How To: Take Care of Yourself

Let's be honest: it is sad if you need an article to tell you how to take good care of yourself. This should be common knowledge or gained from healthy habits you have learned throughout your life. Yet, I am creating an article on this. This is mostly some things to help you go the extra mile- to care for yourself more than just the basics. Oh, and an FYI these are mostly tips for females (as I am one) but I think a good amount of these can still slightly be applied to guys as well.

Face:

I don't do much to my face daily unless I was wearing makeup. You need to remove makeup before you go to bed every day because if you don't it can actually cause acne. I normally wash my face without thinking about it when I shower every morning. I will often get out of the shower and use a facial cleanser, but I don't do that every day. I will also use a face mask about twice a week. If I am dealing with more breakouts than I normally do, I will use microdermabrasion on the affected area. Depending on if I want to give myself an extra treatment on an at-home spa day or if I just wanted to go the extra mile, I will fill up my sink with hot water and I will steam my face over that for a few minutes with a clean towel over my head to trap the heat in the mini spa I made. I have found all of those things that I mentioned above to be really effective for me. 

Body:
Similar to what I was mentioning before, I will shower every morning. I chose this time for a few reasons- I am a morning person, a shower helps wake me up if I am not feeling ready to get up, and I don't feel like I can do anything well until I have showered. I have also found that my hair does better when I shower in the morning. I take a nice 'long' shower about 15 minutes long. Other than that I do not do much for my body as a whole. Every few days I will shave in the shower, or I will sit on the edge of the tub wearing shorts and use the water that comes from the tub to get my legs wet. I use conditioner or shower gel to get my legs soapy before I shave because this helps me get fewer cuts. Yet, I understand this step is not needed. 

Hair:
I will be talking about my specific case of what I deal with in my hair, but if you have other concerns with your hair type, I can try to add that here later. I have thick blonde hair that has never been colored or bleached. I have oily hair and a low to moderate amount of dandruff. I have been using Neutrogena's T-Gel to help with my dandruff and I have found that it helps my oily hair as well. I will rotate between using that, simply rinsing my hair instead of using shampoo or conditioner, and using the 'normal' 2-in-1 shampoo that my family keeps in the house when I shower every morning. It is crazy that it took me so long in my life, but I have recently seen the importance with really scrubbing in the shampoo before rinsing it out, and I have learned that if I can avoid it, I need to not use conditioner on my scalp or the roots of my hair, but only at the bottom. This was a challenge because conditioner used to be the only thing that would detangle my hair, but now that I scrub the shampoo I have found that my hair does not tangle at all anymore. 

Clothes:
Care about what you wear. Sad truth: I used to not. I would wake up every day and literally grab the first shirt and pants I could find. Now, I am a cleaner so it was never the first "clean enough" clothes I could find, but they rarely matched and they just looked disgusting on me. About the time I was learning all these other things, I learned how to care about what I wear. This is not for everyone, but a lot of my wardrobe has changed to more fancy or pretty outfits- especially my shirts. I care about how I look and I make sure that my fashion expert sister and mother think it looks okay together as well.