Hands Excessively sweating? How to know you are one of us

Growing up, I though everybody's hands are supposed to be sweating, but it turned out it was only me. I had to run some medical tests in my early 20s to make sure I was ok, because I was the only one in my family whose hands are like that. It wasn't until my late 20s that I discovered about Hyperhidrosis and finally found a name for my condition.

Hyperhidrosis is excessive sweating that's not always linked to heat or exercise. Your sweat soaks through your clothes or drips off your hands, it goes to the point where it disrupts your day and cause you embarrassment all the time.

Hyperhidrosis is considered a rare condition, affecting about 1 percent people, so averagely that means there are 80 million people around the world suffering from this condition. There is a lot of us out here!

How do you know your hands indeed sweat excessively?

Here are 5 signs:

1 You are constantly washing your hands

I wash my hands around 20 times a day, and even more when it's summer. Washing my hands helps cooling them off and reset them to the initial state. Of course, it takes of course only few minutes until they are all sweaty again.

2 Hand creams feel sticky and make your hands sweat even more

I wish I can enjoy all the hand creams out there, but unfortunately applying a hand cream in our case makes it even worse, now you have excessive sweat mixed with cream.

If you really want to apply a cream to your hand, go for a really tick cream and forget about applying it first on your palms, you can only apply it on the back of your hand and rub the back of your hands with each other, if you don't want to end up washing it after 10 min.

I know hand creams are meant for dry hands but we also like to enjoy the perfume the softness of it.

3 Please, not a handshake!

In a professional setting, handshakes are necessary and say a lot about a person, but not in your case, you do everything you can to avoid a handshake; because you don't want to apologize to people for making their hands wet and you can't stand seeing them wiping their hands after handshaking you. Sometimes, I would rather hug a person than give him a handshake.

So, what I do is, whenever I meet a new person, I keep a longer distance between us so the handshake is not an option.

4 Your hands are a humidity hygrometer

You know when humidity is high and when it's low. Have you ever noticed when you are traveling from a high humidity area to a low humidity area that your hands are a little bit drier and sweat dries faster and don't feel sticky. And when you go back to a high humidity area again, your hands go back to being more sweaty and more sticky and you need to wash your hands or totally get under a shower immediately. Because hands are exposed and you are constantly using them, they help you notice humidity levels of each area.

5 When your feet are also excessively sweating

Do you enjoy wearing sandals in the winter and when you wear them in summer, you wear them with socks?

Do you always go with sandals that have some support on the front and back? because you know otherwise, you will be leaving them behind while walking.

When your hands sweat a lot, chances are, your feet do too.

In conclusion, I know you are making extra effort to adapt to some things that other people do easily, so be proud of yourself! I am proud of myself for finishing this blog post while I'm constantly wiping my laptop keyboard.