Celebrate National Relaxation Day with these celebrity self-care tips
This National Relaxation Day, we're looking to the stars for guidance. Literally.
In honor of the annual holiday, which aims to instill the importance of rejuvenation, we here at Entertain This! decided to resurface seven essential tips from celebrities on how to promote wellness today and everyday.
1. Take time to disconnect.
"In daily life, your phone rings or someone interrupts you — there are so many stop-starts," Cindy Crawford said to the Huffington Post in February 2015. "I like to have that unstructured time to let the brain relax and process and download. You can set your intention in that time."
2. Treat yourself.
“The best way I know for sure to stay in steady makeover mode is to take care of yourself," Oprah Winfrey wrote in the September 2014 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. "To feed yourself with love and loving thoughts. To eat food that's delicious to you and to your body. To engage in loving practices, like giving yourself the gift of stillness at least five minutes a day. To surround yourself with people who bring you light, and to banish all forms of negative energy.”
3. Practice mindfulness.
"You can’t look to…anything from the outside to fill you up," Jennifer Garner told O, The Oprah Magazine's Ruth Baron back in August 2012. "You have to find it in the small things in everyday life—which I do a million times a day: a hot cup of tea, a hummingbird. Stop, take that in, receive it, get joy from it.”
4. Let your creativity flow.
“Start a journal, paint a picture, grab your camera," Mariska Hargitay told Health magazine in April 2009. "And the best part is, you don't even have to show any of it to anybody. Creative expression feeds your spirit, not some person looking over your shoulder telling you to paint faster."
5. Try gardening.
"I plant everything from flowers to vegetables," Laura San Giacomo shared with Redbook in August 2009. "I think gardening is a very physical and contemplative activity where my mind can wander and I can think about other things in my life while I'm actually accomplishing something. It's an organic type of stress release."
6. Get active in other ways.
“I mostly go for hour-long hikes with friends," Kristen Bell said to Self magazine in February 2012, "but sometimes, I’ll do Pilates or 20 minutes of calisthenics… I go through spurts. Working out for me has nothing to do with body image. I refuse to look in the mirror and hate myself. My goal isn’t to change my body — it’s to make my body happy."
7. Connect with friends or family.
As Lily Collins explained to Seventeen magazine in October 2012, "it’s important to relate to one another about issues that you’re having, because the second you open up and someone else says, ‘Oh, me too. I feel the same way,’ then all of a sudden, you feel more at peace with yourself and you can feel more confident with who you are."