It's hard to be positive when you're ill and exhausted, I don't think you have to tell yourself that everything's alright now when it clearly isn't.
That's really not what I was suggesting. Encouragement, reassurance, and looking for positives will do more to lift the spirits and hence the circulation, skin tone, and the musculature of the face, then bemoaning one's troubles, no matter how real and overwhelming they are, I have found after two decades of chronic illness. If you're still breathing, even on a bad day, you are doing quite well. And if everything is really terrible, you can still laugh at that fact for one brief moment.
There is a cumulative effect. The immune system is enhanced, recovery is enhanced, also. Calming the body down is an important part of recovering from any sort of stress, but also very much so from illness. Even my GP says this. It's not woo! I am not suggesting some sort of Pollyanna attitude at all, only to soothe the body.
But MN S + B threads, I have noticed over the years, are overrun with people who take the mechanical approach to their bodies, and act as if the face is a part of a car and needs to be panel-beaten, injected with artificial substances, and then cut and sewn when that is not enough, throw in some acids, which car polish works best. I prefer to work with the body as my loyal friend, not treat it like an inanimate vehicle.
When older women say smile, as the best anti-ager, they don't mean plaster on a fake smile. But it is the misery muscles people are running off to cosmetic surgeons to inject and fill and cut. Grey skin tone from prolonged stress needs circulation, not weird and fashionable concoctions that will ultimately disturb the skin mantle and act as agers.
I also agree with the previous poster above, that the particular cream used is irrelevant. It needs to smell good to you, personally, ideally. But it is the application, the movement encouraging a return to circulation, and the soothing, as I tried to explain.