It’s taken me a while to learn that you can’t do anything that’s important to you unless you’re pretty relaxed first. I’ve taken to making one of my weekend days dedicated to hardcore active relaxing. Everyone is different – some of my friends can’t relax until they’ve run 20km. Other’s clean their house. I like to spend an hour on my skin and hair. I also realised that relaxing has nothing to do with doing nothing and everything to do with ritual and distraction. I love chill out and watch TV sometimes, but when I’m really stressed, that doesn’t do anything. It explains why cleaning, running, hair washing, toenail polishing and what have you do a better job of it.
For my darling friends reading this while studying for their primaries – procrastobaking and cleaning is actually relaxing your mind before it can learn!
Here’s my current ritual for relaxing (it changes all the time, and the products you use only matter insofar as you feel good using them). My hair and skin are a little on the dry side so a lot of stuff below is geared towards that.
1. Light a candle. My current go-to is Diptyque Baies – yes I did pay that much. After 7 straight night-shifts of horror. It was worth every cent. I know it divides the masses but I love it.
2. Brew some tea. I love T2’s White Jasmine, and I’d run out of everything else! I’d probably go for a nice fruit and herb blend though if I’d had it.
3. Put a twenty cent piece of coconut oil through your hair and massage it in well.
4. Watch an episode of Scrubs! I’m rewatching it, it’s immensely cathartic for me. Or you can just wait for 45 minutes.
5. I wash my hair (but don’t condition) then clean my face with the Clarisonic Mia and Philosophy’s Purity Made Simple.
6. After that I put a twenty cent piece worth of the brilliant Terax Crema hydrating treatment through my towel-dried hair – its basically lanolin, then put my hair up in a wrap. There’s some great cheap hair wraps on Ebay, I have a stack of them!
7. My favourite fask masque at the moment is the Clarin’s Hydraquench Masque. Smells amazing and leaves my skin really soft. I slap lots of that on too.
7. Time for another episode of Scrubs! If I really want to dig the relaxation vibe, I use my Meditation Oasis app for 30 minutes and do a guided meditation (they’re brilliant). If you don’t want to pay for an app, then their free Simply Being app is outstanding (I started with that).
8. I rinse off the hair treatment and face masque, and condition my hair, then dry it off, comb it out with the Best Hairbrush Ever (my Tangle Teezer) and put it back up in another clean wrap (seriously they’re $3.75 for three on Ebay!)
9. I use the Endota Spa Green Tea and Pea eye cream, followed by their Bush Honey and Macadamia Skin Drink as a moisturiser at the moment. Both are lovely and the result of a recent facial + splurge. I don’t think I can justify continuing to buy the eye cream, but I’ll keep up with the moisturiser, it smells like dessert.
10. After that I slap on a little bit of coconut oil to the rest of my body – and done! Life seems a lot easier after all of that.
What do you do to relax?
Bake. Love. Run. 