My Nighttime De-stress Routine

It’s been quite a busy few weeks for me. I’m planning to apply to graduate school later this year, so I’ve been studying for the Psychology GRE subject test (that I’m taking in April), picking out what schools I want to apply to, planning other extracurriculars I want to undertake before applying, and working a full time job. Phew. On top of all that, I’m PMSing like a mofo, and just generally felt super grumpy and burnt out today. After studying for about an hour, I just said “fuck it,” and decided to focus on myself a bit.

I recently picked up some bath bombs from Marshalls that I hadn’t tried before tonight. These are by Organik Botanik Australia, and they’re pretty standard bath bombs. They smell like jasmine, and the amount of scent is just enough to power through but not be overwhelming. The bombs fizzed, but they were less bombastic (hehe pun intended) than many Lush bombs. This bomb reminded me of Lush’s Butterball bomb in that it’s just white and just kind of fizzes and that’s pretty much it. The scent is relaxing though, and I enjoyed taking a bath with it.

I read Lisa Eldridge’s Face Paint during my bath, and I’m seriously enjoying this read. Lisa is a beautifully eloquent writer and the images in the book are beautiful and provide a very interesting look into the history and proliferation into the mainstream of makeup. I’ve been getting major 1920s and Old Hollywood inspiration from this book, so someone needs to take me out to some jazz party or cocktail lounge where I can be all extra and do my makeup like Josephine Baker or Marilyn Monroe.

After I write this post, I’m going to spend some extra time on my skin tonight and go through my whole routine – double cleanse, acids, essence, sheet mask, moisturizer, and facial oil. My skin has been having it’s usual pre-period freak out, so that’s lovely (sarcasm). I’m also going to make sure to actually moisturize the rest of my body as well.

I did some yoga earlier today because I was so stiff from sitting at work, but I may do some pre-bedtime yoga tonight as well. I love doing yoga along to Yoga With Adriene’s videos on YouTube, and she has a particularly great video on Yoga for Insomnia that helped me out when I had trouble sleeping before and just generally puts me in a calmer headspace before bed. In addition, I like to do some writing to get my thoughts out onto paper, often in the form of a list but sometimes just in a stream of conciousness blurb.

Hope you are all having relatively relaxed weeks and sleeping soundly!