8 Helpful Home Updates to Boost Mental Health
March 24, 2021Your home is a place that should make you feel warm and happy. Having a home that’s just the way you like it can improve your mental health by lowering stress and anxiety and also promoting a healthy lifestyle. Whether designing a custom home from the ground up or updating the dream home you just moved into, there are many ways to update your home for a more relaxing, calming, and soothing environment. Here are several helpful home updates to boost mental health:
1. Repaint Your Home in Calming Colors
The colors of your home can impact your mood and mental health. One way to update your home and improve your mental health is to use color psychology to your advantage and choose or repaint it in mellow and calming colors.
It’s best to pick a color of paint for one space at a time, clear out the space, and begin painting. Painting an entire room can be done in as little as a day if you have help, and a couple of days if you don’t. This is a relatively easy and inexpensive update to make your home feel more calm and relaxing.
You can also hire professionals to repaint large spaces. Regardless of whether you hire painters or DIY, this is a relatively fast and inexpensive option to change the look of your home and potentially improve your mental health too.
2. Add Softer Decor Items to Your Home
Sometimes, bulky furniture and hard edges can make your home feel cramped and unwelcoming. One way to help improve your mental health, or at least decrease some stress at home, is to soften the decor in your bedroom or home office.
Our brains prefer curves and rounded edges and including them in your home decor can help create a more calming and soothing environment. If you’re for easy home updates to boost your mental health, finding the right furniture and decorative pieces to soften the geometry can be a great help.
An egg chair might be vintage now, but the round shape can improve the atmosphere of a room and how you feel in it! But, it doesn’t have to be a vintage piece; adding any round shapes or pieces with lots of curves is an easy way to get this effect.
3. Include Greenery to Brighten Your Mood
Plants are known to have numerous health benefits. They produce oxygen, absorb carbon dioxide, and they generally just make people happy.
If you want to improve your home, you can start by adding a few potted plants and shrubs to spaces around your home. If you’re really in the mood to flex your green thumb, you can consider starting a garden or investing in new landscaping to add greenery to your entire home and property.
4. Make Sure You Get Some Light
Light can make a big difference in the look and feel of a room, and it can also make a difference in how you feel. One of the ways to boost your mental health is to get more light. Spend some time in the sun, light up a room by opening up the curtains, or try using a light therapy device. This can help boost your mood and also help you regulate your circadian rhythms during times when daylight is short, you can’t get outside, or during time changes.
5. Carve Out a Calming Space
Having a dedicated space where you can focus, just breathe, create, etc. is a home update that can help boost your mental health. Not only is the space designed specifically to be soothing, relaxing, and calming, but also the more time you spend there, the more easily your mind and body will start to relax when you are in that space.
Plus, this calming space that’s just for you is completely flexible and up to you. It could be a dedicated nap area, a reading nook, somewhere where you meditate, a place you go to journal, and more. This is one of the classic home ideas for dealing with cabin fever during the winter and can help you find a peaceful place throughout the year.
6. Use Aromatherapy to Your Advantage
Whether you dig into essential oils and aromatherapy or just include your favorite smells, you can use scents to help create a more calming and relaxing environment. A room that subtly smells like something you find calming and relaxing can help soothe you to manage stress or just wind down after a long day.
7. Reduce Clutter and Get Organized
A little mess can sometimes be a good thing, but a lot of clutter can create a stressful environment that feels cramped and is difficult to use. Sometimes, simply reducing clutter and organizing things can help boost mental health. Not only does the act of doing it get you moving, but it can also create a sense of accomplishment on top of the more relaxing environment you get to enjoy.
8. Create a Home Gym
Moving around and getting some exercise can be a great way to improve your mood and boost your mental health. In fact, a home gym is one of the most popular bonus room ideas for custom homes.
Whether you dedicate an entire room to a home gym or just create a space in your home where you can do some quick workouts, having a space that makes it easy to get active is a great home update to boost mental health.
These are just a few helpful home updates to boost mental health. They’re not meant to help with everything, but they can help you create a more relaxing, stress-free, and comfortable environment at home.
