3 Tips for Feeling Good and Looking Great
When you’re feeling happy, relaxed, and turned on by life, you radiate that energy—and everyone can see it.
For us, the best way to take care of our appearance and make sure we are looking my best is to make sure we are 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 best friend, or at an amazing yoga class. But life includes lots of other things too.
We try to cultivate a life that’s as pleasurable as possible that gives us time to do the things we love. We do work that feels creative. We surround myself with people who nourish us and spark us 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? We’ve been experimenting with this lately, and we’d love to share a few things I’ve found useful.
Look for things to appreciate.
Recently, we’ve been experimenting with the concept of appreciation.
Whatever situation we’re dealing with—whether it’s getting my kid out the door, or a grumpy husband, or five action items flooding in at once for work—we can step back in the moment, shift our gaze, and look for what we can appreciate, right now.
If my kid is stalling, running late and totally distractible, I 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 my husband’s grumpy and tired, I can choose to recognize that’s because he’s been working hard on a creative project, and remember how much I appreciate his incredible and dynamic creativity.
If I get bombarded by five work requests at once, I can take three seconds, shift my perspective, and appreciate that I love what I do for a living. I can also appreciate that it’s busy enough for me to have a lot to juggle!
Looking for what I can appreciate about whatever’s happening, right now, shifts my focus. It instantly makes me feel freer and more able to take pleasure in what’s happening.
Tune into mindfulness—right now.
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 or be able to tap into a deep state of timeless inner peace 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 forth with your attention for a few seconds or minutes (however long you have).
We 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 we can feel more pleasure and enjoy what I’m doing much more.
