Get Your Skin in on National Wellness Month!

August is National Wellness Month, so it’s the perfect time to ask ourselves the question we rarely ask: Are the choices we’re making every day helping our skin, or hurting it?

We may be using a string of products we think are working for us, but are they really? And what about the rest of our daily habits? Are they “good” daily habits, or just things we fell into doing because we haven’t thought much about them lately?

This is a great month to schedule just a few minutes to look over your daily routine and see what you find. We’d suggest taking a piece of paper and splitting it into three columns: On the far left is the daily habit, then the next column is “good” and the last column is “bad” or “don’t know.”

Then, for each daily habit you do for the next week or two, put an X in whatever column it belongs in. Is it good for you, or bad for you—or aren’t you sure?

We’ll explore this more as we go through this post. Meanwhile, let’s give you a little more information to work with.

What is National Wellness Month All About?

National Wellness Month takes place every August. Live Love Spa created the observance in 2018 to encourage people to make self-care a priority and support their mental, physical, and emotional well-being.

To celebrate this month, people may drink more water, move their bodies, spend more time outdoors, practice mindfulness, improve their sleep, or follow a steadier and safer skincare routine. Live Love Spa also invites people to take a wellness pledge and choose small daily acts of care.

The goal is to notice where you’ve been running on empty—or even just “surviving”—and choose one or two habits that will help you feel better with more energy and vitality on a daily basis.

Why National Wellness Month Matters to Your Skin

As we’ve often said here at CV Skinlabs, your skin is part of your whole health. Our safe and nourishing formulas and effective solutions to bring about skin health, radiance, and inspiring skin confidence. Our products help protect and heal the outer barrier that helps hold water in, but it also keeps irritants out. When that barrier is cracked, dry, or inflamed, skin can not only feel and look bad, but it may also allow chemicals, pollutants, and other damaging things in where they can harm not only your skin, but the rest of your body.

A weakened or broken barrier can raise the risk of infection, for example, especially for people with eczema or other sensitive skin. So taking care of skin is about your overall health.

Then there’s your mental and emotional health to consider. How your skin looks and feels can have a major impact on your confidence and self-esteem. Caring for your skin in a way that helps it look its best is part of taking care of your overall confidence, which in turn can make you more likely to make healthy choices on a daily basis because you are practicing valuing yourself.

So “wellness” is definitely a word that we need to think about when we’re thinking of skincare.

What Research Says About National Wellness Month Habits

The research keeps pointing back to the same idea: Small daily choices can have real effects when you keep making them.

Mindfulness-based stress reduction, for example, which includes things like daily deep breathing, slow walks in nature, journaling, and meditation, has been shown to reduce stress, anxiety, and emotional distress in healthy adults. I’m a fan of sound baths, a meditative experience where you are immersed in soothing sound vibrations to promote relaxation, stress relief and emotional well-being.

Daily movement and exercise supports positive mood and sleep. A 2024 study, for example, found that walking reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety, while a separate analysis found that both individual exercise sessions and regular exercise improved several measures of sleep.

Better sleep then gives the body time to recover and helps regulate the hormones involved in hunger. In one controlled study, restricting sleep lowered levels of leptin, a hormone that helps signal fullness, while raising ghrelin, a hormone that increases hunger and appetite.

Even spending a little time outside may help. In a brain-imaging study, a one-hour walk in nature reduced activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in the stress response, while a walk along a busy street did not. Earthing is the practice of connecting with the earth’s natural electric charges by walking barefoot outside to improve well-being and to feel grounded.

No single wellness habit is going to change everything, but together, small daily choices can shape how we feel, think, sleep, eat, and care for ourselves in the long term.

7 National Wellness Month Habits That Focus On Your Skin

So what does all this mean for your skin?

Go back to the three-column habit chart you started earlier. As you read through the ideas below, think about which ones you may already do, which habits you have now that may be working against you, and which habits—here or elsewhere—that you haven’t considered before.

Then choose one or two new habits that feel easy enough to repeat and give them a try for the next couple of weeks. When that period is over, come back to your chart and record what you found out.

1. Use National Wellness Month to Support Your Skin

We talked previously in this article about the value of sleep, exercise, time outdoors, and stress relief. Choose one of those habits and make it specific.

Instead of saying, “I need to exercise more,” decide that you’ll walk for ten minutes each day after lunch. Rather than promising yourself eight hours of perfect sleep, turn off your phone twenty minutes earlier.