Tuesday @ 6pm. You’ve had a long day at work. The bills are piling up. That nagging knee pain isn’t letting up. The stress is at a level of 8 or weeks. You’re just getting home and inside your loved ones can’t wait to see you. They deserve your best.
As you walk up to your house, you now have a 5-second window to change the world. If you created a stress free home environment, here it pays off.
Everything has its time, and the very moment you walk in the door from work is the time for you to switch off the outside world and step into peace. This peace can be by design, believe it or not. Follow these 5 easy ideas and you’ll enjoy newfound tranquility in your life that will spill over into the rest of your day.
1. Clear The Approach To Your Stress Free Home
What we encounter in those first few moments of arriving home can make or break the rest of the night. Starting with the walkway, step, and even the front yard, if we have a clutter-free approach to our home, it will set the other four steps up even better. This begins with a clean walkway. Make it a routine to sweep and hose it off each weekend. In winter, doing your best to have it shovelled and salted will go a long way not just for safety, but for a visual cue to know it’s done. A pot or two of
seasonal flowers will go a long way and can be picked up for under $20 apiece. Some wind chimes hanging nearby also add to the effect we are going for here. I don’t know about you, but when I hear a set of chimes it brings me back to a state of inner peace.
2. Outerwear Everywhere!
Upon walking into your home, if tripping over sets of shoes and dog leashes happens more often than not, it might be a good time to give some of these things a home. This home may come in the form of a shoe rack, a nearby closet rack, a tote in the garage for seasonal footwear, or maybe the donation pile may be in order for some. Hanging coats in the open may be okay for your daily bomber, but any more than one or two and the rest need to find a more permanent spot. Front closet for your
weekender and bedroom closet for the hoodies. Again, seasonal ones can get allocated to a garage tote. A stylish entrance table is great for items like mail, keys, spare change, etc. Be careful not to overstep its usefulness though. If it’s become a catch-all table, time to declutter. Also, if you have room on top of a table, then it will get used. Best practice would be to utilize whatever space that is on it that you don’t need for the above-mentioned keys, mail, etc. Fresh cut flowers are a great welcome home sight. They could accomplish this idea of stealing tabletop space from unwanted clutter.
3. The Nose Knows a Stress Free Home
Believe it or not, our sense of smell is one of the best ways to hack your life that nobody talks about. But you know this to be true yourself. Just as a certain song can bring back a memory of your teenage years, or a special weekend at Grandma’s when you were a kid, a certain smell can do just the same. It triggers our limbic (caveman) part of the brain. These triggers are buried so deep in us that they are impossible to erase. The best we can do is overwrite what they will remind us of. The fresh-cut flowers mentioned above would be terrific in this respect. So would even an unlighted scented candle near your doorway. Also, if you are lucky enough to have an electrical outlet nearby your entrance table, a more economical idea may be a small diffuser with some essential oils. The upfront cost would be more than the weekly flowers, but the long-term savings would mount up. Why not do both! Use the side table for the essential oils and have another table location for the fresh-cut flowers. Either way, you can’t go wrong both on the smell or the visual aspect of each.
4. Can You Hear Me Now?
Having some soft music playing as you’re arriving home would be the icing on the proverbial cake. Now, I’m not talking about the top 40 local station. Not even the oldies station. Think 5-star resort spa. Think meditation beads, incense burning, orange robe-wearing. Especially if you work in a high-paced environment like retail or some busy office settings. Background noise in some environments has a way of becoming the norm in our heads and it’s easy for our body’s inner rhythms to
begin to beat to that pace as the default. If you could add some tranquil, peaceful flute music, for example, into your day, we can begin to tinker with our body rhythm. The inner peace found from this one change alone will alter your day-to-day feelings dramatically.
5. Our Happy Place
Lastly, but for sure not the least, is who you’re coming home to and how they’re doing. Building and developing a peaceful relationship with your significant other will have a great showing at this moment in particular. Walking into a kiss and a smile goes further than all others on this list, so whatever you could do to help this happen, make it so. Sometimes, all it takes is to verbalize your intentions. Simply chatting with your spouse about the space and atmosphere you’re trying to accomplish would open the door to them being on board and helping accomplish this. If coming home in a grumpy mood has been your norm, then I’m sure they will be more than happy to take part in helping you achieve a more peaceful state of mind. If you happen to live alone, then this doesn’t really apply, but all the rest would and should be super easy to do if it’s just you there.
No matter what I tell you about any kind of life hack or quick fix to a stress free home, ultimately the best thing is to start getting stressors in your life down to a minimum. Work on paying off the debt. Work on those stretches and physio for any body issues you may have to the point where you can begin exercising.
