Home to some people is where they spend all of their time, while to others, it’s simply a hub that they visit to sleep and occasionally eat. In either case, the state of your home can have a substantial impact on your mental health, but it’s especially true when you’re spending a lot of time there.
Looking at how you can improve this situation offers a host of benefits. Not only does it mean that the state of your mental health might ambiently improve when you’re spending time at home, but it also means that your home might simply become a more enjoyable place to live in.
Decor
When you live by yourself, and when you feel as though you’re not going to live in your current residence permanently, it’s easy to fall into a mindset that leaves decoration feeling unimportant. However, coming home to blank walls every single day and spending so much time in a space devoid of personality can have more of a toll on you than you might expect.
This is a chance for you to completely customize your space – to create an environment that you love spending time in. You can have wall hangings, bean bags, whatever kind of lighting that you want – you can completely tailor the structure and layout of any given room to what you want to use that room for. Breaking out of the idea that a home has to look a certain way, either from what you’re used to or from what you’ve seen, can be incredibly freeing. However, this kind of freedom can also run the risk of being overwhelming – especially if you’re not someone who feels most at home in the world of interior design. That’s why it can also be useful to have some decoration ideas on hand so that you can structure your creativity.
Working from Home
While a home that you love spending time in is a valuable thing to have in your life, even that might fail to provide you with the kind of comfort that you’re looking for when you’re spending almost all of your time at home. Working from home is something that a great many people enjoy due to the fact that it can allow them greater control over their work/life balance – making work a smaller part of their life than it might otherwise be. However, if that is bleeding through into your home life, there might remain no boundary in place that can allow you to relax during the time that you’re not working.
In this situation, it becomes essential to figure out some ways of structuring your work time effectively. A physical space within your home (such as an office room) can be a good way of doing this, as it creates a physical delineation between work and leisure. If you don’t have this, however, it becomes important to train yourself to focus on work during the time that you’re working – avoiding distractions that can swiftly spiral into long periods of procrastination. On top of this, as this whole situation can lead to a situation where you don’t leave your home all that much, creating regular reasons to go outside can ensure that you maintain a balanced lifestyle.
Specific Techniques
If you do spend a lot of time at home, and you also find that you spend a lot of time anxious or depressed, you might begin to associate these feelings more and more closely with the space that you spend a lot of time in. This can be damaging – especially in situations like when you’re trying to sleep but find that you’re unable to disconnect from the swirling vortex of thoughts that you’ve been replaying all day.
It becomes essential, then, to learn some ways of tackling your stress at home. Just as you’ve perhaps inadvertently created a space that reinforces your stress, you can create an environment that instead cultivates positive mental wellbeing. The trick might be to simply slow down. Learning how to meditate or practice mindfulness is important, but it’s also worth understanding what the goal is here – if you’re desperately trying to switch off your thoughts with this practice, you might spend the whole time becoming frustrated at how it isn’t working. You’re trying to simply become aware of your thoughts and how they represent only a slice of your sensory experience, rather than the whole that you need to focus on. Having a quiet and gentle space to sit quietly in and focus on your breath can help you to practice this skill.
