For our outgoing angel Alessandra, maintaining a positive outlook on life is the key to keeping up her busy lifestyle. Even Victoria’s Secret Angels sometime need a pick-me-up when life gets particularly rough. Alessandra’s #foreveronvacation lifestyle isn’t just physical, but mental too! Creating good habits for your mental well-being serves as a lifeboat for life’s precarious ups and downs. That’s why we took a look into some of Alessandra’s key mental well-being routines.
Make Time for the Important People
Whether she’s jetting off to Europe, shooting a commercial, or prepping for a national ad campaign, Alessandra is most well known to spend her time cherishing friends and family. Juggling your own personal goals with the needs and schedules of others can be challenging, but at the end of the day, it’s these people that make your hard work feel paid off. Making time for those who matter is like an energy recharge for your life, as it provides reward that cannot be earned any other way. Plus, when times are particularly tough, it’ll be these people who will help you through it! Alessandra is always mixing in time with her kids with her hectic model career; it’s just about keeping things fun and interesting! Surrounding yourself with positive energy means generating positivity throughout all aspects of your life.
Prioritize Exercise
For Alessandra, a consistent exercise routine isn’t just about keeping that Victoria’s Secret body, but is also about keeping her head strong and emotions lifted, too! Exercise has been proven to provide a multitude of benefits for mental health, including an increase of endorphins (your happy hormone!). If you’re not that into exercise, just incorporate fun activities into your routine. Going on a hike, taking a swim, playing volleyball with friends, whatever it may be that gets you outdoors and enjoying yourself will make exercise feel easy to prioritize. Just be sure to mix it up with more intensive workouts, such as our fave Victoria’s Secret Angels workout – Alessandra swears by it!
Laugh It Off!
The quickest fix for the blues? A good hearty laugh will do you good! As the responsibilities of adulthood keep us grounded, it’s important to not take life too serious too often. When you take the time to enjoy the humor in the little things – the way that children often do – the weight of the world seems a lot less significant. If you have trouble getting out of your serious mode, try incorporating little “happy moments” throughout your day, like following some humorous Instagram accounts, or putting on a funny show at the end of a long day. Laughter is a sign of joie de vivre, and a few giggle sessions throughout your day will help keep you in that positive mindset.
Practice Gratitude
In our everyday pursuits, it’s easy to get mentally bogged down by all the things we need to do, we should do, or we want to do. The underlying notion here? That we are unsatisfied with where we are in any given moment. Taking the time to express gratitude in our day-to-day re-shifts the focus back onto the good in life and helps us stay grounded in the present. There will always be things to do and goals to achieve; practicing gratitude teaches us to live out the journey to its fullest.
Try starting off your day with naming 3 things you are grateful for with conviction. You can do this in the mirror when you first wake up; after all, you’re doing this for you, so make sure the person looking back believes in it. Another simple yet effective method is creating a gratitude journal. You can unwind at the end of the day and jot down the small moments that happened that gave you small bursts of joy. The best part about this method is you’ll have something to flip back through when you’re having a particularly bad day. And finally, taking time to say thank you to someone – even if only for something small – will give you and the other person an immediate boost. Positivity is infectious, so pass it along!
Breathe
As silly as it may sound, something as simple as controlling your breath can immediately quell stress in your mind. Often times, we become stressed out due to feeling overwhelmed or out of control. Our minds start to race and our breaths quicken, preventing oxygen from fully circulating throughout our system and hindering our ability to reason. By taking a few short moments to slow down and concentrate, you can take control of your stress and release it to make the issue immediately seem easier to digest.
Close your eyes, and focus on inhaling a long breath through your nose. Count to 3, visualize your paradise, or merely think “breathe”; do whatever you need to do to help your mind concentrate solely on your breath. Don’t let any thoughts other than your breath invade your mind. Exhale out of your mouth, and keep your lips slightly taut so that your breath leaves your mouth slowly and controlled. Repeat this several times. If it helps, think about inhaling positivity and exhaling negativity with each breath. When your breath is slowed and your head cleared, open your eyes; you’ll feel that energy lifted.