And I think a glow up gets talked about like it is purely physical. Better skin, better body, better outfits. And while none of that is wrong, I have always believed the real glow up is something that happens underneath all of that. The kind that changes how you carry yourself in a room. How you talk to yourself in the mirror. How you feel when you are alone and there is nobody watching.
That kind of glow up does not happen from a new moisturiser. It happens from how you spend your days.
So this summer I made a list. Not a checklist of things to achieve or a routine to follow perfectly. Just a collection of things some soft, some intentional, some just quietly joyful that I genuinely believe will make you look back at September and feel like you actually lived this one.
Here are all thirteen of them.
✨ Save this post you will want to come back to it all summer long.
1. Watch The Sunrise Phone Nowhere Near You
I am not going to tell you to do this every day. I am going to tell you to do it once, properly, and see what it does to you.
Wake up before the sun. Make yourself something warm. Go somewhere you can actually see the sky a rooftop, a window that faces east, outside if you can manage it. And then just watch. No phone. No photos. No documenting it for anyone. Just you and the sky doing its thing.
There is something about watching the world go from dark to light without a screen between you and it that feels almost sacred. Like you caught the day before anyone else got to it. Like the morning made you a quiet promise that today could be whatever you decide to make it.
It will not fix everything. But it will remind you that mornings can feel like something other than rushing and scrolling and already being behind. That alone is worth the early alarm.
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2. Start A Memory Jar Right Now
This is one of those habits that sounds small and turns out to be one of the most meaningful things you did all year.
Find a jar any jar, it does not need to be aesthetic. Keep it somewhere you will see it every day. And every time something good happens something that made you laugh, something that surprised you, a moment that felt worth keeping write it down on a small piece of paper and put it in the jar.
It does not have to be a big thing. The good conversation you had. The meal that turned out better than expected. The evening that felt golden for no particular reason. The small win nobody else saw but you knew mattered.
At the end of summer, open the jar and read everything inside. I promise you you will be shocked by how much happened. How much was good. How much you had completely forgotten about because you were too busy moving on to the next thing to let it land.
The memory jar teaches you to notice. And noticing is one of the greatest skills you will ever build.
3. Try One New Healthy Recipe And Actually Make It Yourself
.jpeg "Try One New Healthy Recipe")
Not something you have made a hundred times. Something genuinely new. A recipe you bookmarked and never tried, a cuisine you have always been curious about, something with an ingredient you have never cooked with before.
The cooking is part of it but it is not the whole thing. The whole thing is spending an hour doing something with your hands, something real and tactile and completely disconnected from a screen, and ending up with something you actually made. Something warm and nourishing that came from your own effort.
There is a specific kind of satisfaction in feeding yourself something you cooked from scratch. It is quiet and domestic and deeply underrated. It makes you feel capable in a way that very few things do. And one new recipe is all it takes to remind yourself that trying new things is almost always less intimidating than the idea of trying new things.
4. Build A Simple Skincare Routine You Actually Stick To
Not the ten-step kind. Not the kind that requires a bathroom shelf full of things you will use twice and forget. A simple, honest, three-step routine that you actually do every single day without making it complicated.
Cleanser. Moisturiser. Sunscreen in the morning. That is genuinely it to start. The magic is not in the products it is in the consistency. A basic routine done every day for three months will do more for your skin than an elaborate one done sporadically for a week.
Summer specifically is when your skin needs the most attention. The heat, the sweat, the sun your skin is working hard and it deserves some real, consistent care in return. Treat your skincare like a ritual rather than a chore and it stops feeling like something you have to do and starts feeling like something you actually look forward to.
5. Work On Your Dreams A Little Every Single Day
Not a big dramatic session where you overhaul everything and burn out by day three. Just a little. Every day. Without skipping.
Fifteen minutes on the thing you actually want to build. The blog post, the skill, the project, the plan whatever it is that lives at the back of your mind as the thing you are always about to start. Start it this summer. Not perfectly, not all at once, just a little every day.
Because here is what I have learned and what I wrote about recently in a post that still feels very close to me ready is a feeling that never fully arrives. You will not feel ready this summer any more than you felt ready last summer. The only difference between the girl who built something and the girl who kept waiting is that the first girl started before she was ready and kept going anyway.
Fifteen minutes today. Fifteen minutes tomorrow. By the end of summer you will have something real to show for it.
6. Audit Who You Are Spending Your Energy On
This one is less fun to talk about and more important than almost anything else on this list.
Energy is not unlimited. The people you spend time with either fill you up or drain you and most of us, if we are honest, have at least a few people in our lives who consistently leave us feeling worse than before. Not because they are bad people necessarily. Just because the dynamic does not work. Because the exchange is one-sided. Because you always leave the conversation feeling smaller.
A glow up is not just about what you add to your life. It is about what you quietly, kindly, firmly stop tolerating in it. Spend this summer paying attention to how you feel after spending time with different people. The ones who make you feel light and seen and like the best version of yourself more of them. The ones who consistently do the opposite less. It really can be that simple.
7. Write A Letter To Your Future Self
Sit down with a pen and paper not your phone, actual paper and write a letter to yourself one year from now.
Tell her where you are right now. What you are hoping for. What you are afraid of. What you are working toward. What you wish she will remember about this exact season of your life. Ask her questions. Leave her things to look forward to. Be honest with her in a way you might not be honest with anyone else.
Then seal it. Put it somewhere safe. Set a reminder on your phone to open it exactly one year from today.
When you open it, you will cry. I am almost certain of this. Not because things went wrong but because you will see how much you have grown from the person who wrote it, how some of your fears dissolved on their own, how some of your hopes came true in ways you did not expect. It is one of the most moving things you can do for yourself and it costs nothing except honesty and thirty minutes.
8. Take Yourself On A Solo Day Trip
.jpeg "Take Yourself On A Solo Day Trip")
Somewhere you have never been. Or somewhere you have always loved but never gone alone.
No plans that depend on anyone else. No waiting for someone to be free. Just you, deciding where you want to go and then going there on your own terms, at your own pace, stopping when you want to stop and staying as long as you feel like staying.
Solo trips have a way of showing you things about yourself that you cannot see when other people are around. Who you are when nobody is watching. What you naturally gravitate toward when nobody else's preference is part of the equation. How capable and independent and genuinely good at being alone you actually are which, for most of us, is much more than we give ourselves credit for.
You do not need to go far. Even a neighbourhood you have never explored, a park on the other side of the city, a café you have been meaning to try just go alone and see what the day becomes.
9. Talk To Yourself Like Someone You Actually Love
This might be the most quietly radical thing on this entire list.
Pay attention this week to the way you talk to yourself inside your own head. The commentary that runs all day about how you look, what you did wrong, whether you are doing enough, whether you are enough. If you said those things to a friend, to someone you loved, they would be devastated. And yet we say them to ourselves without even noticing.
Positive self talk is not about pretending everything is perfect or forcing fake affirmations you do not believe. It is about choosing to extend to yourself the same basic kindness and patience you would give to someone you care about. Catching the harsh internal voice and replacing it not with a lie, just with something gentler and more fair.
The glow up that changes everything starts inside. Before the skin routine, before the habits, before any of it the way you speak to yourself is the foundation everything else is built on. Build it well.
10. Have A Solo Picnic Date Just You
Pack something to eat simple is fine, a few things you actually like. Bring a book or a journal or just yourself. Find a patch of grass or a quiet outdoor spot and sit there and have a proper meal outside, alone, without your phone as your company.
It sounds small. It feels genuinely luxurious.
There is something about treating yourself to an experience setting it up intentionally, showing up for yourself the way you would show up for someone you wanted to impress that shifts your relationship with your own company. You start to enjoy being with yourself. And that, I think, is one of the most important things a person can develop. The ability to be alone without feeling lonely. To be your own good company.
Do this at least once this summer. Make it a whole thing. You deserve the effort.
11. Build A Terrarium Or Start Taking Care Of One Plant
Before you scroll past this one hear me out.
There is something that happens when you are responsible for keeping something alive. A small, quiet accountability that shows up every day. You water the plant. You check if it has enough light. You notice when something is wrong and you try to fix it. And slowly, over weeks, you watch something grow because of the consistent small care you gave it.
That is not just gardening. That is a lesson in what consistency actually looks like applied to something real.
A terrarium is even better you build the whole tiny world yourself, which is its own kind of satisfying creative project. But even one small plant on your windowsill is enough. Something green and alive that you tend to. It grounds you in a way that is hard to explain until you have done it.
12. Take A Full DIY Spa Day Give It A Whole Afternoon
Not a rushed twenty minutes. A proper afternoon. Block it in your calendar like it is an appointment with someone important because it is. The someone important is you.
A face mask you have been meaning to try. A long shower with the good products you save for special occasions and then never use. Doing your nails slowly and without rushing. Putting on music that makes you feel like you are somewhere better. Moisturising properly, completely, like you have all the time in the world because for this one afternoon you do.
The point is not the treatments. The point is the deliberate act of setting aside time that is entirely for your own comfort and care. Of treating yourself like someone worth the effort. In a world that is constantly pulling your attention outward, a spa afternoon is you pulling it back back to your own body, your own comfort, your own quiet enjoyment of being alive.
13. Create Your Summer Bucket List
This is the one to do today. Not tomorrow. Today, before summer slips into one of those blurs where weeks pass and nothing felt intentional and you cannot quite remember what you did with all that time.
Grab a piece of paper and write down everything you want this summer to include. Big things, small things, free things, things that cost something, solo things, things with people you love. Write without filtering. Write everything that sounds good even if it sounds silly or impossible.
Then circle three things you are going to do this week. Three things. Not the whole list. Just three that are actually possible right now with what you have. Do those. Then circle three more.
A summer with a list is a summer with intention. And intention is what separates the summers you remember from the ones that just happened to you while you were busy looking at your phone.
This is the summer you actually show up for. Make the list. 🌸
A glow up is not a destination. It is not something you arrive at after enough face masks or early mornings or good habits. It is the slow, quiet accumulation of days where you chose yourself your growth, your joy, your peace over the easier option of just getting through it.
💬 Tell me in the comments which one of these are you doing first this summer? I want to know!
You do not have to do all thirteen things at once. Pick the ones that pull you. Start with two or three that genuinely excite you and build from there. Let this summer be the one you look back on in September and feel something real about not guilt, not regret, but that warm, quiet satisfaction of a season that was actually, properly, entirely lived.
And to help you actually plan out your week, track your habits, and stay consistent through every single day of your reset I made something for you.
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