You can be 50 and still be fabulous™
3 Tips For Feeling Good and Looking Great
By Jessica
When you’re feeling happy, relaxed, and turned on by life, you radiate that healthy glow—and everyone can see it.
For me, the best way to take care of my appearance and make sure I’m looking my best is to make sure I’m feeling my best. But let’s be real—life gets crazy for all of us sometimes.
It’s easy to “feel my best” when I’m on vacation, or out to dinner with my husband, or at an amazing event. But life includes lots of other things too.
I try to cultivate a life that’s as pleasurable as possible that gives me time to do the things I love. I do work that feels creative. I surround myself with people who nourish me and spark me up.
But we can’t control everything.
There’s no way to make it all perfect. (And in fact, it’s super stressful to try.) Sometimes life is going to hand us stress, difficulty, and hard stuff we have to work through.
So how do we “feel our best” even when tough stuff is happening around us? I’ve been experimenting with this lately, and I’d love to share a few things I’ve found useful.
Look For Things To Appreciate.
Recently, I’ve been experimenting with the concept of appreciation.
Whatever situation you're dealing with—whether it’s getting your kid out of bed in time for school, or a grumpy husband, or experiencing low sales in your shop—you can step back in the moment, shift your gaze, and look for what you can appreciate, right now.
If your kid is stalling, running late and totally distractible, you can still look at her and choose to see how she’s still adjusting to her time on this planet and how gorgeous and tender that is.
If your husband’s grumpy and tired, you can choose to recognize that’s because he’s been working hard on taking care of you and the kids, and remember how much you appreciate his incredible efforts.
If you experience poor sales during the week, you can take three seconds, shift your perspective, and appreciate that it’s gonna be better next week. You can also be thankful for the little that came in!
Looking for what you can appreciate about whatever’s happening, right now, shifts your focus. It instantly makes you feel freer and more able to take pleasure in what’s happening.
Tune Into Mindfulness - Be Present
Meditation has incredible benefits, and it’s something I recommend to everyone for happiness, radiant health, and skin.
However, it requires stepping outside your life for a minute and creating a new habit. Sometimes, when the stuff is really hitting the fan, it's not the easiest time to forge new habits.
But the core principle of meditation—mindfulness, or being present in the moment—is available to all of us anytime. You don’t have to go on a retreat to be able to access it.
Try this experiment: if you catch yourself feeling stressed, zoom in on where that stressful feeling is occurring in your body.
Is it your chest? Your throat? Your face? Then focus on a different part of your body that feels more relaxed. (My feet work well for me.)
Then just shift your attention back and forth between the “stressed” part of your body and the “relaxed” part of your body.
Don’t try to make the “stress” go away—just move back and forthwith your attention for a few seconds or minutes (however long you have).
I find this kind of amazing. Just a minute or so of shifting my attention back and forth like this will often loosen up the “stressed” feeling enough that I can feel more pleasure and enjoy what I’m doing much more.
Move!
Just moving your body is enough and it’s really easy to forget to do it.
That’s especially the case if we work at a desk in an office, spend a lot of time driving, or have limited mobility in any way.
But taking a few minutes to move in a way that feels good can radically up your happiness quotient—no matter what’s going on.
I love to dance, and lately, I’ve been reminding myself that I don’t have to be at a party or an event to do it. I can put on a song I love especially from way back in the 80s and 90s, crank it up, and spend ten minutes dancing my heart out in my living room. I always feel better afterward.
Same thing with taking a brisk walk.
Moving doesn’t have to mean going to the gym or jogging round your estate. Even standing up and jumping up and down, shaking things out, for 30 seconds right now, can energize you, move your cells around, and shift things inside so it’s easier to smile.
And an extra bonus: it revs up your circulation, so your cheeks flush and you get a little glow. Do that, and you’ll start seeing that external radiance reflected on your skin.
What tools and tricks do you use to cultivate happiness in the moment, no matter what’s going on around you? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!