When insomnia began to ruin this happy sleeper’s nights, I tossed and turned for hours. After a few months of misery, I figured out it’s best to do what the experts suggest: Get up.

If I’m awake for more than 20 minutes, I throw back the covers and climb out of bed. Once I’m up for an hour or two, I’m usually able to go back to sleep.

So what to do during those wide-awake hours? Here are some creative suggestions for dealing with insomnia based on my experience.

Celebrate Kindness

Nothing can change your mood faster than spreading kindness. Get out your favorite notecards and write some encouraging words to someone who is shut-in, ill, lonely, or troubled.

When I was a teenager, I loved to decorate the back of the envelope after I sealed a letter. I’ve taken up that custom again. I use crayons, markers, or colored pencils and festoon the envelope with upbeat words and silly drawings.

Refreshments

In my early days of insomnia, I’d grab a handful of crackers, stand at the kitchen counter, and woof them down.

Here’s my snacking advice. If you decide to have a treat, put it on a plate, sit down, and enjoy it slowly, relishing the flavor. For a beverage, consider hot milk (my grandpa’s sleep remedy) splashed with chocolate chips.

Lists and More Lists

List making is a great way to engage your brain in happy thoughts. Jot down your favorite childhood foods, outfits you loved, kids in your seventh grade class, and the 20 most significant events of your girlhood.

Next, count your blessings. List the qualities you admire about each of your friends, your 50 favorite songs of all time, or the best books you’ve ever read. A festive notebook or journal adds to the fun of list making.

Creative Googling

I pick a topic I know nothing about and investigate! I’ve now studied why the sky is blue (to settle that issue for myself once and for all), the sex life of Victorian women, the invention of the vacuum cleaner, beach houses in Tahiti, and the life of Gloria Steinem (whom I respect for her brains and her grace).

The Junk Drawer

Straighten out that messy drawer. I’ve found a purple rubber worm, a pencil from the New York World’s Fair, tampons (haven’t needed them for over a decade), a pacifier (and my youngest child is 30), an expired driver’s license, a plethora of keys, the missing earring to a pair I adore, and my business card from 1998. What did I chuck and what did I keep? I’ll leave that up to your imagination.

If you are downsizing, why not use your sleepless nights to make some real progress? If you want some inspiration, these examples may help.

Appreciate the Night

Often, we’re so frustrated to be awake that we miss the joys of the night. Soak in the stillness. Study the sweet faces in the baby portraits on the wall or the elegant finials on your grandmother’s secretary.

Trace the pattern on the throw pillow with your finger; burrow deep in the softness of the afghan on the couch; note that the skin on your arm, despite your sixty years, is still smooth.

Sharpen. Polish. Straighten. Scrub

Sometimes a task that seems tedious in the daytime becomes a happy friend in the night. I’ve sharpened pencils, polished silver bracelets, and scrubbed the sink spotless. Best of all, I tidy up. When I come back downstairs the next morning, my kitchen and family room look a whole lot better than they did when I first went to bed, a refreshing reward for being awake in the middle of the night.

Are you dealing with insomnia? What are your best tips for dealing with the problem? What activities do you enjoy during those wide awake hours?

As a woman over 60, you have already lived a long life. You have likely fulfilled many of your practical goals. You may have married, raised children and had a satisfying career.

You have always put others first and, now that you are older, you may want a change of pace. You want to spend time on yourself – to visit with friends, travel the world, sleep in, read or simply watch television.

Is Your Life Everything that You Want It to Be?

But after a while, some of you may feel that something is missing. As you read books, you may think, “I could have written that.” As you go to an art show, you may wonder, “What if I tried to paint that?”

A wave of regret my wash over you. You wish you had painted when you were younger. You wish you had written a book or learned to play a musical instrument while there was still time. You have always felt that you had some artistic talent – you remember that as a child you liked to draw, or write stories, or perform in neighbourhood plays.

You may be longing to let these artistic talents flourish again, but you are afraid that you may have left it too late. You feel that you are too old and do not have the ability or energy to do it now. This is not true!

Life After 60 is the Perfect Time to Follow Your Passions

People have always created works of art and innovative projects well into old age. Many of them made their first attempts when they were well into their 60s, 70s and beyond. We have marveled at the works of elder pioneers like Grandma Moses and Millard Kaufman.

Their work reflects a warehouse of knowledge gained over a lifetime of learning and experience. This knowledge, researchers are finding, provides fertile ground for creativity. But the story does not end there.

We, as women over 60, all have a rich store of accumulated life experience. But now we know we have something more. Thanks to recent research, we know that our brains have the ability to form new neural pathways, and learn new skills up to a very old age.

Do You Know How Amazing the Aging Brain is?

Neuroscientists have now accepted that the brain has a quality referred to as “plasticity,” the quality that allows you to learn a language, a musical instrument, or take up an entirely new endeavor, no matter what your stage in life might be.

Shelley H. Carson, (Harvard University), has studied creativity and the aging brain. She says:

“These changes in the aging brain may make it ideally suited to accomplish work in a number of creative domains. So instead of promoting retirement at age 65, perhaps we as a society should be promoting transition at age 65: transition into a creative field where our growing resource of individuals with aging brains can preserve their wisdom in culturally-valued works of art, music or writing.”

Dr. David Galenson, who has conducted studies on creativity for the National Bureau of Economics, concludes:

“Recent research has shown that all the arts have had important practitioners of two different types – conceptual innovators who make their greatest contributions early in their careers, and experimental innovators who produce their greatest work later in their lives.”

These discoveries have dramatic implications for us – we realize now that creativity is not exclusively the domain of the young. We know that women over 60, who are beginning to explore an art form, can depend on many years of creativity.

We know that our talents and abilities are still there, inside us, just waiting to be awakened. Whether you are 60, 70, 80, or even 90, you can use your brain in such a way that this period in your life becomes your happiest and most productive.

By reawakening your creativity, you will capture the natural enthusiasm, energy, and wonder of youth. You will have bypassed the belief that you are too old—you will have taken the quantum leap over the laborious steps of rational thought, and into creativity.

Is it Possible to Find Your Creativity After 60?

Of course it is! It is still there, just as it always was. The difference is that, this time, it is enhanced by life experience—millions of rich, valuable impressions that you can draw on while you are expressing the medium you want to explore.

What Should You Try First?

Well, anything, actually! You don’t have to be the next Michelangelo, or Robert Frost. You just have to do something that stimulates your creative brain. Once you start, there can be no looking back.

Once you find your artistic and creative niche, you will wake up each morning, champing at the bit, anxious to get going. Nothing is beyond the realm of possibility. Nothing is impossible.

Here are some ideas:

• Write a piece of music
• Take a course in quilting
• Learn about medicinal herbs
• Learn a musical instrument
• Do something new for your health – learn yoga or tai chi
• Bake the perfect cake and ice it creatively
• Learn carpentry and build a birdhouse
• Learn the names of hundreds of perennials and start growing them
• Write a poem or a story about your childhood
• Take a class in dramatic performance or water colour

Opening your mind to the creative process will open new channels. It will wake you up and give your life new meaning. Once you have fulfilled an idea, you will be inspired to try another one. You are now on a creative path that will take you into new worlds of experience!

Combining knowledge into novel and original ideas is what the creativity is all about. Women over 60 have both: knowledge and the capacity for original thought. Who knows what can happen next?

“Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.” Betty Friedan

Do you find yourself doodling, or sketching, while watching television? Do you daydream, creating scenarios of dramatic situations in your mind? What are your creative passions? Please join the conversation.

When Chrissy Teigen shares her favorite makeup or skincare products, we listen. So when she took to Instagram Live to share all the must-have beauty essentials she packs for trips. In a towel and a face mask, Teigen showed her favorite pimple stickers, the Zitsticka Killa that are actually now available on Amazon. Chances are, you use pimple patches too and you might want to get your hands on these.

After sharing everything in her makeup bag, Teigen got down to skincare and held up Zitsticka Killa. “They are so awesome,” she said. “They’re these little patches with these little, not needles, but pokeys and you put them into your pimple and leave it on all day or whatever you want and it dries out your pimpke and I love it.”

Those “pokeys” are actually 24 microneedles that dissolve into the pimple. Killa is different from regular hydrocolloid patches in that there are also acne-fighting ingredients infused within. In this case, there’s salicylic acid to kill bacteria, niacinamide to reduce inflammation and hyaluronic acid to retain moisture.

Our mission at STYLECASTER is to bring style to the people, and we only feature products we think you’ll love as much as we do. Please note that if you purchase something by clicking on a link within this story, we may receive a small commission of the sale.

Zitsticka.

Buy: Zitsticka Killa $29

Zitsticka Killa is for those new, up-and-coming zits that haven’t yet come to the service. A flat hydrocolloid patch will work well for those. Each Killa box comes with eight microneedle Killa patches and eight priming Cleana swabs used to prep the zit before patch application. You won’t get that satisfying white gunk in the patch, but instead you’ll be shocked by how well these shrink a swollen, red spot. You might need to use another one the next night to keep the pimple from ever becoming mature in the first place.

Dolores Catania’s Dress on the Yacht

Real Housewives of New Jersey Season 11 Episode 10 Fashion

ICYMI when BBH’s Faryn posted it back in September, Dolores Catania’s floral off the shoulder dress on the yacht on tonight’s #RHONJ had to be mentioned again.  The Jersey Housewife looks absolutely stunning in the piece providing the perfect spring inspo for the rest of us. And if you missed this post the first time, the sold out status might just be enough to convince you to subscribe to our mailing list at the bottom of this page and get all of the news on her dresses hot off the presses.

The Realest Housewife,

Big Blonde Hair

Click Here to See her Rebecca Taylor Dress

Click Here To Shop her Carmen Sol Tote

Click Here to See her Alexandre Birman Wedges

Photos & Info: @DoloresCatania

Originally posted at: Dolores Catania’s Dress on the Yacht