But, there are ways to stop the nervous sweating cycle. By understanding and planning ahead for nervous sweating, you can significantly reduce its effect on your life and say goodbye to the discomfort and self-consciousness that can come with being a nervous sweater. To help you out, this article will explain the mechanism behind nervous sweating and offer some tips for how you can fight it.
Looking for a long-term solution for your nervous sweating? Try out Social Citizen’s sweat-proof Social Tee as an easy everyday option for managing sweat and staying cool all day.
What Causes Nervous Sweating?
Usually when you sweat, it’s out of a type of gland called an eccrine sweat gland. When you get too hot or exercise vigorously, your body will release an odorless, colorless fluid made mostly of water and salt through the eccrine glands to help control your temperature. Most of your eccrine glands are concentrated on the palms, soles of the feet, forehead, cheeks, and armpits. There are many tips and treatments to tackle when it comes to armpit sweat.
But stress sweat is another story. This type of sweat is released through apocrine sweat glands, which are mostly found in the armpits, genitals, and on the scalp. These glands produce a thicker fluid that empties into the hair follicles before it gets to the surface of the skin. And even though it’s initially odorless, it doesn’t evaporate as quickly as eccrine sweat can, allowing it more time to combine with bacteria on your skin to develop an odor. This is the smell we associate with body odor.
Why Do I Get Randomly Nervous and Sweat?
When your body reacts to an emotion like anxiety, stress, or excitement, it will release sweat from the apocrine glands. Instead of taking some time to start the way that eccrine sweat does, apocrine sweat is released immediately after it’s triggered.
And that’s not to mention the fact that stress can raise your heart rate, which can heat up your body and cause you to sweat from your eccrine glands, too.
It might be embarrassing and annoying to deal with anxiety sweating, but scientists believe that there may actually be an evolutionary reason for it. Other animals actually release odors when they’re stressed, too, which acts as a signal to peers that something dangerous is happening. This could be why stress sweat happens immediately without delay, so that other members of the species have time to react to the looming danger.
But just because nervous sweat has a purpose doesn’t mean that we as modern humans have to suffer through it if it bothers us and gets in the way of our day-to-day lives. Thankfully, there are steps that you can take to prevent and manage nervous sweating and feel more confident.
How to Stop Nervous Sweating: 4 Ways
You can use the following tips every day to help prevent, reduce, and manage nervous sweating.
1. Alleviate Stress
The first thing you can do to help reduce nervous sweating is to fight the problem at its root. If you don’t get stressed, then you won’t stress sweat. Unfortunately, stress is incredibly common in our fast-paced modern world, with 77% reporting stress affects their physical health followed by 73% of people reporting stress impacts their mental health. That’s why learning stress management techniques can be life-changing both for your perspiration problems and your overall well-being.
The following tips can be very helpful for reducing stress.
- Identify the things that trigger your stress and see what can be done about them. For example, if your work life is very stressful, find ways to take a break and separate your mental well-being from work stress. If you struggle to find time for family chores, consider asking another member of the family to step in and help you. Whatever it may be, do your best to reduce the number of stressors you’re dealing with.
- Consider practicing mindfulness meditation, which has shown to improve anxiety levels 60% of the time. Starting with five minutes a day of sitting and clearing your mind can make a difference.
- Learn to use breathing exercises, which can work to reduce stress in the moment by calming down your body’s nervous system and the fight-or-flight response that can cause symptoms of anxiety.
2. Use Antiperspirant and Deodorant
Antiperspirant, made with aluminum that reduces sweat by blocking your sweat glands, is an important tool in the fight against unwelcome perspiration. Thankfully, it can be used all over the body, not just in the underarms, so if you find that your nervous sweating tends to happen in one non-underarm area, you can focus your antiperspirant usage there.
If the standard antiperspirants you buy at the store aren’t doing the trick for you, you can always try a clinical-strength antiperspirant or even talk to your doctor about prescribing you a prescription-strength antiperspirant, which has the highest concentration of sweat-blocking aluminum.
If part of what bothers you about nervous sweating is the body odor that it causes, you can use deodorant to help prevent the smell. It works by killing the bacteria on your skin so that your sweat has nothing to interact with to produce a bad odor. Deodorants come in all sorts of scents so you should be able to find one that you like rather easily.
3. Trim Your Body Hair
Trimming and grooming the body hair in areas where sweat and odor are a problem can help your perspiration issues in a few ways. First, it will help your antiperspirant and deodorant reach your skin more thoroughly so they can do their jobs as effectively as possible. And second, it can prevent sweat and oil from being trapped in areas where they can react with bacteria to cause body odor. Some have found shaving armpits can help prevent excessive sweating.
4. Pick Your Attire Wisely
A final suggestion that can make a big difference to your nervous sweating is to make thoughtful decisions about the clothes you wear. Some clothing can make sweating much worse. Heavy, hot clothing can make you even sweatier, and certain fabrics will soak through with sweat and get even more uncomfortable on the skin. And that’s not to mention the visible sweat stains that can tip off the people around you that you’ve been sweating, which is the last thing you want to happen in high-pressure situations like big family and work events.
There are clothes that can help improve your nervous sweating problem. That’s why we’ve found bamboo armpit sweat pads are perfect for heavy sweating. Anxiety sweating can be helped by choosing the right attire to seamlessly hide armpit sweat pads. Loose clothes made of light, breathable fabrics will keep you cool, while darker colors can better hide sweat marks.
The bottom line: If you’re going to find yourself in a situation where you anticipate you’re likely to get nervous (and therefore sweaty), plan ahead to wear something that won’t exacerbate or show off your sweat, like the Social Tee.
How Social Citizen Can Help You
Even better, there are some clothes that are even designed specifically to help people who suffer from nervous sweating. Social Citizen’s fashionable sweat-proof attire can assist you in managing your stress sweat in multiple ways.
Social Citizen’s shirts are designed with a hidden bamboo underarm pad guaranteed to stop 100% of sweat stains and naturally fight body odor. Not only is this a great solution for keeping you cool, dry, and fresh, but it can also be a major relief psychologically. Knowing that you won’t have any visible sweat when you wear your Social Tee can even reduce your anxiety before big events so you never get that sweat in the first place.
For casual, everyday wear, Social Citizen offers a sweat-proof Social Tee in four neutral colors in both men’s and women’s cuts. If you’re going to someplace more formal, you can opt for a Social Citizen polo shirt or wear your Social Tee as an undershirt under business attire.
Try out Social Citizen’s clothing today to experience the comfort of a sweat-free shirt along with the reassurance of a worry-free mind.
