Motivational monday #5 10 little things you can do to de-stress your life

Sometimes when everything gets a bit overwhelming, it can be hard to know what to do to improve your state of mind. Luckily, I've come up with 10 tips to instantly make life a bit less stressful.

1- Turn off social media notifications on your phone
2- Write a short term to-do list
3- cull your wardrobe
4- unsubscribe from all email marketing
5- get rid of five items you no longer use
6- unfriend and unfollow everyone on social media you don't actually like
7- downsize your beauty collection
8- sort out your email inbox
9- reply to five messages
10- throw out odd socks.

Motivational monday #4

There's someone I've been spending too much time with recently whose immediate reaction is always negativity. 

Before every activity is a list of risks and things that could go wrong and the idea they might be bad at it. I just think it must be so exhausting to think that way. 

Being negative is so time consuming and energy consuming, it takes over your life leaving you with not enough time to so anything apart from breed more negativity. 

Being around this negative person has started impacting me, making me nervous and unsure, as a result I have got so much less done and then berated myself for being unproductive. 

I am training myself to let go of that, to do things without imagining the worst and to embrace the idea of crossing that bridge when I get to it, and not visualise myself falling off. 

Motivational Monday #3

One of the biggest contributions to my insecurity has always been comparing myself to others but as I've gotten older I've realized that there are so many different types of beautiful and that there is so many beautiful people in the world, but their beauty doesn't make me any less beautiful, even if I am nothing like them, and changing myself to be like someone considered beautiful simply takes away from my unique beauty.
I think a lot of this comparison based insecurity is because society constantly pits women against each other in order to sell us things, from magazines comparing which celebrity wore the best dress rather than acknowledging how beautiful they both looked to telling us that buying from certain brands will make us more like the model in the advert and therefore make us more beautiful.
Disregard the idea that being like someone else will make you more beautiful, the thing that makes you the most beautiful is your individuality.

Motivational monday #2

I am a person who doesn't deal very well with stress and has a tendency to make problems bigger than they are but if I have learnt anything in the last year or so it's that a cup of tea and a biscuit solves everything. 

It may not solve the problem itself, but it gives you the time to step back from a stressful situation and focus on liquidy goodness in the form of tea, and since having this epiphany I have become a lot calmer and happier. Sometimes a cup of tea is all you need to think logically about a situation or mull the situation over with someone. No problem is too big to contemplate over a cup of tea, and no problem is too pressing that you can't escape from it with tea. 

Go and grab a cuppa and click these links to find tea related joy from Twinings (not sponsored, I just love their tea) 

Salted caramel green tea 

Lady Grey

Winter spice tea 

Motivational Monday #1

Something I've been considering is how much  courage it takes to be kind not only to others but to yourself, we are our own worst enemies and conditioned from a young age to hate ourselves, to want to change ourselves in order to try and reach unobtainable standards and then reduced to being disgusted with ourselves when we can't reach those standards. Most industries thrive on the idea that we hate ourselves and need to change and this issue that all but consumes people is simply a marketing strategy. Being in a world full of this negativity means that it can take guts to stand up and say 'Actually, I'm happy with myself, I like who I am'

 We are taught that the needs and desires of other people, our jobs and lifestyle come before our own needs and desires, that we are secondary beings and we are made to believe that self love and self care is a radical idea when actually being kind to ourselves should be instinctive.

You are you, and you are unique and special, you have no flaws but simply a different type of wonderful so I urge you to take the time to be kind to yourself.
Buy the dress, eat the chocolate, remind yourself that you are worthy of respect, tell yourself how great you look.
Be good to yourself and don't deny yourself desires and needs, listen to your body and your heart and the sense of deeper self awareness and happiness is beyond anything else in the world.
Just take the first step today
and have courage and be kind, to yourself as well as others.