Well Intentioned: Courteney Cox on Staying in the Moment and the Pursuit of Olfactory Happiness

From mantras to meditation, mindfulness to manifestation, Well Intentioned offers an intimate look at how to make space for self-care in meaningful ways, big and small.

Courteney Cox has always been particular about fragrances—and not just her own fragrances. “I can’t stand when I see somebody and they have a strong scent. That’s their business,” she says with a laugh before descending into an all-to-familiar anecdote about hugging such an olfactory offender, and having their fragrance get stuck in your hair, and on your clothes, until you essentially have to wear someone else’s scent for the rest of the day. “It makes me crazy!” she continues, effectively qualifying the degree of her obsession with perfume. “But anyway, that’s where it started,” the actor-turned-brand founder says of Homecourt, the beauty-meets-homecare brand she launched last year. Cox, who had been mixing her own fragrance blend of smoky wood, spices, and leather notes for years originally just wanted to make a candle, but during lockdown, she had an epiphany while wiping every surface in her Malibu home with Clorox (stars; they’re just like us): what if our cleaning products could be effective, smell nice, be good for us—and look good on our counters, too?

Cox loves cleaning, but the line goes beyond her excellent Dish Soap and Surface Cleanser, which feature plant-based surfactants and come in four different scents including Cece, a riff on her personal fragrance with hints of sweet cardamom, carrot leaf, and patchouli. There’s also a hand wash, a decadent shea butter-laced hand cream, some covetable candles, and her newest innovation: a zinc- and charcoal-spiked room deodorant that works to neutralize bad smells instead of just masking them with high-end perfume notes. “Each scent has a different vibe,” Cox explains of her considered fragrance blends, an exercise in curation that she says has helped “exercise” her brain. But the Friends alum and Instagram humorist is equally adept at quieting a racing mind, especially when it keeps her up at night. Here, Cox shares her go-to tool for better sleep and why purging toxic people from your life is just as important as tidying up your shelves and drawers. “In the words of Marie Condo, if it doesn’t make you happy, get rid of it.”

1. Stay Grounded in the Moment

It’s really important to stay in the moment, but I have ADD so that’s particularly hard for me. I have so many moments in my head and I just wanna go do them all at once. So for me, one way of being present, is to try to take care of what’s happening now. It’s so easy to say, “Oh, I’ll worry about that later,” about certain things. I did this a lot when I was younger. I didn’t care about anything to do with my body. It was like, my body’s fine! I’m young and my skin’s good! Who cares if I lay in the sun! I wouldn’t ever wear moisturizer. And then as I got older I’m like, why didn’t I focus on any of these things?! So I just try to take care of myself in every way now and not put any of it off—whether it’s mentally, physically, all of it. We spend so much time in the future and in the past. I think it’s really important to just enjoy every moment now.

2. Support Good Sleep Habits

It’s really hard to stay present if you’re not sleeping. I’m a terrible sleeper, but if I sleep terribly for three nights that fourth night, man, I’m gonna get the best sleep. Although I have a new thing that I figured out to do. The other night, I got up in the middle of the night and was worried I wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep, so I got out my LightStim. It’s always next to my bed. It looks like something from a dentist’s office and it’s in the background of every Zoom I sign on to. I care a lot about the way things look, so I don’t know why this has made the cut, but it’s no joke. And the other night, I thought, OK, I’ll put that on my face and see. And I got so relaxed that I went back to sleep. It was incredible. So I’m going to try that every night.

3. Have Hobbies

I love hobbies. I think it’s really important to have things that engage and inspire you. We’re all working all the time, and it’s just nice to have other things to look forward to. I love to cook and I love to play the piano and I love to play tennis and I love to putter. Puttering is a big one for me. If you just have time during the day where someone says, “you have nothing to do for the next hour and a half,” I just go through my house. I recently redid my bookshelf. I don’t read—sorry! I try. But when there are too many words on a page, I just get overwhelmed and it’s hard for my mind to slow down. I’m just not a reader. But I love design books, art books. Tommy and Kathleen Clements’s Eight Homes is really good. I must have like, three copies. And you can just keep looking and looking at it and you always find something new. I also love Axel Vervoordt and I’m a big fan of Richard Misrach. I have a piece of his, a photograph, and I actually met him and he was the coolest, nicest human being. So then he sent me all of his books and I love to look at them over and over.  

Eight Homes: Clements Design

Axel Vervoordt Timeless Interiors

4. Exercise Your Body and Your Mind

I have a new trainer, who I love. She’s a physical therapist—that’s how we started together because I had some back issues—and now I work out with her three days a week. I just expanded the gym at my house and I’m so in love with it. I have a few machines and then I have one of those Bosu Balls to do leg presses. But she puts me through it. Say maybe I’ll be on the treadmill for three minutes, and then I’ll be on a machine, and then I have a leg press, and she’ll have me do crunches. I think machines are so much more fun than doing mat work. But she kind of incorporates both. And then I play tennis twice a week. I look horrible when I play tennis. [Laughs]. I mean, I used to wear cute little shorts; now, it’s just not the same. I wear one of those turtleneck sunscreen things, my Asics sneakers, a hat, and I’ve got the wrist band, the elbow band, the knee brace, I’ve got sunscreen on. And I wear an Apple watch because I really care how high my heart rate gets! My mind is the thing that actually needs chill, but I’m always exercising it, too. Homecourt is a huge part of this. I get to be creative. We have the cleaning products, and we have the hand care, and the air care. I always burn the Cece candles, because that’s my scent. It’s a fragrance blend that I’ve been wearing forever. I went to a dinner the other night and someone was like, “Oh my God, you smell like your stuff.” And I was like, “yeah, that stuff smells like me!” But our new room deodorant actually neutralizes odors. It’s probably one of my favorite products. I’m really proud of it. You can use it in any room, but some rooms are more important than others!

Asics Gel-Challenger 13 Clay sneakers

Homecourt Cece room deodorant

5. Take Inventory of What—and Who—is in Your Life

I’m a big believer in getting rid of things that you don’t need. I’ve definitely sold a lot of stuff on The Real Real. But I’m not, like, Marie Condo. I can’t put all the stuff on the floor because I would walk away and get interested in something else, and come back and be too overwhelmed to ever finish it. But if I start with one drawer, then go to the next drawer—even if it’s one drawer a day—it’s still worth it. I also believe in getting rid of people in your life that are toxic. I didn’t learn that skill until now. It’s like, why am I wasting my time? There’s a thing that I learned in therapy that I typically hold onto those people out of fear, or connection. So often I just want to make sure that that person still likes me. And I don’t want to do that anymore. That’s a big thing for me. We don’t have time to spend on things that don’t make us happy. That’s what I kind of also mean by being present and in the moment. I spent so much of my life trying to make other people happy. But it’s really important to be able to make yourself happy, too.