Our home should be our castle, and the place where we feel safest and most content in the world. Coming home from a long day at work should be like entering our own personal little oasis of calm and joy, and even returning home from a fantastic holiday should feel satisfying and positive in its own way.
For too many of us, however, our homes are more of a torment than a blessing — places where the worries of life are magnified and added to, rather than reduced and brought under control.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are a few suggestions for how you can become happier with, and in, your home.
Invest in a bit of strategic luxury
There’s such a thing as too much luxury, to be sure, but there’s also such a thing as too little. If your home is a place where you constantly feel chilly and mildly depressed, investing in electric underfloor heating might be the strategic touch of luxury that will make all the difference.
If your home is dark and depressing, maybe it’s time to pay for a skylight to be put in, or at least buy some better lights so that you don’t feel like you’re lurking in a cave all the time.
Only you can identify which areas of your home cause you to become a bit less happy and a bit more miserable. It’s worth taking the time to make a note of these insufficiencies, and to then try and introduce some carefully chosen and uplifting touches of luxury to make the whole experience better and more fulfilling.
Get rid of the clutter and enjoy a more spacious mind
A cluttered home seems to be deeply linked to a cluttered mind, and coming home to a house littered with clutter to the point where you can only see the floor in patches, it bound to do some damage to even the most resilient person’s sense of calm, control, and happiness.
A messy home doesn’t just distract us in an abstract sense; it affects the parts of our brains which detect threat. The difficult-to-comprehend chaos of a messy room can cause chronic stress precisely because our minds perceive that chaos as an untamed space where danger and uncertainty lurk.
On top of that, living in a cluttered environment sends us the signal that we’re not in control of ourselves or our environment.
Tackle the clutter and take a more orderly approach to your home, and see if you don’t feel better in record time.
Begin positive household rituals
It’s not just what’s in a home that affects our mood; it’s also what we do in that home.
If you have a pretty chaotic sort of routine — eating your meals in bed or on the sofa, for example — you’re likely to experience a vague sense of apathy in the home.If you begin conditioning yourself into adhering to certain positive and orderly household rituals, on the other hand, you’re likely to feel more purposeful and optimistic in a short time. Begin by eating your meals at the dinner table. Buy a dinner table if you don’t have one.
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