En español | "You look tired" is a phrase no 50-plus woman likes to hear. It's a loud and clear hint we're not coming across as fresh, healthy and attractive to others — and who needs that? Clearly some combination of stress, insomnia, the daily barrage of social media and news, family/work/health issues and a few too many late-night Netflix binges is throwing us serious shade. Here are nine ways to snap out of it with an at-home routine and a 911 fast fix.
1. Cold brew your face and bodyNo hitting the snooze button. Even if you feel and look like a zombie, a cold shower, steamy suds-up and icy rinse finish will get your senses tingling, smooth superficial creases from your face and lift any brain fog. Prefer languishing in a cozy bath? Do the cold, steamy, cool routine as you wash your face. The heated soothing cleanser part will still steam the lines and the cold will give your circulation a jolt.
2.Timing and technique matter. Think of a "tired" face like a deflated balloon, a "fresh" face like a round inflated one. If you lightly blot your face and immediately apply your hydrating cream or oil, skin gets plumped up. Wait five minutes, or 20, and you've lost that absorption window when emollients work best. Gently massage moisturizer into face, neck and décolletage for two or three minutes. This helps relax tension lines and gets a glow going.
3. Freshen eyes ASAPThe skin here is super thin and dry. It not only shows fatigue first, but amplifies it by going red, puffy, dark-circled and saggy. Clarify the "whites" with fast-acting drugstore drops like Lumify by Bausch & Lomb ($12, Target) or Alcon Naphcon-A Eye Drops ($11, target.com) both staples in A-list celeb makeup artist kits. Next a caffeine-packed eye cream like Garnier SkinActive Clearly Brighter Anti-Puff Eye Roller ($8, target.com) with vitamin C and caffeine, cool metallic roller tip soothes or Dickinson's Original Witch Hazel De-Puffing Eye Gel with caffeine and cucumber ($10, target.
com) — chilled if possible (keep it on call in the fridge) — to soothe and reduce swelling and discoloration. No drops or cream handy? Check the freezer for frozen peas or blueberries and apply the icy bag over closed lids for five minutes. Or try cooled tea bags.
When you look tired, stressed mature skin either gets temperamental (sensitive, ruddy and possibly prone to breakouts) or it can go desert dry (ashy, sallow), and expression lines and wrinkles seem to sink deeper. Either way, a creamy, dewy stick foundation with a wide range of 30-40 shades like Flesh Firm Flesh ThickStick Foundation ($18, ulta.com), Bobbi Brown Skin Foundation Stick ($46, sephora.com) or Hourglass Vanish Seamless Finish Foundation Stick ($46, sephora.com) pulls your face together fast. Pricey? Yes, but when you're aiming for authenticity instead of a mask, multipurpose coverage pays off. Using fingers, makeup brushes or sponges, dab and blend the foundation stick where and when needed on red, brown, blue or violet discolorations.
Instinct says go sunny and beachy — but hold it right there. Don’t reach for a self-tanner or bronzing powder. That's OK for your best days. But to restore a glow, grab a creamy pink or peach blush like Revlon Insta-Blush ($8, Target) or e.l.f. Beautifully Bare Blush ($4 target.com) and give cheeks a yoga-class flush in seconds.
Now's not the time for smoky dark eyes — black liner and dark brown shadows can look sexy at night in dim light, but they'll drag you down during the day. To restore sparkle, choose a nude palette in light to medium shades of mauve, peach and shimmery taupe like Maybelline Total Temptation Eyeshadow + Highlight Palette ($9, target.com) or NYX Professional Makeup Eyeshadow Palette in Soft & Rosy ($8, target.com). The combo of muted brown liner and mascara and pale shimmer on your upper lids restores shape and keeps the emphasis there. Skip makeup beneath the eyes, where liner and mascara can emphasize bags and crepey skin.
Pulling hair back or wearing it up can exacerbate a fatigued look, especially if hair is pulled too sleek and tight. Always let a few pieces float or cut feathery bangs if ponytails are your thing. Keep your hair loose, tousled and free and play up texture, wave or color. Yes, it's a distraction but one that works and makes you look lively, animated. Consider getting highlights around the face — it adds a frame of light just where you need it.
8. Wear cheerful vibrant colorsA white shirt is a classic brightener and black makes us feel slim and chic, but juicy colors like orange, red, raspberry, yellow and bright blue signal an energetic attitude. Ditto to splashy prints, stripes — even in a scarf. When feeling blah, throw on some color. It’s an instant pick-me-up.
Let's say you're already at work, a meeting, a party or a restaurant when a "frenemy" delivers the "you look tired" news.
Grab an ice cube and head for the restroom. Rub the cube (or pat hands splashed with icy water) over your face right over face makeup. It revs up circulation like a cold shower. Brush your teeth or rinse your mouth with fresh water. Yawn to relax your jaw and de-tense facial muscles that exacerbate lines. Bend at the waist, run your hands through your hair and flip it back. Unbutton your blouse or shirt to a V to show more neck and upper chest, roll up your sleeves to show forearms, or take off your jacket or cardigan and go sleeveless — don't let it all be about your face. If possible, take a brief brisk walk. Movement has a caffeine-like effect that makes you look more alert. Breathe deeply from your diaphragm, five counts out and five counts in. Sit and stand up straight — no slouching — to appear more energetic. Add some statement glasses and bling. And smile: instant facelift.
‘How are you?’ It’s something we’re asked countless times a day by friends, family and colleagues, and the resounding response is usually along the lines of, ‘I feel tired.
’ One of the many outcomes of the upheavals of the past year and the uncertainty of the months ahead is a feeling of perpetual tiredness—and that fatigue is written all over our faces as dullness, dark circles and angry, misbehaving skin.
“This ongoing situation is having numerous indirect effects on our skin,” says Dr Anjali Mahto, a consultant dermatologist at Skin55 in London. “Many of us are suffering from increased levels of stress and anxiety, which means that not only are we feeling mentally tired, but levels of baseline chronic stress are affecting sleep patterns, resulting in physical tiredness and impacting the stress hormone, cortisol, aggravating any pre-existing skin conditions.”
It is the effects of stress that Noella Gabriel, co-founder and global president of Elemis, argues that we are noticing in our skin. “We need to understand that stress is not just something we go through, but something our skin has to contend with on a daily basis,” she says. “Our skin faces external stressors every single day, a fact that is then exacerbated by our own emotional stresses.
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So, even if we are sleeping well, the constant hum of stress that many of us are experiencing right now is causing us to feel tired and making our skin look fatigued in the process. Here’s what you can do about it, according to the experts.
“Around 9pm, as the day closes, the body prepares for sleep by producing melatonin, a powerful anti-inflammatory antioxidant,” explains Gabriel. “Melatonin helps to balance the circadian rhythm and counteract inflammation and oxidative stress, which are key players in ageing. If this process is interfered with by broken sleep, anxiety or stress, the body produces cortisol, which in turn prevents your skin from producing hyaluronic acid, its natural hydrator.” What all this means is, poor sleep can result in dry and dehydrated skin, leading to dullness and an impaired skin barrier.
With many of us working from home now and foregoing makeup, it’s tempting to skip an evening skincare routine, but if you do, you are missing out on an opportunity to support your skin’s repair mechanisms while you sleep.
In terms of the best products out there, Estée Lauder Advanced Night Repair takes advantage of your circadian rhythm and helps to even out skin tone and boost glow, while Elemis Ultra Smart Pro-Collagen Night Genius is clinically proven to help strengthen the skin’s protective barrier, so it can hold on to its own moisture better and minimise sensitivity. It has also been shown to hydrate skin over 72 hours. Both help to make you look more rested than you may feel.
“When my patients tell me they think they look tired, what they are often referring to are changes in the upper third of their face, especially around their eyes,” says Dr Mahto. “Their concerns can range from pigmentation or dark circles to fine or deep wrinkles, to hollowing due to volume loss and subsequent tear troughs.”
Team fatigue does not appear out of nowhere, it is always provoked by something: it accumulates in the same way that poison accumulates in the body when poisoned
Many managers work with people as if they always full of energy and active.
But what if the team members are close to overworking and losing their enthusiasm? Here are five tips for dealing with employees who are at their limits.
Any employee can be evaluated in numbers. Efficiency, usefulness for the company, efficiency, qualifications of an employee - all this can be assessed in points, translated into the language of dry statistics. The resource of an employee, the degree of his fatigue can also be assessed - this is where you need to start.
It is convenient to think of a human resource as a battery with a certain level of charge. For an average employee, it is charged by 45% (values are higher for top managers): this is a person who is motivated, he understands what he wants, and works for the result. But as you get tired, the charge level drops.
If the “charge” is at conditional 35%, a person loses the ability to competently plan time and respond to changes. At 20–30%, it switches to “automatic operation”, along a knurled track, without desire. At 15% or less, a person loses the will to live, this is already the level of medical depression.
Tired employees are usually at the level of 20-35%: they are able to work, but do not know why, they are poorly motivated, they do not want to be promoted. A lot of things annoy them, or vice versa, they become indifferent to everything, they may consider themselves incompetent. With such employees it is necessary to work individually. After all, if you tell tired employees at a general meeting that new tasks are coming, they will react negatively: “nothing will work and will not work.” A personal meeting is distinguished by a safe atmosphere: it will be easier for a person to accept changes, live them and get involved in work.
Most importantly, do not motivate tired employees, do not push them to accomplishment, they will perceive this as additional pressure.
In a normal situation, we focus on working with the team as a whole. Group meetings, group events - bringing people together into a single mechanism. With tired people, this approach does not work: to become part of the team, you need to give it a part of yourself. And a tired employee cannot give anything away, he does not have enough resources even for himself.
Therefore, start with individual meetings, work through each person's personal problems and difficulties separately. At the same time, at such meetings, you will be able to more accurately assess the resource of each employee, to form an optimally suitable strategy for working with him.
It is best to hold such meetings once a week and meet with every employee, even those who are full of energy and whose condition does not bother you. First, in the end, you still need to work with the whole team. Secondly, meetings with individuals can look like a “call on the carpet”, and if you meet with everyone, then they become the norm of the workflow.
Gradually, as you progress, you will be able to rely on the most energetic employees in the formation of the team. But at the initial stage, it is better to rely only on your ability to give a resource, because taking something from tired people is literally a crime in relation to the team.
Fatigue does not appear out of nowhere, it is always provoked by something, it accumulates in the same way as poison accumulates in the body during poisoning.
Accordingly, the first thing to do is to remove the “irritants”, that is, the reasons why fatigue began to accumulate. If this is not done, any attempts to restore the strength of tired people will be like trying to fill a barrel with a huge hole in the bottom with water: employees will continue to get more and more tired.
Almost all irritants are related to the psychology of the employee and his attitude to work. First of all, it is carelessness. A person simply does not pay attention to the very concept of fatigue: he concentrates on work tasks, on relationships in a team, on some kind of activity and does not follow his own resource. It’s worth starting with an explanation of the concept of a “battery”, an available resource for every tired employee. Use an individual approach: with some people, an emphasis on taking care of yourself will work well, with others who are team-oriented, it is worth saying that a tired person does not benefit the team.
Having explained that fatigue needs to be monitored, move on to the two main mistakes due to which it accumulates. The first is ignoring one's own needs, an attempt to adapt to the team. "Everyone around has time to do something , and I have to too." The desire to keep up with the team is commendable, but people often forget about their other workload. For example, today everyone went to the evening brainstorming on the project - and I have to go. And it doesn’t matter that everyone worked from twelve o’clock, and I came at eight and solved additional tasks. Teach people to correctly evaluate their strengths and their responsibility, to strive not for “everyone”, but for themselves.
The second mistake is the habit of “not tired = not working”. People work until they get tired. But this fatigue will accumulate day after day, as a result, the “battery” will not have time to recharge and sit down.
The solution is simple: abandon fatigue as a marker and evaluate the success of work on a certain day on closed tasks.
By removing the causes of fatigue, you will prevent its further accumulation - the “battery” will stop discharging further. But it is necessary not only to stop fatigue, but to return a person to the original, energetic state: “charge the battery”. Therefore, the standard workload is not suitable now. We need to reduce the complexity of tasks so that people have time to recover.
And here it is very important not to simplify the tasks themselves: many employees, due to their personal qualities, will not be ready to switch to a “sparing regime”, they will be eager to give themselves to the company and prove their usefulness, so we recommend simplifying not the tasks, but the approach to solving them .
Try to load tired employees with things they already know, things that can be solved in a few clear steps. If the solution to a problem can be painlessly simplified (for example, to refuse additional brainstorming sessions), do it. And the battery will start charging. It is also very important to emphasize the moment of achieving a result, victory. At the stage of simplifying the process, when you have already had initial conversations with employees, people already understand that they are tired, and many feel uncomfortable because of this, they believe that they are letting the team down. You need to show them that they bring value to the team: they take on tasks and successfully cope with them.
As a rule, the activity of a team is a constant work on oneself.
Brainstorming, learning new methods, practices and techniques, constantly striving for something new... Forget it. For a month or two, while the team is being restored.
Eliminate the "excess" from the working and creative process - everything that you can do without. One main goal. Simple processes. No emphasis on self-organization - tired people need support, they need a leader who is ready to direct their efforts. And when they recover and get stronger, it will be possible to return to the usual multifaceted work.
The return should also be gradual: make the load more difficult step by step, adding new elements to the work one by one. In no case do not rush, if you suddenly notice that with the addition of the next task, people stopped coping, they began to get tired again, carefully reduce the load to the previous level and stay at this stage longer.
Home - Social networks - 14 reasons why you are always tired
Lack of sleep isn't the only reason you might feel overwhelmed. Some everyday habits that are present in your life imperceptibly exhaust you both physically and mentally.
1. You skip a workout when you feel tired
Skipping a workout to save energy is one habit that works against you. A University of Georgia study found that people who engage in physical activity at least three times a week feel much more alive and don't tire as quickly.
Regular strength exercises increase endurance, enable the circulatory system to work more efficiently. Oxygen is delivered faster and in large quantities to organs and tissues.
So the next time you're lounging on the couch, consider that if you took a walk down the street instead, you'd be a lot more energetic tomorrow.
2. You drink too little water
Even if you're only 2% short of your ideal water level, it's already taking a toll on your energy levels, says Amy Goodson, a nutritionist at the Sports Medicine Clinic in Texas. Dehydration leads to a lack of blood, making the blood thicker. This makes your heart work less efficiently. It slows down. Muscles experience interruptions in the supply of oxygen and nutrients.
How do you know how much water to drink? According to Goodson's recommendations, you need to measure your weight in kilograms and divide it by 30 - this will give you the number of liters you need to drink per day.
3. You are consuming too little iron
Iron deficiency in the body can make you feel lethargic, irritable, weak. It can be very difficult for you to focus on work.
This is a consequence of the lack of oxygen in the muscles and cells, says Goodson.
To reduce the risk of anemia, start eating more iron-rich foods. These are lean beef, beans, eggs (with yolk!), dark green leafy vegetables, nuts. For maximum effect, you need to mix them with foods rich in vitamin C: it improves the absorption of iron.
4. You are a perfectionist
Perfection is impossible. Let's face it: you've known this for a long time.
If perfectionism pushes you to push yourself to the limit and constantly take extracurriculars, it will eventually wear you out, says Irene Levin, professor of psychiatry at New York University.
"You set unrealistic goals for yourself - and you always have a reason to be dissatisfied with yourself," she says.
The expert recommends using only close goals, setting clear deadlines for them and learning to work without paying attention to distractions. And remember Parkinson's law: "Work takes up all the time allotted for it.
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5. You make an elephant out of a fly
If you constantly assume that you're going to be fired when your boss calls you to the mat, or if you're scared by the prospect of riding a bike because you're afraid of getting into an accident, this is also a very important part of your chronic fatigue.
Worry drains your brain reserves and literally paralyzes you, Levine says. If you find yourself having bad thoughts, take a deep breath and ask yourself: how likely is it that this worst-case scenario will happen?
To beat anxiety, you will have to love being outdoors, meditating, exercising, and connecting with other people.
6. You skip breakfast
Food is fuel for your body. When you sleep, your body continues to use dinner to pump oxygen and nutrients into your cells.
And when you wake up, you simply have to charge yourself with breakfast. If you skip it, you will almost certainly feel sluggish until lunchtime.
"Breakfast is fire for your metabolism. If you skip it, your metabolism slows down," says Goodson.
A nutritionist recommends breakfast foods that include whole grains, lean proteins, and healthy fats. For example, oatmeal or a peanut butter sandwich. Suitable fruits, dairy products, eggs, toast, yogurt.
7. You eat unhealthy food
Almost all semi-finished products are loaded to capacity with sugar, salt and food additives. This makes them high glycemic foods. This indicator measures the rate at which carbohydrates are converted into sugar in the blood.
Constant jumps in sugar levels up (when you eat a sweet bun with a cup of tea in the office) and down (after an hour and a half, when it is completely processed) make you feel forever tired.
8. You find it difficult to say "no"
People often want to please others so much that they act at the expense of their own energy and happiness. Even worse, they hold resentment and anger.
But in the end, if your boss asks you to work on Sunday and this clause is not in your contract, then you can always say no. You will be surprised how much easier your life can become if you stop spending half a day each day helping or keeping your annoying co-workers company.
Susan Albers, a licensed clinical psychologist at The Cleveland Clinic, recommends practicing saying "no" out loud when you're driving alone in your car to work. If you repeat this word out loud regularly, it will become easier to say it.
9. You have a dirty office
Old papers and cups on the table, rubbish underfoot and on the desks of colleagues - all this limits your ability to concentrate and limits your brain's ability to process information. This was proven by a study conducted at Princeton University.
“When you finish today, make sure you leave after you have tidied up your desk. All your things should be in their places - and preferably not on the table, but in the nightstand,” the authors of the study recommend.
If your office doesn't have a cleaning lady, set up a duty schedule. Garbage really kills productivity.
10. You work without holidays
Checking email while you're lying by the pool puts you at risk of burnout, says Professor Lombardo of Princeton. On vacation, you need to stop using working gadgets and programs - this is the only way you can completely relax, unwind and return to the office refreshed.
"If you take breaks more often, you will become a more creative, productive and efficient person," says Lombardo.
11. You drink one or two glasses of wine before going to bed
Alcohol seems like a good way to unwind before bed, but it can have serious side effects. It depresses the central nervous system and causes sedation, says Allen Toufig, MD and director of the New York Academy of Neurology.
Alcohol has the opposite effect of sleep. It causes a surge of adrenaline in the body.
"By drinking before bed, you sabotage the positive effects of it.
You can often wake up in the middle of the night after you drink and go to bed," says the doctor. And recommends not drinking later than three to four hours before bedtime.
12. You check email and social media in bed
The bright light from your smartphone or tablet disrupts your natural circadian rhythm and suppresses the production of melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate sleep and wake cycles. Toufig recommends not using LCD gadgets two hours before bedtime.
Well, if you can’t afford this, then at least make sure that the screen is at a distance of more than 14 centimeters from the eyes. This will reduce its negative effect.
13. You stay on caffeine all day
Research shows that coffee is only good for the early morning. If you drink more than three cups of this drink a day, then it seriously disrupts your biorhythms.
Caffeine, in particular, blocks adenosine, a substance that requires you to get some sleep.
