutely nothing in common with me except that she has invasive thoughts and her invasive thoughts are nothing like my invasive thoughts but he has absolutely nailed the description on what it feels like to constantly be arguing with your brain you feel like you're actually under attack by somebody else who just happens to also be you and so if you are ever if you experience this and you'd love to read about that experience or if you know somebody else and you would like to know what they're going through he has done a fantastic job it's a really good book all by itself but he has also done a wonderful job at describing the experience of being in the head of somebody who has all of these constantly invading obsessive thoughts sidenote over whether you have a mental disorder or not stress in all of its forms can have an effect on rosacea and rosacea can have an effect on your stress so whether it's because you have an anxiety disorder you're suffering from depression or there's just stuff going on in your life that makes you feel stressed for a moment or for a day or for a few days they can all play off of each other and nothing gives me a flare-up faster then Sun is definitely my top trigger I find that way easier to control those sun exposure is way easier to control then stress and anxiety and things like that and I can feel stressed and instantly flare up for that reason a major part of the Rosi lifestyle that I've been building to try and keep my rosacea symptoms under control has to do with actually controlling my stress which is good for me anyway since I do have anxiety disorder some panic disorders we have already talked for a lot longer than I'd meant to I kind of got a few babbles there but I really did want to set a foundation to let you know sort of where I'm coming from in terms of talking about stress and rosacea art how rosacea is actually a trigger for various mental health conditions how it can cause more stress in a person's life and how it can actually increase the risk of mental health conditions I have been finding a lot of studies that I will be discussing in the next video and I will cite everything in the video description when that one comes out part three is going to be about how stress and anxiety and other mental health conditions can make rosacea symptoms worse so it's the other way around and I'm hoping to get into some coping techniques and things that have worked for me I don't know what worked for you but I'm hoping that by sharing what I'm going through it will give you something to discuss with your doctor or something to try out for yourself if you feel that it is appropriate for your condition either mentally or in terms of your rosacea because I feel that this is something that is affecting an awful of us and it hasn't been discussed enough this link which is very powerful and has been shown time and time again in research and has talked about in a lot of places that are specific to rosacea is not it's not getting out there quite as much we're talking more about foods and skincare products and the Sun and that kind of thing but our mental health isn't getting the attention that it probably should because it is affecting our lives and our rosacea symptoms for that matter so because of that I just wanted you to know that you are not the only one who is struggling with this kind of thing if you are struggling with it you are not alone and there are a lot of things that we can do to cope with our anxiety our stress and therefore a lot of the triggers that are making our rosacea symptoms worse so I hope you like this video I hope it was informative to you and helpful and entertaining in some way again if you do have any requests specific to stress and rosacea that you'd like me to cover in one of the future videos in this series then I hope you will make a comment and let me know what they are I will try to accommodate if I can if you did like this video I hope you will give me a big thumbs up that way I will know I do pay attention to the number of little thumbs ups that I get for a given video because that lets me know that that is a video that you enjoyed and that you would like to see you would like to see more of that type of thing in the future and if you do want to see more stuff like this then I hope you'll subscribe to my channel and click the little bell if you want to be notified every time I put out a new video I try to put them out every Sunday and sometimes I have one I would on Thursdays as well and everything and I will see you next time [Music] you