Your home is supposed to be your safe haven – a place where you come from a hard day of work to relax. However, many people feel even more stressed when they get home.
The main reason why you may not feel at peace in your home is that your living space has not been designed for tranquility, comfort, and ultimate wellness. You may decorate your home with beautiful things but if there are a few key aspects missing from it, it can be very tough to turn it into a Zen place.
Designing Your Living Space for Peace, Comfort, and Wellness
No matter what kind of home you live in, it is not hard or expensive to turn it into an esthetically pleasing and comfortable place. You only need to pay attention to a few basic aspects of wellness.
Personalizing Your Living Space
Most people spent 90% of their lives indoors. Since the global pandemic started and more and more people started working from home, it has become even more important to create a living space that reflects your own personality and can calm and soothe you.
Whether you are working, entertaining yourself, or just relaxing, adding personal touches to your home can help you relate more to your living space and create an ambiance of safety and comfort.
Personalizing your living space does not have to be difficult or expensive. Even small things, like painting your bedroom a certain color, adding fabrics in pastel tones to the living room, and placing photos and artwork in the hallway can make your living space uniquely yours.
Adding Ergonomic Furniture
You want your home to be as comfortable as possible. Whether you are sitting on your desk or reclining on your bed, comfort should be your main priority when it comes to your furniture.
If you work from home, it is not the best idea to create a rudimentary makeshift office from your dining table and chair. Instead, you should design a comfy, airy, and bright home office for yourself. Now, we don't mean the office needs to be state-of-the-art with thousands of dollars of furniture apiece. However, it should at least have a comfortable desk and chair that prevents back, neck, and arm aches.
Using natural elements like wood and stone, placing a small pot of plants near your desk, and opening the window next to your workplace can increase the wellness factor of your home office and improve your performance.
When it comes to your bedroom, comfort should be maximum in this place as well, naturally. Research says that using flooring made of natural materials like sustainable bamboo can have helpful health effects. You should also consider what kind of surface you are lying on at bedtime.
Sleeping on a medium-firm mattress, one that has adjustable firmness and can offer you proper spine alignment and support, like the MLILY Dreamer Gel Memory Foam Mattress, can improve the quality of your sleep.
If aches and pains are a concern for you, then a memory foam mattress can help you relieve the pressure on your spine, shoulders, and hips and prevent chronic aches.
Implementing Bathroom Safety
When bathrooms are not made with a focus on safety, they can lead to an increased risk of safety. If you are adding a shower stall to your bathroom, make sure it does not have a protruding lip at the bottom that can result in tripping. Choose a zero-threshold shower. It is also important to install a handrail inside the shower as well as a seat for extra safety.
If you have a bathtub installed, make sure it has an entryway that can be opened when you have to enter it, rather than having to climb into the bathtub.
If you want to turn your bathroom into a safe and tranquil space, you can also consider adding elements like all-wood flooring, walls, and fixtures. Consider adding a small soaking tub or a sauna, and add small nooks and shelves where you can place potted plants, natural rocks, beautiful crystals, and fragrant candles.
Creating Biophilic Designs
When you add plants and green elements to your home, you are immediately turning your home into a biophilic space. Biophilic spaces incorporate natural elements by bringing the outdoors inside.
Even bringing a few small potted plants into your home can energize your home and make it more vibrant. Research has also shown that plants reduce stress, improve your mood, and increase productivity. In addition, they are very effective in improving the indoor air quality of your home by taking in carbon dioxide and giving out oxygen.
As such, if you are bringing plants into your home, you are basically purifying your living space.
Allowing Natural Light In
If your home receives a lot of sunlight, you should consider making the most of it. Natural light brings in warmth and much-needed vitamin D into your home. In addition, it will also reduce your reliance on artificial lighting which will result in reduced energy bills and savings for you.
Research has also found that the use of natural light is more beneficial than the use of artificial light since natural light has a steady intensity, time, and duration, and does not flicker. As such, it reduces the risk of eye strain and injury and keeps a proper circadian rhythm, which promotes healthy sleep.
Making a Fitness Room
For maximum wellness, every home should have a space for activity and movement. You have the choice to dedicate one room in your home for exercise, but if you have the money to do so, you can also integrate a playful and active design for your entire home by adding steps, ladders, and climbing walls.
Make sure that your fitness room is not in a dim and dark corner of the house or nobody would want to go there. Create your fitness area in a part of your home that gets seen on a regular basis and serves as a reminder that you need to work out. So don't hide the fitness room in your attic, basement, or shed.
Incorporating movement and activity throughout the day is very important for your physical and mental health. It reduces stress, makes you more resilient, and improves your energy level, which means better performance throughout the day.
Decluttering Your Home
One of the biggest stressors is a chaotic and cluttered home. A house that is stuffed full of furniture, knick-knacks, and is messy to boot can increase anxiety – and the worst thing is that you don't even realize what the cause is.
Every room in your home can be cluttered but the biggest culprits are your bedroom, living room, and kitchen. Your bedroom is supposed to be a place of order, not chaos so you should minimize the items in it, including furniture, clothing, and other objects that you do not use frequently.
Your kitchen can be decluttered by getting rid of extra dishes or storing them away where they can't be seen. Keep out only the pots and pans that you use and regularly check the contents of your fridge and freezer to see what needs to go.
Your living room sees the most traffic every day so it is natural for it to remain a bit messy. To reduce the clutter, you should place just enough furniture in the living room. If it has a bookcase, make sure it stays organized. Do not place too many decorative objects in the living room as they only cause it to look disordered. Allow lots of open space in the room and if you do not have one already, install large windows on the walls that let in lots of natural light.
Combating Noise
If you live in the middle of a bustling city, your home can become very noisy. To deaden some of the noise, it is a good idea to call a contractor and request them to install a layer of sheetrock to the walls.
Once you have installed the noise-dampening layers in the walls, you will be surprised to see how quiet and peaceful it gets. If you are unable to install sheetrock for any reason, then another effective way to block out chaotic outside noises is to create ambient noise in your home. This can be done by adding an indoor water fountain which provides soft and soothing noise.
Start Designing
This is hardly an exhaustive list of things that you can do to increase the overall wellness of your home but they are a good start for you. Even incorporating a couple of these tactics in your home can make a wonderful difference when it comes to increasing the health and energy in your home. You can also come up with your own design methods that allow you to live in a tranquil, healthy, and safe home.
