Outlooks & Setbacks Saturdays

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” ― Jimi Hendrix

Stress is an inevitable part of life, but it can feel even more overwhelming if you don't have a place to retreat for rest and relaxation. This is particularly true if you tend to be a highly sensitive person (HSP), a form of neurodiversity that causes people to have an increased response to physical, social, or emotional stimuli.

When looking for ways to manage stress, people often overlook one of the simplest and most effective strategies: Creating a peaceful home. Because most of our days begin and end at home, having a peaceful home as your base can help you launch yourself into the world from a less-stressed place each day.

At a Glance

Whether you are a highly sensitive person or just prefer to have a cozy, restful environment, creating a space that helps you feel peaceful at home can be vital for your mental well-being. Having a peaceful space can help you feel relaxed, refreshed, and more energetic. Strategies that can help you feel peaceful at home include decluttering, incorporating stress-soothing habits, using aromatherapy, practicing feng shui, and playing music. 

What Is a Peaceful Home?

A peaceful home is where you feel physically and emotionally calm, safe, and comfortable. It's a place where you can be yourself. 

It also means having a space where you can live harmoniously with other people who live in your home, including your partner, family members, roommates, or others who may live there.

However, what feels peaceful to you might not be the same as it might be for someone else. If you have an extroverted personality, a peaceful home might be one that is filled with friends, conversation, and activity. For someone more introverted, a peaceful home might be a quiet place to retreat to find solitude and alone time.

Barriers to a Peaceful Home

Because this seems like such a given, why don’t people focus more on discovering and assembling the elements of a peaceful home? It’s a paradox that many of us experience.

Even though home is important, creating a peaceful space might not seem as pressing as some of our other needs. When rushing to get out the door in the morning, or collapsing on the couch after a long day, cleaning and organizing may seem ridiculous.

There may also be other barriers that prevent people from feeling safe, peaceful, and secure in their home environment. Some factors that can make it more difficult to have a peaceful home include:

• Having a poor work-life balance
• Conflicts with other people living in your home that create a hostile atmosphere
• Clutter
• Poor communication with others in the home that leads to misunderstandings
• Financial problems that create stress, anxiety, and uncertainty
• Unsafe or unsanitary living conditions
• Overcrowding, lack of privacy, and lack of personal space
• Mental health challenges that make maintaining your space more difficult
• Lack of access to healthcare and accommodations
• Excessive noise
• Overuse of technology that creates disruptions and interferes with relationships
• Loneliness, social withdrawal, and social isolation

Reasons to Make Your Home Peaceful

However, when you consider the value of creating an inspiring place to wake up to, a soothing place to come home to, and a relaxing place to live, it becomes apparent that time and energy put into creating a peaceful home can translate into energy saved and stress relieved.

The Toll of Clutter

In ways many people don’t realize, clutter has hidden costs. It drains us of time, energy, and even money. Many people describe feeling disorganized or chaotic when they are living in clutter or items seem disorganized.

According to one study, home is more than just a place we live. It's a place made up of experiences, situations, and meanings that we shape and are shaped by. Because home is so important, researchers found that being surrounded by clutter can actually take a toll on a person's subjective well-being.1

Fun With Friends and Family

One clutter-clearing expert, FlyLady, refers to a cluttered environment as living in CHAOS: Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome. We love this acronym because it’s so true—who can relax with friends and family in a messy home? Probably not you or your guests.

Because of the benefits of social support, and the stress-relieving benefits of having fun with friends, it’s even more helpful to have an environment where everyone can relax and have fun.

If you feel like you can't invite people over because your home is too chaotic, messy, or cluttered, it can take a serious toll on your social life. Over time, this may erode your social connections and contribute to a lack of social support in your life.

Energy Levels

The eastern practice of feng shui—the ancient art of placement—is gaining popularity all over the globe, as people notice that their surroundings can influence the way they feel and the energy that they have. Feng shui holds that the placement and type of objects in our surroundings can affect our energy, or chi.2

Whether or not you are interested in feng shui, you have probably noticed that cluttered environments can be an energy drain—even if just because there’s so much to look at (and everything you see is a reminder of cleaning that should be done).

Maintaining an uncluttered, peaceful home can make you feel more energetic and relaxed at the same time.

5 Steps to Create a Peaceful Home

Including several peace-promoting elements in your home can make it a more soothing and enjoyable place to be. When trying to convert your home into a more peaceful space, consider the following strategies.

Pare Down, Organize, and Decorate

These are the classic activities people think of when they think of home makeovers. Getting rid of clutter can help you plug up energy drains all over your home. Organizing your things can help you to know where everything is, and have a place to put everything in your home so that clean-up goes very quickly.

Decorating, using colors and themes that truly speak to you, can help you feel relaxed and energized at the same time as you look around and take in the beauty, order, and style of your home.

Create a Space for Stress-Relief Activities

One of the challenges of maintaining stress-relieving habits is that we get busy and let other activities in our lives come first. If we build in a physical space for our stress-soothing habits, we have a physical reminder, as well as a facilitator, to help us maintain the motivation to keep these habits in our lives.

Improve Feng Shui

Many people have reaped the stress relief benefits of feng shui and swear by the practice. Feng shui tips that can help you create a peaceful home include the following:

• Tame the clutter by getting rid of things you don't use or don't need
• Keep an open path to move around your space more easily
• Add houseplants to your space
• Keep windows clean to let in light

As you're making changes to create a peaceful home environment, factoring in a little feng shui (or a lot) can bring long-term benefits, as once you incorporate the stress-relieving elements of feng shui, you don't have to constantly maintain most of the changes—they're just part of your decor.

Try Aromatherapy

Because aromatherapy is getting a lot of buzz these days, it's easy to find products that provide a wonderful, soothing scent for a room. And the hype isn't unwarranted; aromatherapy research shows that there are real stress-relief benefits to its use.3

Aromatherapy can help create a peaceful home that subtly offers passive stress relief, making it a recommended element of a peaceful home.

The Best Essential Oils for Stress Relief and How to Use Them

Play Music

Music is another of those wonderful stress relievers that, like aromatherapy, offers passive stress relief and can energize or relax you (depending on the type you use). It can offer benefits that are better than you might imagine.

Incorporating music into the background can help contribute to a peaceful home environment—it's a great way to relieve the stress of those you're with, and relieve your own stress at the same time, without much effort.

How to Use Music for Stress Relief

Takeaway

Creating a peaceful home is all about creating a space that helps you feel the most comfortable, secure, and happy. So think about what matters the most to you. It might mean creating a space full of books and a comfortable place to read. Or it might mean making your home a welcoming place to entertain your friends and family.

So spend some time thinking about your favorite places to relax, and then try to channel that feeling into your home. It might involve decluttering, rearranging, or redecorating, but making an effort to bring more peace into your home can help you feel less stressed and more restored.

Peace & Forgiveness

What is one small change you can make today to bring more peace into your home?