Making your home stress-free: 6 tips for a happier life

Stress is an integral part of our lives. So it’s not even clear that a truly stress-free home exists. Stress is good anyway. Up to a point. We also need to be able to manage stress, and there are ways to do that. But the unnecessary stress that doesn’t help us in our daily lives can be reduced with a few small tips.

Our stress levels can fluctuate because of our jobs, our relationships or even our homes. We need to make our home a calm, safe environment where we can come in, relax and blow off steam after a stressful day at work. In this article, I’ve put together a list of steps you can take to create a stress-free home.

If you want to empower yourself from within in stressful situations, read Timi Csontos coach and trainer’s post Two surprising ways to manage stress.

Tips for creating a stress-free home

Living in the present

Our objects affect our mood. So if we are surrounded by many objects that pull us back into the past and prevent us from moving forward and achieving the goals we have set for ourselves, we can feel weaker. I read somewhere that we should only keep beautiful or useful objects. 

Beautiful things to admire and useful things to make our lives easier. How simple it sounds, doesn’t it?

If you think about how many objects we have in our homes that we think are useful, useful, but for whom? Not for us, after all. We haven’t used it for a while, but one day, you know, when… and after all, our fear of the hypothetical future forces us to adapt in the present, because if we were to accidentally part with this object, we would surely need it at some point. And that object should be a children’s brush set for 790 Ft, and the date should be 7 months from now, when one afternoon we would be so bored that we would still take out that object.

Living in the present is not easy. To give up a plan from the past that we will sew while having a child, even though it is no longer a priority for us, and to give up a dream that is not really a dream anymore with the birth of our child, but we dare not accept that I am not Szandra Cserta anymore, but Martin’s mother?

It causes us stress, trying to live up to every expectation, and we have to accept the harsh reality that we are not the person who figured out one Tuesday afternoon that we were flying to Scotland for the weekend on Friday because the flight was cheap and accommodation would be found somehow. 

Our role at home is also constantly changing. When you go home to sleep after working 10-12 hours a day, the function of home is different from when you have your first child and everything has to be baby-proofed, and you are no longer just at home on weekends, you are at home 0-24. More plates are consumed, the quality and quantity of light coming in through the windows becomes more important.

Live in the present. Determine what functions you need your home to perform for you now, this year and this month, today, and design it accordingly.

Our home is there to help us live a more balanced, happier life.

With the right objects, it provides security. Now. That’s why there’s no room in our homes for things that aren’t beautiful and useful to us.

Creating a happiness corner

In our home, we need a place to recharge. As women, we don’t always have the opportunity to have a little nook all to ourselves, a place we can retreat to and that makes us truly happy. It doesn’t have to be a whole room, just a little nook, a particular spot on the sofa, or any place where we’re not disturbed and can retreat when we need extra energy.

Put objects that make us happy to see, a softer blanket on the sofa, or even the right cushion on the balcony to warm our waist while we have our morning coffee.

Timi Csontos, coach and trainer, always says that we need to refuel ourselves, because when we run out of water in our glasses, we can’t give more. So, if we are more balanced and relaxed, then all the people in our home will be happy.

The importance of sleep

We know that sleep is important, yet we often don’t pay enough attention to it. Sometimes we sleep for hours at a time, go to bed irregularly, or start reading about what happened on social media in bed immediately after waking up, while everyone else was asleep. Or maybe we received an official email between 11pm and 6am. When most likely no one is working. And if we did, it’s unlikely to be an urgent email that we could answer from our pyjamas in bed.

The basic rules of restful, balanced sleep seem very simple, just like losing weight: take in fewer calories than you burn. Yet not everyone fluctuates between sizes 34-36. Often it’s not enough just to know what you should be doing. So it’s not enough to know the rules of sleep: i.e. don’t talk on the phone/ watch TV/ laptop half an hour before you go to sleep, don’t bring electronic gadgets to bed, keep the room a bit cooler, go to bed relatively early each day at a set time, and definitely sleep between 10pm and 2am.

The last one, 10-2 sleep, is something I heard recently, which is when you have the opportunity for a power nap, the intense, necessary sleep that will make your next day more productive. 

Now, you could say that we don’t mind putting our phones in bed and, yes, we like to get up to see what’s going on in the world at large because we can then relax a bit more lying in bed. That sounds nice, but what is the reality?

The next time you’re in bed talking on the phone just before you go to sleep, or just after you wake up, think about what messages are getting through to you!

You might read in the morning what’s happened in another part of the world, whether it’s a natural disaster or a political post, and that’s the first thing you’ll know that day. Or even checking your emails. Is it really necessary to read the 5:32 a.m. newsletter a minute after you open your eyes to see what unmissable offer the sender is offering you?

Routine and finishes

How do you feel when you go to a museum? A sense of calm is certainly one of them.

It’s not for nothing that when we look at minimalist, clean homes in magazines, we’re drawn to them because we feel like they’re missing from our lives.

If only we could have a kitchen counter with such a beautiful, blank surface. The good news is that it’s possible to design blank surfaces into our homes and keep them, even if our homes are now in a state of chaos.

It may be good to have them, but if it’s a threat to our health, then lose weight! Too many objects and clutter can also affect our health. If we are not mentally strong, the sight of clutter can affect our self-esteem.

After all, everyone can tidy up, right? The only difference is that we can’t tidy up properly until we go through the mental process of getting rid of all the things in our homes that are completely unnecessary and unpleasant for us. 

Once we have fewer objects in our home that we have to constantly pack away, we can find space for these objects and free up surfaces. Replacing items that fall out of surfaces becomes an integral part of our daily routine, so when we go to bed or go to the bathroom first thing in the morning, the sight of an empty counter next to the tap will recharge our batteries. We believe that we can do it, we smile that we can maintain order, and that we can actually do anything we set ourselves a goal to do.

Naturalness

Naturalness is true of both plants and light. The more natural light we have in our homes, the better we feel. Of course, this also means reducing distractions such as TV and radio as unnecessary background noise.

Awareness is a great treasure in this respect too. If we choose in advance which programmes we want to watch on TV or what we want to watch on social media, we will waste less time flipping through channels or scrolling through and refreshing.

Harmony in your relationship too

Often, we want to create a stress-free home because there’s not really harmony in the family at home. We don’t prioritise tidiness, we’re a bit more cluttered, and we argue about things, tidiness, delays due to clutter, and endless unnecessary fights that start with “where did you put it again anyway…”.

And these arguments are not always about the mess. It’s just an apparent excuse that’s easier to talk about than the real thing, which may be that you haven’t had enough time together because you’re tired or because you’ve just had a hard day at work. 

But often the real reason for the argument is that the parties do not have the same concept of order.

One person tends to hoard and find it harder to get divorced, while the other doesn’t understand this, and these little spats can lead to a rise in our stress levels. We are different, some are more of an experience person, others are more attached to objects, and it is through objects that they experience important events that they like to remember.

Since we probably like the person we live with in whatever form, we want to please them, and they probably want fewer conversations to end in us not doing the dishes again before we leave for work.

Honest conversation is often helpful in these situations, so that we can understand without playing games why simplifying, creating and maintaining a clean, tidy home is important to the other person, and if we can really digest the request, then together we can move towards a new goal of creating a stress-free home.