No matter how much makeup you slather onto your face, nor how well, nor how high-quality, it will not do as much for your appearance as a bright, natural smile and an actual healthy glow. If you want to look your best in this world, you need to start, first and foremost, with your inner self. Improving your health and happiness will glow from the inside out, taking years off your life and putting you in a position to actually look your best. And believe it or not, feeling your best isn’t that hard. By implementing a few easy steps into your life, you can look and feel better today.
Learn to Relax
Fast-paced modern lifestyles have led to stressed-out people. Stress, meanwhile, effects your body in a number of ways, from increasing your heart rate to tensing your muscles. And unlike our ancestors, who would be stressed out by raging rhinoceros and then relax again after the threat was gone, our stressors don’t go away. Their perpetual presence in our life increase our rates of heart problems, long-term anxiety, and insomnia. Meanwhile, our bodies show our fatigue through wan, stressed-out smiles and dark circles under our eyes?
The easy cure for all this stress? Focus on relaxing a little bit every day. Learn to release tense muscles through Free Your Spine and practice mindfulness exercises to keep yourself present in your daily life rather than worrying about your future or your past.
Eat to Live
So many people have made food into a relationship—something that is turned to at the end of a long day or excluded from life out of shame. Either way, treating food in this way gives it power that it should not have in our lives and allows unhealthy eating habits to form. The purpose of food is to fuel our bodies to perform to their maximum capacity. When you can truly understand and believe that, you’ll be able to eat to live rather than living to eat or living to avoid.
What does eating to love look like? It looks like eating foods that make your body work well in quantities that make you feel satiated but not stuffed. And it looks like increased energy levels, brighter smiles, and healthier skin. Learning to eat to live is one of the best ways to increase your appearance without fancy diets or exercise plans. Though speaking of exercise…
Move Your Body
You don’t have to live in the gym to make your body look great, but you do have to move. Why? It has nothing to do with body shaming or what size clothing you wear. Once again, it’s about making you feel good so that you emit positive energy—an energy that is infectious and makes you more attractive to yourself and to others. Moving your body keeps your muscles loose and capable. It gives you confidence to know that you can do things. And it releases oxytocin, a feel-good hormone that will help with all your other goals.
Tips for moving your body? Yoga is a great way to keep yourself limber and relaxed. It’s also a great stress relief technique, so you can conquer two duties with it. Walking and swimming are also great ways to move that are low impact, which means that you can do them no matter what your previous activity levels looked like.
Do Good Daily
Studies show that when we do good things for other people, we feel good in return. So why is it that we only give gifts on birthdays and Christmas? Why do we only do charity works when major disasters hit? If doing good makes us feel good and doing good makes other people feel good, we should be doing good all the time. So the final easy step to making yourself look good by making yourself feel good is to make a point of doing something nice for someone else every single day. These daily acts of kindness will have you feeling like a more positive, giving person, drawing it in as part of your identity—and when it’s part of your identity, then feeling good will be part of your identity as well.
Everyone wants to look good. But to truly conquer the confident, happy, vibrant look you’re going for, you can’t just watch makeup tutorials on YouTube. You first have to start with who you are as a person and how you feel on a daily basis. Once you feel good about yourself, you can start cultivating a look that others will love as well.
