You want your home to be as relaxing as possible. When you get home from work you may not expect the stress to melt away, but you at least want the place where you are going to spend your downtime to not be a source of more stress. Interior design encompasses many things, from color to functionality, texture, and the way that the items you choose to furnish your space with, interact with that space.
Thankfully, there are a lot of ideas out there in the world for handling the design problems you can face, and for reinventing your space so that it contributes to your life, rather than being one more source of trouble that you have to deal with. You can have a beautiful space, one that you enter and immediately feel the chains of the workaday world fall away.
It can be a space that every member of your family, whether they are small children or your furry children, feel good about living in, and that is going to greatly reduce your stress.
1. Reduce The Clutter
It is definitely something that can start to get stressful when you have so many things and you can’t find anything. It is stressful when your home looks a mess and you can’t invite anyone back to socialize either, and it can just creep up on you.
People get to a point where they have accrued so much stuff over the years, and half of these belongings don’t get used, but get hold onto in case they might be useful at some point. It gets to be like a gridlock of belongings, one that absorbs anything new that comes into space into its morass. Just look at the popularity of Marie Kondo, and all those things that made their way to the charity shops that didn’t ”spark joy”.
2. Use Color
Color and its ability to change the perception of space should never be underestimated. Color is one of those things that we respond to very quickly, and whereas some colors communicate energy, and some can dampen the mood, others really are designed to create an atmosphere in which you can relax.
You may have been into a beauty salon or a doctor’s office and immediately felt yourself calm down because of the way in which it has been decorated. This is by design, and it can be replicated quite easily. You just have to think about colors that suggest warmth, and colors that are natural. There may be colors that have certain associations for you that help you to feel relaxed as well. All of these things should give you some great ideas.
3. Get A Plant
Some people may think that having plants in their house is going to require a lot of maintenance, but that doesn’t have to be the case. You can get some very low maintenance plants that are going to lift the atmosphere of your home.
Plants are believed to eliminate toxins from indoor spaces and are also capable of reoxygenating your home. So, feeling better in the space, and having good air to breathe is definitely going to allow you to relax more.
The plant is also going to add to any natural feel that you are trying to achieve in your home, and it brings that touch of nature inside. When people want to get away from things after work, nature is often something that they retreat to, and this is a great way to recreate some of that feeling.
4. Cater To The Room’s Function
Some of the lack of relaxation that you are feeling derives entirely from the disorder that is prevalent in your space. You don’t have a place for everything and everything is not in its place. When you have to do something that means that you have to search for it, and if you are in a hurry that is going to slow you down and cause more stress.
If you take things from the scattered mess that they are in and you designate one space for play, and one place for study, one place for eating, etc – the room is going to start to make sense, and you will be able to navigate it much more easily.
5. Perfect The Flow of The Room
This kind of builds on the previous suggestion. Can you move easily through your home? If you have children or animals that live with you, are they able to get around easily without knocking things over or bumping into things?
Being able to move around without fear of damaging things can drastically reduce stress. There is a lot of talk about child-proofing, or cat-proofing a space, and not so much about strs-proofing it.
The less you have to have attention on where things are and how you are going to move through your space, the better. It also may be currently set up in a way that others do not find inviting, so having people over can again become a source of stress.
6. Get Relaxing Furniture
When you get home from work and you want to sit down, is that something that you can easily do? If not then you need to re-think your space. Who wants to arrive where they live and end up feeling as stressed as they were throughout the day? Maybe you could trade your traditional furniture for something less conventional and get yourself something from Sumo that really checks both boxes, of being both functional and relaxing.
If you have cats or dogs, do you have it set up so that they aren’t going to damage your furniture? With kids, you also want to consider what- are you comfortable with your kids hanging out in the space, and your furniture’s ability to withstand that? You don’t want to be stressing about either of these factors when you can handle them quite easily by putting some thought into your initial purchases.
7. Balance Natural Lighting With Artificial
Being under constant artificial light is not great for your eyes and it can make you end up feeling stressed and tired. Often we are working under artificial light all day when we are at work, and we are sat in front of computers or watching TV a lot of the time, and our eyes need to relax.
Having some sources of natural light in your home give your eyes some time off. Natural lighting in interior is also beautiful and can be used to great effect in making your room come alive. With the notion of natural colors and calling to mind nature, it is also a really simple and easy way to do that as well.
8. Work With Natural Textures
As you can see, a lot of the ideas for making your home more relaxing involve moving away from that artificial and cold feeling that you can often get in the work environment. You are looking to evoke something that is natural, because the natural is welcoming, and the artificial is often not.
Touch is an important sense, and it is very closely linked with any sense of comfort that you are going to create in your home. Natural textures and fibers will give you this sense of comfort, and they will allow you to relax more easily. Think how harsh artificial textures can often be functional, but are not the best for cuddling upon, or feeling warm with, when you want to chill out.
8. All Rooms Are Important To The Overall Design
When you are thinking with the design and flow of your house no room is any less important than any other. The house is a whole, not just the separate parts.
If you perfect half the rooms of the house and then you have one problematic one, it is going to impact on you and the levels of stress that you have.
One room with an undesignated function or that exists outside the purpose of the rest of the house, may become the focus of any disorganization or a potential place where clutter might build-up, and once that happens it is most likely only a matter of time before that spills out into the rest of the house. Spend a little time thinking of how each room functions and contributes to the whole and you can avoid this.
Conclusion
As you can see there are some really simple and inexpensive changes that you can make to make your space better for you. Tidying up, thinking with functionality, making sure it flows well, these are things you can do before you ever have to buy anything.
If you think about how your space at work is, some of the lessons you can learn from it will weirdly help you to relax. At work, the spaces you operate in have a function, and everything in that space is tailored to that. Home is for relaxing.
The space that your work in is often decorated in a way that is supposed to inspire you, and with a no-nonsense approach that removes all distraction. Your home environment is not that different – stress is another form of distraction, and your home should inspire you; should allow you to relax. Hopefully, we have given you some ideas to make this easier.
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