When it comes right down to it, what is your home to you? How do you experience your home on a day-to-day basis, and perhaps just as importantly, how do you feel and think about your home?
For many of us, our homes essentially end up being not much more than places where we watch TV, store our clothes, and stay out of the rain in between time spent at work, and whatever else might be happening over the course of everyday life.
Of course, some household chores and tasks are well-recognised as being important for safety and well-being, such as understanding what is an EICR?And keeping the electrical wiring and circuits in the home operating well.
When it comes to it, though, your home can be so much more – and there are so many different ways that you could be thinking about and relating to your home, that could lead to a significantly more enriched and positive experience of everyday life within that home.
Here are a few tips for changing how you think about your home.
Your home is your own personal slice of the world, that you can shape according to your preferences
First and foremost, your home is your own personal slice of the world that you can shape according to your preferences, interests, and state of mind.
In and of itself, this is a very powerful thing that many of us often end up overlooking on a day-to-day basis.
No doubt, you've got certain aesthetic preferences, and certain thoughts about how you would like your surroundings to look, feel, and function over the course of everyday life. Why, then, would you not take interior design seriously, and consistently endeavour to turn your home into the kind of place that really reflects those preferences of yours?
When you begin to do so, your home can end up serving as an ongoing project that can help you to feel more and more positive about your surroundings, and more and more engaged in the context in which you find yourself.
Your home is an extension of yourself, and will tend to mirror your internal landscape and vice versa
Many influential people have pointed out over time that our homes are essentially extensions of ourselves, and our mindsets will tend to be heavily influenced by our surroundings, and vice versa.
If you are feeling overwhelmed and are caught up in a chaotic and unsure state of mind, it's likely that your home will end up becoming messier and more disorganised as a result. And, by the same token, a messy and disorganised home will tend to encourage a messy and disorganised mindset, and so on.
Understanding the implications of this, you can take steps to organise, tidy up, and optimise your home environment so that it helps you to consistently feel your best, perform to the best of your abilities, and to experience the kind of everyday mindset that you would ideally want to experience.
Among other things, this will tend to include things like making sure that your home is tidyand well-organised, and that it’s decorated in a way that you find positive and uplifting, and so on.
It is important to be conscious of the fact that just because you aren't intentionally structuring your home in a way that feels meaningful and positive to you, that doesn't mean that the layout and atmosphere of your home isn’t still influencing your mindset, and deeply impacting how you think, feel, and behave on a day-to-day basis.
Your home is a studio for exploring your hobbies and projects
Your home can be something like a personal studio for exploring your hobbies and projects, and enabling you to more and more deeply involve yourself in potential pastimes and activities that you find fun and engaging.
Many of us have all sorts of different potential hobbies and pastimes that we would like to explore and take up, but simply never get around to doing so, because of the fact that we are too busy, distracted, appear to lack the space or resources to get started, etc.
Even in a small apartment, though, it will often be possible to set aside a corner of a room that can become an active "hobby space." This could be as relatively straightforward as setting up an artist’s easel, or setting up a small table with a sewing machine on it.
Developing skill at any endeavour or with regards to any project requires consistent practice – and your home is a private space where you can do just that.
Your home is your personal gym and fitness centre
In addition to everything else already mentioned, your home can be your own personal gym and fitness centre.
Of course, it's one thing to be talking about explicit home gym setups in and of themselves – things like a garage that has been converted into a dedicated workout area, complete with a squat rack, dumbbells, and so on.
But it's not necessary to go to this kind of length in order to turn your home into an environment that helps to facilitate better fitness and mobility, and heightened levels of everyday physical activity.
As many people have commented in recent times, individuals are tending to live excessively sedentary lives today, with many sitting for most of the day, and this contributes to a wide range of negative situations and conditions.
Simply adding morestools and fewer chairs to your home can improve posture, and setting up a standing desk can help you to be on your feet more during the day.
Increasing your baseline level of physical activity can have a wide range of different benefits, including making you more energetic, proactive, focused, and also helping you to experience a heightened sense of positivity on a daily basis.
In fact, some psychological researchers have found that the number of steps you take in a given day appears to be intimately connected to how positive and upbeat you are on a routine basis, and how susceptible you are to things like depression and overall low mood.