Your home should be a place to relax, unwind, and recharge your batteries. A calm and peaceful home promotes wellness and mental peace. Still, many of us live in environments that elevate rather than reduce our stress levels. This is a problem because our days begin at home and end at home. If you have a calm home, you will feel refreshed and energized when you head out in the morning and have a tranquil oasis waiting for you when you return.
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What Is a Calm Home?
A calm home is a place where you can be yourself and feel emotionally and physically calm and safe. If you live with a partner, family, or roommates, your home should have a harmonious environment where everybody feels comfortable. This may not be easy to achieve when extroverts and introverts live together. Extroverts often feel isolated and disconnected when they spend time alone, so they may find a home filled with people and activity calming. Introverts are just the opposite. For them, a calm home is an escape from crowds and a place of quiet reflection. Creating a home environment that works for everybody can be difficult, but it’s not impossible. Here are nine tips that could help you to create a calmer and more peaceful home.
Tip #1: Get a Good Night’s Sleep
Your efforts to create a calm home may not bear fruit if you wake up tired and achy every morning. If you feel invigorated and refreshed when you get out of bed, your stress levels will lower, and you will embrace the day more confidently. A good bed is one of the secrets to a good night’s sleep, so making sure that you retire each night on a quality twin mattress could be a significant first step on the road to a calm and peaceful home.
Tip #2: Declutter
If your closets are bursting at the seams and you see a disorganized mess wherever you look, your home may actually be harming your emotional health. Clutter can affect mental health. Women who lived in cluttered environments had higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This can lead to or exacerbate symptoms of depression. If you want to feel calm and relaxed in your home, you should eliminate as much clutter as possible.
Tip #3: Choose Calm and Soothing Decor
Bright colors and dazzling patterns may look great in a home improvement store, but they can become overwhelming when you live with them every day. A home decorated in neutral colors like white, beige, or light gray may not have much of a wow factor, but it will be more comfortable to live in. If that sounds too bland, you can liven up your decor with soothing colors like terracotta or pale blue.
Tip #4: Embrace Aromatherapy
Our sense of smell is extremely powerful, and the mere whiff of an odor we have not experienced since childhood can trigger vivid memories. Pleasant aromas can make your home feel welcoming and comfortable, and there are plenty to choose from. Lavender, chamomile, and cinnamon all create a relaxing atmosphere, as do the scents of freshly baked bread and recently ground coffee. If you are looking for a passive form of stress release, get an essential oil diffuser or a bread machine.
Tip #5: Let the Outside In
People who are under a great deal of stress are often told to go outside and “touch grass,” and for good reason. Human beings feel more at peace when surrounded by nature because this is the environment that nature prepared us for. Living in the woods may not be a viable stress-relief strategy, but you can bring nature into your home with plants. Succulents are fairly low-maintenance, and many of them give off a light and pleasant aroma.
Tip #6: Maximize Natural Light
Environments that are bathed in natural light calm the nerves and increase happiness. You can maximize natural light in your home by opening blinds or curtains during daylight hours and placing mirrors strategically. If you plan to remodel or renovate your home, consider adding some skylights.
Tip #7: Get Comfortable
Most of our home time is spent sleeping or sitting, so it only makes sense to make these activities as comfortable as possible. You will never feel completely at ease if your sofa and mattress are too hard or soft. An adjustable bed with a quality mattress will make watching TV before you retire much more enjoyable, and it could also relieve muscle aches and back pain. If you get a sofa with a futon mattress, you will have a comfortable place to sit, and your guests will have a great bed to sleep on.
Tip #8: Don’t Skip Household Chores
You may not like to clean your house and wash dishes, but they are jobs that must be done. If you put household chores off, you will feel anxious and uncomfortable because all you do is delay the inevitable. Piles of dirty dishes in the kitchen sink and a messy environment are not a recipe for peace and relaxation, so try to take care of your household chores sooner rather than later.
Tip #9: Play Soothing Music
There is a reason why upscale stores often have soothing music playing in the background. Calming music soothes the nerves and creates feelings of peace and serenity, which makes people more likely to buy things. You can use the same strategy to calm your home environment. If you don’t want music playing, you could get a machine that replicates the sound of gentle rainfall or waves lapping against the shore.
Create a Haven From the Stresses of Modern Life
Turning your home into a place of peace and calm does not have to be difficult. These simple tips could help create a tranquil environment that encourages relaxation. Get rid of clutter, decorate with neutral colors, get some plants, make the most of your home’s natural light, and ensure the sofa you sit on and the bed you sleep on are comfortable and supportive. If you do these things, your home will become a haven from the stresses of modern life in no time.