I want to be careful about how I describe this, because the concept has been so thoroughly colonised by the wellness industry that it is now very hard to discuss without sounding like a brand campaign.
But the practice is real, it is daily, and the effect on my functioning — and on the skin of my patients, which I can examine objectively — is clinically significant.
What I do: each morning, after the outdoor light exposure and movement, I sit. Usually ten minutes. Sometimes twenty on quieter mornings. I’m not chanting, not visualising, not cultivating anything specific. I am sitting with what the Japanese martial arts tradition calls mushin — “no mind” — the state of non-attachment to arising thoughts that is the foundation of present-moment performance.
I came to this through BJJ rather than through a wellness programme. In combat sport, the mind that plans and anticipates and worries performs worse than the mind that is simply present. The opponent doesn’t care about your strategy. The mat is happening now.
The neuroscience of what sitting quietly does
The physiological response to meditative practice — by which I mean any form of deliberate, sustained attentional practice, not just formal seated meditation — is well-documented.
Regular practice reduces the baseline activity of the default mode network: the neural circuitry responsible for rumination, future-planning, and the mental time-travel that constitutes most of what we call “stress.” The DMN is metabolically expensive and, when chronically hyperactive, is associated with elevated cortisol, disrupted sleep, and the HPA axis dysregulation I’ve described elsewhere [1].
Sustained meditative practice also appears to reduce the cortisol awakening response in a way that is distinct from simply sleeping better — it modulates the amplitude of the cortisol peak, producing a more measured physiological start to the day. For women in perimenopause, where cortisol regulation is already compromised, this is clinically relevant.
Telomere length — a marker of biological ageing at the cellular level — has been associated with meditation practice in several studies, though the causality is difficult to establish cleanly [2]. What the association signals is that the physiological environment produced by regular meditative practice is different from the one produced by chronic, unmanaged psychological stress.
What this does to skin — directly and specifically
The skin-stress connection is real and I see it in practice every week.
Cortisol has several direct effects on skin biology. It activates mast cells, which release histamine and pro-inflammatory cytokines — worsening reactive conditions including eczema, rosacea, and seborrhoeic dermatitis. It activates sebaceous gland androgen receptors, increasing sebum production and worsening acne in susceptible individuals. It degrades collagen through the MMP pathway I’ve described elsewhere. It impairs skin barrier function by reducing ceramide synthesis.
Asian skin, with its higher melanocyte reactivity to inflammatory signals, is particularly susceptible to the pigmentation consequences of chronic cortisol elevation. I see this in patients who go through significant stress periods: the melasma that was controlled suddenly flares. The periorbital pigmentation darkens. The skin’s inflammatory threshold appears to lower.
Conversely, patients who manage their stress well — measurably, not just through self-report — show more stable treatment results, better wound healing after procedures, and slower progression of the structural changes I associate with inflammatory ageing [3].
Why I’m reluctant to call it meditation
The word has accumulated so much commercial weight that it now comes with expectations that I don’t want to set.
You don’t need an app. You don’t need a cushion. You don’t need a forty-day programme or a certified instructor (though these can be useful). You need a consistent daily period — ten minutes is genuinely sufficient — of deliberate disengagement from the doing mode.
What counts: sitting with tea in silence, consciously not planning. Walking without a podcast, paying attention to physical sensation. Breathing exercises that engage the parasympathetic nervous system — the 4-7-8 pattern, box breathing, or even simply slow exhalation. Writing without agenda — the kind of morning pages practice that is essentially a form of cognitive defragmentation.
The common element is the parasympathetic activation: the shift from sympathetic dominance (fight-or-flight, planning, urgency) to parasympathetic rest-and-repair. This shift is necessary for the physiological restoration that makes everything else — sleep, digestion, immune function, skin repair — work correctly.
The Singapore context
Singapore does not easily accommodate stillness. The productivity culture, the ambient noise of a dense city, the pressure to be continuously useful and available — all of these work against the practice of doing nothing deliberately.
I’ve heard every version of “I don’t have time” for this from my patients. The honest response is: you don’t have time not to. The physiological cost of unmanaged chronic stress is cumulative and is being paid whether you acknowledge it or not. Investing ten minutes daily in its management is not a luxury. It is a maintenance requirement for a system that is under sustained load.
My children grew up watching me do this — sitting quietly in the morning before the house woke up. I hope they’ve taken something from it, though I’ve learned to apply zero pressure to what children take from parental example. They’ll come to it or they won’t.
The skin protocol implication
When patients ask me why their treatments aren’t working as well as they expected — why their results plateau, why their skin is reactive and difficult — I now ask routinely about their stress load and their stress management.
The treatment environment that a chronically stressed body provides is not the same as the one a well-regulated body provides. Treatments that stimulate collagen synthesis work better when the cortisol environment isn’t continuously degrading that collagen in the interval between sessions. Pigmentation treatments work better when the inflammatory threshold isn’t constantly being lowered by cortisol-driven mast cell activation.
I can’t treat my way around a patient’s unmanaged stress. I’ve stopped trying. I now make the conversation about the stress an explicit part of the consultation — because it is a clinical variable, not a lifestyle supplement.
If you’d like to hear more of these conversations, I discuss the intersection of mind, body, and skin on my podcast Skin, Honestly — which tries to be as honest about the non-clinical dimensions of skin health as it is about the clinical ones.
And if you’re on Instagram, where I occasionally surface the quieter side of this practice: @drlowchailing.
The quiet practice is ten minutes. Every morning. Without exception, mostly.
It is the cheapest, most evidence-based, most consistently underused tool in the longevity toolkit. Not because it is difficult. Because it requires stopping — which, in a culture built on doing, is the hardest thing of all.
References
[1] Lazar, S. W., et al. (2005). Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness. NeuroReport, 16(17), 1893–1897. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.wnr.0000186598.66243.19 [VERIFY — confirm before publishing]
[2] Epel, E. S., et al. (2009). Can meditation slow rate of cellular aging? Cognitive stress, mindfulness, and telomeres. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1172, 34–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04414.x [VERIFY — confirm before publishing]
[3] Chen, Y., & Lyga, J. (2014). Brain-skin connection: Stress, inflammation and skin aging. Inflammation & Allergy Drug Targets, 13(3), 177–190. https://doi.org/10.2174/1871528113666140522104422 [VERIFY — confirm before publishing]