Is your skin going through a rough patch? Whether it’s constant breakouts or visible dryness, we’ve all been there. There are many factors that contribute to our skin’s health, but more often than anything, it’s affected by our daily habits.
It’s true- from the temperature of your shower to how much sleep you're getting, seemingly small choices add up to major impacts on your skin's strength, appearance, and radiance.
The good news? Once you understand what's working against your skin, you can start making changes that actually support it. So, here are seven surprisingly common bad skin habits that quietly undermine skin health- and what to do instead.
1. Not Getting Enough Quality Sleep
For so many common health issues that affect our minds, bodies, and, yes, even our skin, sleep should be one of the first places to investigate for a root cause. Why? Because the time spent in nightly slumber is also the skin’s regular, nightly repair window.
If you aren’t getting enough quality zzz’s, then your skin isn’t getting enough time in maintenance mode to produce collagen, repair the functional barrier, and support its healthy microbiome. A late bedtime and/or poor sleep habits can have a direct, visible impact on your natural glow.
Study after study has demonstrated this correlation between sleep and skin health. Just look at a 2015 study with 60 healthy volunteers, which found that poor sleep quality was “associated with increased signs of intrinsic ageing, diminished skin barrier function and lower satisfaction with appearance.”
If you suspect sleep is one of your main bad skin habits, it’s time to intentionally slow down your evening. Healthy sleep rituals help lay the foundation for a healthy mind, body, and skin. Over the long term, getting more sleep on a regular schedule will support your skin’s natural barrier, encourage greater collagen production, and give it plenty of time to recover from the daily onslaught of environmental stressors.
When you prioritize rest, you support the synergy between rest, repair, and your skin's natural radiance.
2. Poor Diet
It may also come as no surprise that what you fuel your body with also fuels your skin. Diet shapes everything from skin structure (think collagen production) to inflammatory response to the microbiome. A healthy diet ensures your body has all the building blocks it needs to protect your skin.
While we could write an encyclopedia on the role of healthy food for skincare (and plenty of people have!), the basic formula isn’t overly complicated. Aim to eat a balanced diet, with plenty of fruits, vegetables, healthy fats, and whole grains, while keeping excess sugar and ultra-processed foods to a minimum.
Systematic reviews (that is, papers that review all relevant research) show that diets filled with refined carbs, sugary drinks, and sweets consistently lead to acne. On the other hand, diets rich in colorful fruits and vegetables provide plenty of micronutrients, such as polyphenols and carotenoids, that help reduce the signs of aging through antioxidant support.
Like sleep, healthy food is a central pillar supporting whole-body wellness. What nourishes your body from the inside inevitably shows up on the outside. While no diet needs to be 100% healthy 100% of the time, the more you focus on nutrient-dense, minimally processed foods, the more you’ll start to see results looking back at you in the mirror.
3. Hot Showers & Baths
Yes, it's true: that long, hot shower that feels like pure luxury isn’t always the best choice for radiant, smooth skin. When you zoom down to the surface of your skin, hot water strips away your skin's natural oils, weakens its protective barrier, and can leave you with dry, irritated patches.
Studies show that hot water exposure increases moisture loss, dilates blood vessels, causing redness and irritation, while disrupting your skin's pH balance. Especially for people with sensitive skin, eczema, or other concerns, this daily steamy damage is especially noticeable.
But you don’t need to commit to cold plunges. Aim for warm, not hot, showers and baths, between 98°F and 100°F. It’s also recommended to keep your daily shower short (around 10 minutes) and to use gentle, pH-balanced cleansers.
And here's the crucial part: lock in moisture within two to three minutes of toweling off, since that’s when your skin is most receptive to hydration. Our rec? A slow, even application of our intensely nourishing Beyond Body Oil.
4. Chronic Stress
If you’ve ever experienced an inconvenient breakout during a stressful period in your life, you already know how mental health is intimately tied to skin health. Whether we want to admit it or not, chronic stress reshapes skin biology through the brain–skin axis. This is the communication loop between your brain and your skin, mainly involving the nervous, hormone, and immune systems.
On a molecular level, stress dysregulates cortisol and inflammation, accelerating signs of aging, damaging our skin's natural protective barrier, and potentially triggering a flare-up (acne, psoriasis, or other chronic skin conditions).
While we can’t always control the stress in our lives, we can learn to navigate the seemingly constant bombardment. You’ll also notice quite a bit of overlap with the other healthy habits on this list. Calming, intentional routines like a quiet bedtime ritual signal to your body that it's time to shift out of fight-or-flight mode and into restoration.
This is where whole-plant hemp CBD comes in, working both from the inside out and the outside in to support your body's natural balance. CBD-infused body care, like CBD Bath Gems fizzing away in the tub, helps wash away your worries while nurturing your skin with CBD and other beneficial botanical extracts.
5. Over-Exfoliating (Physical or Chemical)
Whether you’re exfoliating with a homemade sugar scrub or a cosmetic-grade chemical product, the goal is to help improve your skin's natural shedding process. But for those scrubbing away several times a week—or worse, daily—the practice is actually doing more damage than you’d think.
Over‑exfoliating removes more and more of that natural (and healthy) layer of oil that protects your skin from environmental stressors. It also disrupts an otherwise vibrant and flourishing microbiome, leaving you much more exposed in the end. Breakouts, redness, irritation, and dryness are just a few of the signs that your exfoliation schedule is too aggressive.
Most people do best with gentle exfoliating about one to three times per week. Whatever product is in your arsenal, start with a weekly schedule and increase only if you feel it's needed. Then, following each scrub, reinforce and support the skin’s barrier health with Night Magic, our clinically proven biomimetic oil for intense support.
6. Environmental Stressors
Environmental stressors are a broad spectrum of (mostly) unavoidable elements in our indoor and outdoor environments that gradually damage our skin. The types and intensity of the stressors depend on everyone’s lived experience, but include a combination of UV exposure, pollution, climate conditions, and even blue light from your screens.
While a little exposure to any of these elements doesn’t determine long-term skin outcomes, collectively, with ongoing exposure, they drive oxidative damage, barrier breakdown, pigment change, and accelerated signs of aging.
Sure, you could move out of the city into the woods and never look at a screen again, but realistically, it's impossible to eliminate all environmental exposures over a lifetime. The goal here is not to live in a bubble, but to bring in external resources to support your skin's natural barrier function.
Protection from environmental stressors is exactly what it was designed to do, so it’s well past time we gave it more resources than the obvious sunscreen.
Look for formulations like Skin Therapy, packed with antioxidants and botanical compounds that neutralize free radicals while strengthening your barrier from the outside in. It's about building resilience over time, so your skin can handle whatever the world throws at it.
7. Tobacco & Alcohol Use
Considering just how damaging cigarettes and alcohol are to our internal organs, it's probably not all that surprising to find out these substances also damage the largest organ of all, the skin. As it turns out, what is bad for your skin is equally bad for your body.
In no uncertain terms, research has demonstrated that tobacco and alcohol both accelerate visible signs of aging, destabilizing skin balance. Alcohol is dehydrating and inflammatory. It leaves skin drier, less plump, and more vulnerable to environmental damage. Smoking tobacco (and even using nicotine pouches to some extent) causes vasoconstriction, which reduces blood flow, oxygen, and vitamin delivery. It also breaks down collagen and elastin, which rapidly accelerates aging at a cellular level.
While these two may be among the most difficult bad skin habits to break, they are also among the most detrimental to skin health. Reducing or cutting out these harmful habits will have a direct and noticeable impact on your skin health. They also represent whole-body care. Breaking these habits is an act of self-care at the deepest level.
Simple Shifts Make All The Difference
Your skin is a reflection of how you live—a compilation of the hours you sleep, the food you eat, the stress you carry, and every other daily habit that makes up your day-to-day. The truth is that skin health is built upon a foundation of daily habits, many of which happen far from the bathroom mirror.
Small, intentional shifts in your routine, like choosing warm over hot showers, prioritizing a full night’s sleep, and supporting your skin's barrier, can help your skin feel more youthful and resilient over time.
