According to studies, people who live in a clean house are more likely to make healthy life choices. Cleaner dwellings have been related to increased physical activity and better eating choices.
As we all know, diet and exercise are connected to greater health.
While a tidy home will not magically make us healthier, research has shown that people who live in clean, organized settings make healthier choices throughout their lives.
By making a few changes to our spaces, we can thrive.
1. What Furniture Do We Have?
The first step to creating a space that works for us is to consider what furniture we have. We don’t want to have so much furniture in a room that it seems overcrowded or cluttered.
Open spaces are more relaxing, whereas a room with too much furniture can make it seem as though the walls are closing in on us. We should keep things simple and choose furniture that doesn’t have lots of added bulk.
At the same time, we should not deny ourselves style, comfort, or convenience. If we make sure to choose furniture that is useful, we will be better able to keep our spaces clean.
2. What Items Do We Have?
The next step in keeping a space tidy is to do an inventory of what items we have. It can be surprising just how much stuff we can cram into a small, cluttered space.
Once we pull everything out, we may discover we have lots of extra towels or that we have a pile of technology that we forgot we had.
The better we are at identifying what we have, the better able we will be to keep our home tidy. Sometimes in this process we find items we forgot we had.
This might be the perfect time to use the new towels we got as a gift. In addition, we could open that wonderful sounding tea that has been sitting in our cupboard for ages.
3. Can We Get Rid of Anything?
The easiest way to stay tidy is to have less stuff to begin with. When we take things out and see what we have we tend to realize we have several items that don’t spark joy nor serve us anymore.
Sometimes we keep items because they have sentimental value.
However, all too often we end up holding on to broken items, or items that are no longer useful, simply because we never got around to getting rid of them.
In order to create spaces, we can thrive in, we need to get rid of these items.
4. Where Do We Really Use Each Item?
It is also important to consider where we really use each item in our home. For example, many of us have our comfortable shoes for women thrown in the bottom of a closet.
They would be better suited to a designated shoe rack that we have in our entryway. Since we put our shoes on as we are heading outside that is where we should keep them stored.
The same is true of every other object that we have in our homes. If we think through where we use objects, we will be able to keep our space tidy.
For example, if we want to make sure that cups do not cover our space, we can always put it on a designated coaster in our office.
Then each evening we make sure to bring that day’s cup to the sink to be washed.
5. What Really Works for Us?
When it comes to designing a space where we can thrive, it is important to remember that there are no rules. What our space looks like is up to us.
Sometimes we can get lost in how we think we should design a space rather than what works for us.
If we tend to just throw clean laundry on our bed, we can have a designated clean laundry basket that we place at the foot of our bed.
We can then stay tidy by knowing whenever we have clean laundry, we put it in the basket. We don’t have to store such items in our closets if we don’t use them there.
If we design a space that works for us, we are much more likely to thrive.
