12-05-2025
Easy ways to boost your mood throughout the week
We could all do with a bit more wellbeing.
Starting the week should be energising and uplifting, but the reality is that feeling good on a Monday can be out of reach sometimes. From work anxiety, the pressures of parenting or caring, anguish over world events or just a plain old funk, there's a lot that can weigh on you.
Finding ways to invigorate yourself is important.
Wellness is often linked to how many matching yoga sets you can buy or how long you can devote to making the perfect matcha and while those are lovely treats to give yourself, there are many small but powerful switches you can add into your day or week for free that have the power to boost your mood and calm your nerves.
WellFest, Dublin's fabulous wellness and fitness festival, descended on the beautiful grounds of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham once again this weekend, bringing with it a veritable tidal wave of energy, positivity and activity.
I was invited to check it out, and I busied myself speaking to as many experts as I could about bottling that passion and taking it home with me.
Here are four takeaways from some of Ireland's leading figures in health, wellness and fitness.
Jenny Keane, holistic sex educator: Ask yourself these three questions.
"For me, I really believe wellness is not a destination that we get to but is a state that is always moving, so that means that we don't aim to feel good and then we arrive at feeling good forever. It is a normal part of the human experience to be able to swing between states of connection and disconnection, back to connection again, to move between states of joy and sorrow and exhaustion and overwhelm and back to energy again.
"It's that swing that allows us to experience, I suppose, the humanness of what life is, right? All of the emotions, all of the experiences.
"So when it comes to introducing a wellness practice, I don't believe that it should look [like] the same thing each time. I believe that it's learning how to ask three simple questions often and frequently, over and over and over again.
"Those questions would be:
How do I feel?
What do I need?
Can I give it to myself?
"Because then it looks like you understand whether one day you wake up and you need something like a high intensity, dynamic cardio class, or another time you might realise that what you need is a really gentle, slow yin yoga class, maybe with candle lights.
Jennifer Rock, The Skin Nerd: Treat your skin as you would treat yourself.
"There's a direct correlation between how you look after your skin and how you feel in yourself. I'm going to assume that everyone cleanses and [uses] SPF because that's essentially cleaning the organ that is the skin and protecting it.
"The key ingredients are ascorbic acid, which is the pure form of vitamin C, it helps with colour, collagen, clarity and also is really protecting against the sun. And then retinoid. Retinoids are really the gold standard for truly helping repair the skin at a cellular level.
"Honestly, it can be so easy: it's cleanse, vitamin C, a bit of vitamin A and an SPF.
"After about three to six months, start taking photographs on day one, you will see the difference and you will feel the better for it.
Dave and Stephen Flynn, The Happy Pear: Laughter, joy and friendship are superfoods.
Dave: "One thing I'd recommend someone do to improve their mental health and wellbeing, is do something they love, something that's well, is good for their health, but is something they love, because if you love something, it could be more sustainable.
"It could be dancing, it could be gardening, it could be painting, it could be going to pet a cat, someone's cat or mind a kid for an hour! [Stephen: "That sounds a bit weird."] It's just to do something that you love and make time for it because time passes quickly and you need to be intentional about what you spend it [on]."
Stephen: "I think a really important thing that someone can add to their wellness routine, to their daily life is laughter and joy. We're caught up in a society where wellness can be so righteous and so perfect, whereas I think we're all flawed humans, and I think embracing our flaws and having a laugh, I think these are real superfoods: laughter and joy and friendship."
