9 Ways to Feel Fabulous in Your Fifties

To be vibrant and full of vitality is an important part of your overall wellbeing. Here’s how to feel fabulous in your fifties and beyond!

Your fifties are a time of exciting transformation. It’s easy to believe that youth is behind you and that the best years are over, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

In fact, embracing this stage of life with energy and optimism can open up possibilities you might never have imagined.

It’s about reimagining what vibrant living looks like because you can absolutely feel fabulous in your fifties and beyond.

Being in your fifties is the beginning of a new phase of life. We slowly begin to acknowledge that we probably have less time on Earth than we’ve had before.

It’s a sobering thought and often women begin to draw back from life believing that all the best is behind them. But don’t fall for that.

You can absolutely feel fabulous at any age!

Five Take Aways From This Post

• Your mental and emotional well-being are essential to feeling fabulous at any age.
• Prioritize self-care by nurturing your whole self, not just focusing on the things you want to “fix.”
• Embrace daily routines that nourish your body and soul, from exercise to mindfulness practices.
• Engage in social connections, both deep and light, are vital for your health and happiness.
• A balanced, nourishing diet supports long-term vitality, helping you feel good every day.

Believing in your ability to feel fabulous is the key to unlocking the full potential of this time in life.

When you begin to believe that your best life is behind you, your mood begins to plummet and you cling tightly to your comfort zone trying to protect yourself and all you hold dear.

This creates a sense of being stuck, your energy levels might drop, and maybe even your overall health begins to decline.

I want you to know, that this really can be a great time of life and you can feel excited and grateful for your years you have after 50. You probably have decades left!

To be honest, even if I only had one year to live, I’d still want it to be as fabulous as possible.

The foundation for having a vibrant and purposeful life is to take care of your mental health and well-being. When you do this, everything else can get better. 

Often, we try to do this in bits and pieces without putting things into context and taking care of our whole self. 

For example, women will try to lose weight with the only goal being to see a lower number on the scale. While your physical health is important, losing weight in itself doesn’t necessarily add to your overall health and mental well-being.

Most women attempt to lose weight by hating themselves or feeling like they aren’t enough as they are. This results not in a fit thin body, but more often in another failed attempt to lose weight and a sense of hopelessness.

So, to feel fabulous it’s important to take care of your ENTIRE self, not just try to fix the parts you hate. This is about how to love yourself into feeling amazing.

Lovingly Tend Your Mental Well-Being

Tending your mental well-being is more than doing Wordle and crossword puzzles. There’s nothing wrong with that at all! But to create healthy mental health, it’s also important to push yourself a bit.

My 92-year-old mom lives in a retirement community and from what I can tell, mental well-being is the most important thing you can have when you are older; along with physical health and mobility.

Why is it important to think of being in your eighties, nineties, or even beyond. Because the way you live now will definitely impact the way you age and how you experience it.

Below you are going to read about seven ways to improve and protect your mental well-being and mental health. 

How You Are Neglecting Yourself Now

Before I get to what to do, I want to check and see if you see yourself in any of the following scenarios. These are the most common things I see with my clients.

• Overworking
• Putting other people’s needs first
• Not taking time to take care of your body
• Not taking time to feed yourself or plan for meals
• Leaving your wants or needs for last
• Giving everyone else your best
• Feeling exhausted, discouraged, resentful 
• Thinking it’s bad or lazy to relax, lie around doing nothing, or being unproductive

If ANY of these are your current state, stick around. Read carefully. You are important, not just for what you do for your partner, your kids, your boss, or your friends.

Your best contribution to the world and everyone in your circle comes when you take care of yourself and put your well-being first. 

Feeling bad might feel really normal to you, so much so, that you might think you are “fine.” Sure it would be nice to be appreciated more or to have others do more, but it feels safer to just keep carrying everything.

Well, your spirit and your heart know differently and your mental health needs so much more than just some cognitive stimulation!

Realize That Your Emotional Well-Being is Important

I’m going to start with your emotional well-being. So emotional well-being does not mean that you feel only positive emotions and don’t have negative emotions.

Emotional health means that you understand how feelings affect your body, not just your mood. 

I use the terms emotions and feelings interchangeably. My definition of feelings are vibrations in your body. Think about it. Our feelings always make our body feel a certain way.

• Like your heart is breaking in two
• Like you’ve been punched in the gut
• Like something is squeezing your throat
• A sick feeling in your guy
• Pressure, burning, or squeezing in the heart

These sound awful and they do not feel great. However, this is how emotions are expressed and processed within our body.

The problem comes when at an unconscious level we aren’t willing to feel, what we ACTUALLY feel. So we do so many things to not feel bad.

• Overeat, over drink, or over anything including overworking
• Try to change something. Move, new job, new partner, new friends
• Act out on another person by putting the blame on them
• Numb ourselves or withdraw from life
• Settle for feeling a sense of frustration and irritation

What is the solution? The solution is to feel whatever comes up. It’s stunningly simple to write but can be harder to do if you have no experience really feeling.

Here’s a post that describes how to feel your feelings without drowning in them. 

Control what you can control

One mindset shift that can also help is to really understand that you can’t control everything. So let go of what you can’t control and control what you can.

Usually the only thing you can control is yourself: how you act, how you feel, and how you think. 

It might seem super scary to let go of your perceived control but it’s actually a wonderful feeling. Let other’s take care of themselves. Let them be themselves. 

You can still be kind and compassionate, but you DO NOT have to fix, manage, and control anyone around you.

Understand the Role of Your Emotions

Your emotions mean everything and they mean nothing. When we think we’re being emotional, we’re usually stuck up in our heads thinking about what happened.

However, our emotions are happening in our body. They are always there in some way, sometimes more noticeable than other times.

I love to think that my feelings are the juice of life! 

A few weeks ago, I had a clients feel her anger about something. She had unknowingly been pushing it away. When she actually felt it in her body, and it was a burning red feeling, something amazing happened.

Her face lit up with joy. 

Anger, for example, is an emotion most of us are afraid to give into. However, when you just sit there and let yourself feel it in your body, you won’t act out. Within a couple of minutes it will move through your body and you’ll feel calm again.

Then with your body calm, you can approach the situation with a fresh perspective and make rational choices about how you want to act.

With regards to food, we will often feel strong cravings and urges. We’re used to giving in but we can also feel that discomfort and just let it be there for a couple of minutes.

At that point you can decide, am I hungry. If yes, eat something. If not, ask yourself what you do need. 

You will feel better overall, when you are able to feel something in the moment or even process it later. When you continually push away feelings (most of the time unconsciously) that energy makes us feel stuck.

If you find yourself saying things like this to yourself, you may be pushing away a feeling.

• I’m overreacting
• I don’t have time for this (meaning I don’t have time to feel it.)
• I’m not going there
• If I start, I won’t be able to stop

It’s normal to think if you don’t give into a feeling, you’ll feel better. The opposite is true. When we try to bypass a feeling, we often do something to numb it such as grabbing some candy or we react to it by something like taking it out on someone else.

Ignoring how you feel eventually leads to an overall sense of feeling bad in some way.

Engage in Regular Physical Activity

Exercise feels amazing and I love to move my body every day. For way too long we have yoked exercise to losing weight. 

Physical activity however is way more important than just to punish ourselves for overeating. 

When you begin to view your physical activity as something that feels great; you can begin to try new things and create daily routines that support you rather than deplete you.

A few months ago, I went through a period of grief where I felt in pain emotionally every day. What I discovered about exercise is that certain kinds of exercise actually made me feel better.

When I would work out, after about ten minutes I would find myself smiling and the heaviness would lift. 

I had always loved the way exercise made my body feel, but I was amazed to find how it changed my mood.

There was especially one kind of exercise that really worked. I subscribe to a couple of programs online that combine cardio, strength training, and stretch. Those types of routines seemed to be the best for my grief.

As much as I love to walk, it didn’t quite lift the sadness.

I’m not an affiliate but the one that helped the most was Ellen Barrett. It’s the best $7 a month I spend!

Create Life-Giving Daily Routines

I’m kind of a free spirit and I love variety. However, I find that my overall sense of well-being is highest when I have what I call life-giving daily routines. 

Here are mine. Yours may be totally different depending on your schedule. If you don’t think you have time for taking care of yourself–then address that thought first.

Every morning I have coffee, journaling, and prayer in bed. This sets the foundation for my day. The journaling helps me see where I am and the prayer helps me direct my day.

And the coffee? Well for me coffee makes me happy.

As someone who writes for a living, I had to find a way to build writing into my day. Most days, I go over to a local coffee shop to write with my second and last cup of coffee. This is so ingrained that I never get writer’s block.

When I sit down to write, words just flow for an hour and a half. 

A lot of you think you couldn’t possibly get anything of substance done in that amount of time. However, when you spend that entire time typing, you write a lot of words!

I look at the cost of my cappuccino and a great tip as my office “rent” and it more than pays for itself. I can still get writing done at home but I get the most done by going out to a public place. 

In the late morning and afternoon, I work with my clients. After coaching, I do a workout or take a walk. 

Most days I take time to do EFT or tapping as it’s commonly known. I’ve always loved tapping but when I made it part of my daily routine, I definitely feel better. 

Every day I eat a good lunch and dinner. After dinner I like to read and/or call my mom. I end the day with an hour of TV.

Once a week, I use my afternoon and evening to go spend with my grandchildren. 

So, there is a foundation that sustains me and my business, while allowing space for errands, family time, fun things, and whatever.

Practice Mindfulness and Build a Positive Mindset

If you begin doing the things I mention above, you will be well on your way to practicing mindfulness and creating a positive mindset. 

It’s the nature of humans to operate on auto pilot. If we tried to be mindful about every single thing, we’d get nothing done.

However, periods of mindfulness help us create a better autopilot for our daily lives! 

So, in an above section, I talked about processing emotions. And here I am recommending creating a positive mindset. 

Having a general positive outlook does not mean you never feel negative emotions. In fact, you will feel them all!

But with a positive outlook, you won’t be derailed by them or think something has gone wrong in your life.

Part of my positive mindset is believing that life works FOR me and that even problems help me. I hate when problems crop up as anyone, but I am learning to spend less time bemoaning them and just get to taking care of them.

Problems invariably teach me something or I learn new things. When I think about it, problems actually, if approached without anger, invigorate me in some way. 

Solving problems helps us with mental stimulation and cognitive function.

Being mindful, allows me to make the most of every situation. 

To practice mindfulness, you have to have make time for it. You can practice meditation. You can journal every day. When you take a walk, do it without music or a podcast. Just experience what is going on inside you and around you.

Focus on Your Sense of Belonging

Your social circles are important to not just your sense of well-being but to you overall health.

How much social connection do you need? By now, most of you have probably heard that the most important thing for your health is to have strong social connections. 

Don’t worry if you don’t have a big social circle or lots of friends. 

It’s the quality not the quantity that matters.

And here’s even better news. You get to decide what quality means to you.

My social needs are moderate. I love to get to together with my family but I also realize they have their own lives and work. But I can feel love for them all the time and that feels really great.

I have friends all over and the phone, Zoom, and social media help me stay connected.

My relationship with my clients is important to me. And my relationships with people to whom I am a client are important to me.

I love my hairdressers, the baristas at my coffee shop, my housekeeper, my dentist and eye doctor, and my acupuncturist. They are important to me and I value what they bring to my life.

Grow Your Sense of Purpose

Women who live fulfilled lives light up a room. There is just something different about them. 

Now, to be clear, you don’t have to have a sense of purpose with a capitol P. But I also believe, having some sense of purpose feels better than just existing.

Who gets to decide if you have a sense of purpose?

You do my friend! 

My mom who is 92, defines her sense of purpose as being uplifting and positive around anyone she interacts with. She loves having a purpose and a reason to be.

I’m not saying you have to–but it can feel great. My purpose has gone through variations but it is usually along the lines of helping people in some way.

In my college advisor years, I absolutely loved helping people get an advanced education and/or make progress on their careers. 

As a life coach for women, I really love helping women feel better. When it comes down to it, I help women feel better. 

Choose a Balanced Diet

Having a balanced diet is not just about eating your vegetables and lean proteins. What I mean by eating a balanced diet is that you change how you view your diet as a whole.

Most women I work with are doing a version of “I need to be on a diet and so I won’t let myself enjoy any food nor will I try to just nourish my body.”

This commonly looks like depriving yourself at meals or even skipping meals, then overeating, snacking, or binging at other times. 

If you are like many women over fifty or going through menopause, you are gradually putting on a little weight each year, without feeling like you are overeating even.

Diets are punishment for how your body looks. But the time when you’re not dieting can be problematic. It’s all or nothing for many of you.

Do you think something along these lines? If I can’t diet, as in deprive myself, I’m just going to eat like crap. I’ll start next week.

Well, next week comes and goes and you still keep eating like crap.

Your nutrition is important to your overall health no matter what your weight is. You deserve to eat good food. 

I always recommend that women eat real meals. This means make some food, sit down, and eat it. Eat enough that you feel satisfied body, mind, and soul. 

If you do this, your body will begin to trust you. You’ll lose your desire to pig out because a part of you is afraid you’ll deprive it later.

When you get the hang of eating meals you enjoy, then balance your meals withe vegetables, proteins, fats, and a variety of fruits. 

In five years of coaching women, I have to tell almost every woman to EAT MORE. I believe the body needs consistency and nourishment more than anything. 

You get to decide what relationships are meaningful relationships. I value my dermatologist but we don’t have that loving connection. Not all relationships have to be like that.

But I believe it’s important to take time to nurture all your relationships that are important to you. And it’s okay to expand your idea of relationships beyond close friends and family.

Final Thoughts on Being Fabulous after 50

Whatever the phase of your life, you can have more vibrancy. Whether you start a new hobby or learn a new skill, or any of the things above, it is life-giving to be intentional in how you live.

This doesn’t require a rigid adherence to daily routines, special diet, or even thinking you HAVE to do any of these things.

Vibrancy is fluid and flowing. My hope is that by integrating some of my suggestions, you’ll feel better and life will feel more enjoyable, even when it’s tough.

You are a gift to the world in some way. When you feel vibrant and life is moving within you, you can embody that gift.

Not because it makes everyone else feel better (though it might) but because you will feel better and more alive.