How to Make a Cozy House — De-stress Your Home

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, and I’m your happiness expert. This week’s video is all about getting in touch with the reality of our stressful lives, and then how to cope with it in gentle, very practical, and realistic ways. So, stay tuned, and you’re gonna get all about chilling out.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So, stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Yeah, so before I get into this week’s video, if you’re new to the channel, please subscribe to my channel right now. Go click the little subscribe button, and you get a new video into your inbox every Sunday morning.

Now, this week’s video, I think, is apropos for the time of year. We are coming back from the holiday break and, for most people, there is just an avalanche of stress in their lives. All the New Year’s resolutions that we capped, and all those that we’re struggling to keep, and those that we haven’t kept. There’s a sense of pace that picks up again. Things slow a little bit at Christmas, then we’ve got this big pace that we have to keep up with after the break.

There’s also often financial challenges because we overspend. Sometimes there’s guilt and shame about physical issues that arose during Christmas times. We drink too much, we eat too much, and then there’s all those New Year’s resolutions, those pesky New Year’s resolutions that we made and maybe haven’t kept or we’re struggling to keep. For whatever reason, there tends to be a lot of stress in our lives, and there are some very simple ways that we can cut through the stress.

Today’s video is really about creating physical space that encourages and facilitates our well-being. One of the biggest things that we can say on that front is this whole concept of living in a clutter-free, simplistic physical space. I think we all struggle with this. Many of us do. As time goes by in whatever space we’re occupying, we tend to build up more and more little physical things in our space, and pretty soon all the horizontal surfaces have stuff on it. There’s more furniture in a room than you really need, and the cushions aren’t quite right. The little cozy blanket you had in front of the TV is sitting in a ruffled way on the couch, and all these little assaults on our senses can destabilize us to a certain extent. It’s stressful to see things messy: kitchens, living rooms, our bedrooms, all that kind of stuff.

The simplest way to approach that is build a little bit of time in your life to create less clutter. If you just say, “I’m going to take just five minutes,” a five-minute promise to yourself that you’re gonna do a little tidying up, and if that’s all you take and you only make a little dent, no problem. That’s really well done. But often, if we give ourselves just five minutes of investment, we’ll probably take more like 10, 15, or get on a roll, and we might even do a half hour. Your place will be infinitely tidier, and this can make a really big psychological difference.

This is also in keeping with a whole broader concept of minimalism, which is just trying to reduce the amount of stuff we have in our lives. We’re getting down to what Marie Kondo refers to as just those things that give us joy. I’m not the biggest subscriber to minimalism, but there are some real merits to going there in its less extreme forms. So, I encourage you, number one, to get a little control of your space, even if it’s just one space at a time.

Secondly, and more long-term, think about the colors that you have in your home. We know from lots of research that certain colors are necessarily going to raise our blood pressure. The color red, for example, that might be obvious. But more subtly, and most people wouldn’t recognize it, deeper darker goldy yellows tend to make us a little bit stressful too. So, think about colors like light blue or green. Greens tend to be the one that most of us, most of the time, will find relaxing and calming. Those are the kind of changes that we can insert into our house through our art or through certain objects that we leave out on exposure. But better still, you might want to actually repaint the room and make it green.

Thirdly, bring the natural environment into your home. There’s a couple ways to do this. One is obviously to bring in as much natural light as you can. So, when you get up in the day, if you’re comfortable with it and you still have privacy, open all your blinds, throw open the drapes, and allow as much natural light into your home as you can. That obviously brings a greater sense of calm. We even know from some research that the lack of exposure to natural light leads to some depression. That often comes on at this time of year and into February because the winter is getting long by this point, and we’re missing that natural light. So, open all your drapes, open the blinds, get the natural light in.

In addition, bring some nature into your home. I encourage you to have a few beautiful house plants in your home just to add that sense of natural serenity that can come with beautiful plants. Research even shows that aquariums lead to a greater nature relationship. We start feeling relaxed when we’re watching little fish swim around, or we hear the trickle of a little fountain. These things can be a reflection of our very ancient tribal past where we would have evolved in spaces that had natural sights and sounds. So, try to a certain degree to make your home reflect what you would find out in nature.

Fourthly, I just want to say that there’s something very strategic in having a singular space in your home that’s dedicated to calm. Now, if you’ve got a meditation or mindfulness practice, or a yoga practice, or something like that, you may already have a space like this in your house. But it might be a reading nook, or just some place where it’s clutter-free, there’s no electronics, and you know that when you go there, this space is for you to relax in. So, a reading nook, a meditation cushion, something like that can be very, very helpful. It can be a spot where you clearly know this is intended to be a relaxation zone, and by using it in that fashion, there’s an immediate awareness at some subconscious level that this is the place where you can settle down.

There’s four quick tips this week for the stressful time in our lives. If you find this content useful, please share the video, like the video, and subscribe to my channel. You’ll get new videos every Sunday morning. Thanks for watching, until next time.