The end of April: for most people, it’s a beautiful time with birds singing, warming temperatures, and sunny days. But for college students, it’s several days of all-nighters, binge-eating, and mental breakdowns. The struggle IS indeed real when it comes to surviving the last few weeks of classes and finals, and from the breakouts, dark circles, and zombie eyes we see all over campus, we know the beauty struggle is real too. There’s no way we can expect to get a full 8 hours of sleep every night, eat clean foods, AND keep up with our healthy beauty regimens at the height of academic crunch time, so outward beauty is going to have to take a back seat for a few weeks. But inward beauty—especially the beauty of a healthy, happy mind—definitely has to become a priority.
Mental health is a huge component of being beautiful inside and out. How you take care of your mind affects how you take care of your body. If you allow stress and anxiety to negatively impact your thoughts, you will also inevitably allow negativity to affect how you feel about yourself. Those all-too-familiar doubts, fears of failure, and drops in self-confidence we experience at the end of each semester are all results of stress overpowering our minds. Only by learning to beautify our minds through healthy, ugly thought-banishing care can we really start to experience a self-love that radiates from the inside out.
Photo Credits: Courtney Bailey
There are a few simple, practical ways you can nurture mental health on your own. Since Earth Day was yesterday and that “boho vibe” was all over social media, I was inspired to share three of my favorite holistic, “hippie” methods that work wonders for de-stressing and soothing your mind.
1. Meditation
No mental health care list would be complete without meditation. This is probably the #1 best thing you can do to beautify your mind. There are hundreds of techniques and methods for practicing meditation, and getting started can initially seem very overwhelming and almost mysterious. If you’re like me and most college students, you have no idea what a mantra or chakra is, and you really don’t have the time to research ancient breathing practices in the middle of studying for finals. Though some meditation rituals can be more complex, at its core the practice is actually fairly simple. The goal of meditation is to quiet the mind and force it to focus on only one thing for a set time period. This helps control the stress and raging anxious thoughts inside us. You can choose a word, a phrase like “ohm”, a mental picture, or anything else that you like for your mental object of focus. Set your alarm for 5-10 minutes, close your eyes, and gently force your mind to focus only on your object for the entire time allotment as you breathe deeply. And that’s it! You’ve just meditated. Keep this practice up once a day, and you’ll be amazed at how much more calm and efficient your mind is in high-stress situations
Photo Credits: Courtney Bailey
2. Essential oils
If you use Pinterest or know any suburban blogger mom, you are probably very familiar with the essential oil craze. Personally, I’m still a bit skeptical about all their supposed healing powers, but for sensory calming, they are pretty magical. The best way you can employ essential oils for mental health is to use them in a diffuser. An essential oil diffuser is usually fairly affordable, makes your room smell nice, AND helps relax you. Why wouldn’t you want to invest in a product like that? A few tried-and-true oils that help create those same “good vibrations” we feel walking into Earthbound Trading Company are: lavender, frankincense, Roman chamomile, ylang ylang, and peppermint oil. These oils are famous for their mental health properties and are extremely effective at combating stress, anxiety, and even depression. You can use these oils alone or buy scent blends that combine them with other soothing oils.
3. Teas
Sleep-deprived college students always turn to coffee for headache relief, pick-me-ups, and de-stressing. However, coffee is what the book Eat Pretty would call a “beauty betrayer.” Caffeine is not only bad for your outer beauty (talk about a complexion wrecker!), but it can disrupt mental health by creating caffeine crashes that lead to greater anxiety, stress, and headaches. Instead, a better beverage for mental health is herbal, non-caffeinated tea. Not a huge fan of black teas? Don’t worry, because these teas generally taste much sweeter, fruitier, and more floral than black teas. Just like with essential oils, there are dozens of tea flavors and combinations to choose from. However, my personal favorites include: chamomile, lavender, peppermint, and anything citrus (orange, lemon, etc.). You’ll notice that a lot of these tea flavors are the same as essential oils I just listed. These scents and flavors are doubly effective when diffused and steeped, and you’ll find that drinking lavender tea in a room that smells like lavender is probably one of the most relaxing feelings in the world.
Naturally and Beautifully Me 