With COVID-19 and all the chaos in the world, it’s more important than ever to have relaxing and quiet spaces in your home. Below are seven tips and tricks to make the rooms of your home more relaxing and comfortable.
- Keep it Clean
First of all, make sure your rooms are clean. It’s not just better from a hygienic or aesthetic point of view, but it’s much less stressful to talk into a room that isn’t cluttered. Pick up trash, food, put away clothes, sweep and/or mop the floor, keep stuff off the ground. It makes a space much more inviting and welcoming. When you enter a clean and fresh space, there are fewer stimuli to overwhelm your senses and you can focus more on your thoughts and tasks. Keeping your rooms clean goes a long way towards making your spaces more comforting and relaxing.
- Freshen Your Pillow Cases
Okay, so this is mostly just useful for bedrooms, but bedrooms should be the most relaxing spaces in your home, anyways, so we think it has merit! This tip is also extremely important for anyone who struggles with allergies. Even if you don’t have time to wash your pillowcases often, simply taking them off of the pillow and placing them in a dryer for a few minutes or letting them air out on a clothesline or hanger and spraying them with a fabric refresher can make a huge difference in the comfort you feel when you lay your head down at night. [Pro Tip: If you aren’t washing your sheets weekly, you should be! Experts recommend a minimum of bi-weekly washes, but for most of us, if we want sheets free of dead skin and oils, weekly washings are more than warranted].
- Keep Plants Nearby
If you can put flowers or other plants anywhere in your space, do it! This might be an obvious tip, but having living things in our home can help center us. From hanging planters to plant walls to a few potted plants near a windowsill, the presence of plants and other greenery is both relaxing and calming, reminding us of the simple bliss we can experience just from living. For those without green thumbs, succulents are excellent, low-maintenance options for adding greenery to a room. Occasional watering will keep these desert plants happy and healthy.
- Put Work in Its Place
Especially in the era of working from home, it’s important to remember that work has a place in your life, and you can’t let it expand beyond its bounds. Don’t let multiple rooms in your house start moonlighting as home offices. Keep your work in a specific spot (i.e. an office) and don’t leave work papers and assignments lying around in other rooms. Making sure the other rooms in your home are free of work will go a long way towards making your home space more relaxing.
- Look at Lighting
Natural light is ideal for relaxing spaces, obviously, but it isn’t always practical. When lighting a room, use LED soft white light bulbs to provide relaxing, gentle glows that offer the perfect blend between bright and dark. Ambient lighting from lamps and sconces are also key for creating a relaxing atmosphere. Overhead lighting is more functional, but it’s also often more jarring. By and large, ambient lighting is the way to go. Candles are another great way to provide both mild light and alluring, relaxing scents.
- Minimze
Less is more. And even less is even more. Do you really need all of those clothes? Can your video game collection fit into in a storage box instead of taking up a whole wall on your bookshelf? Do you really need this many chairs?
If you go through your things and decide whether or not you really need them, you’ll probably find out that, in fact, you need a lot less than you think. Ask yourself if you feel emotionally connected to an item, and if the answer is no, then figure out some way to get rid of it. You don’t have to throw it out! You can give it to a friend, donate it to a thrift store or charity, or maybe even recycle it!
- Hide Wires
These days, we all have so many technological devices and accessories that the power outlets in our rooms can look like giant masses of wires and cords. No one, in the history of ever, has enjoyed looking at that, or felt relaxed by it. If you want to create a relaxing space, make sure to find ways to conceal them by tucking them behind furniture or consolidating your outlets and plugins with a power strip. It should be easy to plug a phone or other device in, but the plugs and cords themselves should be out of the way. You shouldn’t have to move things around constantly or be tripping over stray wires and cords. That’s the opposite of relaxing.
