Your Beauty Routine Is Impacting Your Resilience.

your beauty routine is impacting your mental resilience.

My Tiktok feed is full of beauty routines and I love it. The everything showers, 10-step skincare, hair oils, dry brushing, infrared saunas, and supplements with syllables we can’t pronounce. While these rituals may look frivolous to some, for many they’ve become acts of discipline (whether Im just the weird one that correlates beauty and discipline). Beneath the almond-shaped nails and gua sha, there’s definitely something else glowing up - honestly, its science, its mental resilience.

I know, I make myself laugh too, but hear me out. My 10 step “mama-time routine” is not always about vanity. I’m all for building discipline and resilience, academically its the smart thing to do right? Im telling myself “I care enough to do this again and again and again despite how boring it might feel today, or how much I want to go to bed.” I’ve learned by listening to the podcasts I love that when you have consistent beauty routines, you are essentially performing daily exercises out of self-respect. You might be trying to grow your hair, clear your skin, or simply feel a bit more put together but those goals don’t materialise overnight. They require repetition, discomfort, and patience. Three things neuroscience and behavioral psychology confirm are key drivers of resilience.

In The Diary of a CEO podcast, host Steven Bartlett has spoken to a range of world-class thinkers, from neuroscientists to athletes to military leaders. Yes, I will bring this podcast up again. Many of Steven’s guests return to the same insight that doing hard things regularly, especially when you don’t want, to is the fastest track to developing mental strength.

Dr. Andrew Huberman[1] explains the neuroscience of habit formation, noting that dopamine is not just released when we get a reward, it’s released when we anticipate progress. “The pursuit is what builds you,” Huberman explains. My jaw was open in awe in this episode and I urge you listen. What Huberman ephasises, means your discipline to get up, oil your scalp, exfoliate, and drink that magnesium-laced, chlorophyll water isn’t superficial right? There is evidence that you delaying gratification (or immediate results) is something that directly links to long-term success and emotional regulation.

Professor Daniel Lieberman[2] discusses the paradox of comfort. "We’ve made everything so easy that we’ve forgotten how to be uncomfortable. But discomfort is what strengthens us." He explains that the body and the mind adapt when placed under consistent, manageable strain. In other words: your beauty routines that feel tedious are what train your body to withstand more. And in a world saturated by distractions and instant dopamine hits, creating structure around beauty rituals becomes a way to condition your body back to discipline.

Steven Bartlett himself often talks on this theme[3]. He shares "Mental resilience isn’t built in the peaks. It’s built in the plateaus, when you show up anyway." This sentiment matters because we’re taught to expect instant results, but skin doesn’t clear in a week. Hair doesn’t grow three inches overnight. The benefits of routine are often invisible until one day, they’re not. I have often found myself complaining of not seeing results, getting bored and dragging myself along to achieve my goals that suddently happen out of nowhere (after months and months…).

I bring us to a broader topic that I love to discuss, which is longevity (low key obsessed). Not just in terms of living longer but performing better for longer. Dr. David Sinclair explains that consistent stressors like fasting, cold exposure, and exercise activate cellular defence pathways that delay aging[4]. The same idea applies to our minds. The effort it takes to consistently return to the same discipline each day, whether physical or aesthetic, builds the kind of cognitive toughness that shows up in every other part of your life.

So when someone tells you your beauty routine is excessive (reminder: what they say doesn’t matter) you can educate them in the fact that it’s neuroscience and they can mind their business and go back to their 75 hard challenge. Washing your face at night instead of crashing into bed is a test of impulse control and sticking with your hair routine when it looks like nothing is happening is a test of delayed gratification. Choosing to put effort into yourself (whether you see it as self love or at times plain exhasting) is benefitting you both internally and externally. Winner.

References:

[1] A Huberman, "The Diary of a CEO" with S Bartlett, episode 101, 2021.
[2] D Lieberman, "The Diary of a CEO" with S Bartlett, episode 212, 2023.
[3] S Bartlett, "The Diary of a CEO", episode 159, 2022.
[4] D Sinclair, "The Diary of a CEO" with S Bartlett, episode 94, 2021.