Reading Time: 4 minutes Simple Ways to Spoil Yourself
This is a guest post about easy ways to treat yourself.
We live in a rapid-fire age. Everything happens quickly. We fire up our phones and order cars that arrive in minutes, food that arrives in less than an hour. It’s easy to forget to take a moment off for yourself. Yet, if your life is too fast-paced, you might get burned out. Your mind shouldn’t be racing all the time.
Injecting regular self-care habits into your routine will keep you sane and happy. You don’t need to be a millionaire to spoil yourself. Devoting five minutes a day to meditation might be enough. The key is that you spend time focusing on yourself and your needs.
Here are a few ideas you can try.
Simple Ways to Spoil Yourself
Take a Bath
It sounds simple but it’s quite effective. Taking a bath is a great way to unwind. If you really want to relax, light some candles in the bathroom and use a special bath bomb. It will make your bathroom look and smell amazing.
While you’re in the bath, try to let your mind wander. Don’t think about work, your relationship stress, etc. Those problems will still be there when you get out of the tub. Focus on yourself while you’re bathing. Connect to your body, feel your muscles relax. You can make the experience more interesting by playing music or a podcast.
Upgrade Your Wardrobe
Your style expresses who you are. Even if you have no fashion sense and throw on a pair of jeans and a hoodie every day, it still says something about your personality. You can easily spoil yourself by upgrading your wardrobe. Replace all of your staple pieces with newer, better-fitting items. Or, add a few outlandish statement pieces to the mix.
Experimenting with fun jewelry is a good option. Gold Urban Jewelry makes eye-catching pieces that you can add to almost outfit. You can buy jewelry if you want to spruce up your wardrobe without making major changes.
Exercise
Okay. At first, exercise might seem like a punishment. It’s tough, you get sweaty, the results take a long time to become apparent. However, if you’re a couch potato, incorporating regular exercise into your routine could literally save your life. Exercise helps your mental and physical health.
If you’re going to stick with a routine, you need to pick something that you like. Don’t try to become a marathon runner if you have bad knees and hate being outside. It’s possible that exercising for the sake of exercising doesn’t appeal to you. In that case, try to find an active hobby that you enjoy. There are adult sports leagues in almost every city. You could even try giving up your car and walking and taking public transportation instead.
Read
By exercising your mind, you keep your thoughts limber. It’s important to try to stay fresh as you grow older. If you let your mind fall apart, you’ll feel less satisfied with your life. An easy way to stretch your mind is to read. It doesn’t have to be novels if you’re not interested in reading books. You can read articles, interesting magazines and newspapers, you have a lot of options. You want to increase your vocabulary as well as your knowledge of the world.
Learn How to Cook
Pampering yourself with food feels amazing. However, if you don’t know how to cook you’re stuck buying expensive takeout and restaurant food. If you learn how to cook, you can treat yourself at home for a fraction of the cost. Learning how to cook can be a very pleasant experience if you go about it the right way. Make sure you don’t put too much pressure on yourself.
You used to need a cookbook to learn popular recipes. Now you can look up almost any recipe you want online. There are free databases.
Schedule a Massage
Massage therapy has ancient roots. Relaxing the body ultimately relaxes the mind. You’ll feel happier and less stressed if you get regular massages. If you live in a major city, you should be able to find a discount for a reduced cost massage online. Many companies offer special rates to first-time customers. Or you can see if there’s a massage school in your area. The students should be able to give you a decent, reduced-cost massage. Their rates are sometimes as low as $20 an hour for a full body treatment.
If you want to make the people around you happy, you need to be happy yourself. That means that you need to devote time to your self-care routine.
Rachel is an Austin blogger, educator, mom, wife, young breast cancer survivor writing about health, saving money, and living a happy life in Austin, Texas.
Rachel has written for HuffPost and Hometalk and has been featured on KXAN, Studio 512, Fox 7 Austin, and CBS Austin.