Your home is your refuge at the end of a long and stressful workday. It’s where you want to be able to sit back, kick your feet up and just relax. If this isn’t what your home is to you right now and you desperately want it to be, we’ll be giving you some tips on what you need to do. You won’t have to feel confined to your bedroom to find some peace in the house.
Stress and anxiety are daily challenges for many people and they don’t always know that it can take something as simple as a mini home makeover to lighten things up.
Let’s start with the obvious and largest influence on the aesthetic of a space: the walls. White is common because it’s easy to match with furniture, but the whole clinical feel doesn’t do wonders for relaxation.
You need to find soft hues of pretty much any colour you fancy. A pastel range isn’t harsh on the eyes and doesn’t make a bold statement (which is good because you’re not trying to be bold). Blues have been known to help reduce anxiety but if you prefer the fields, sunshine, earth or flowers, your connection to the pastel colour will help calm you down when you walk through the front door.
Your freshly painted and clean walls can do with a bit of décor, which is why art is the next step on the home makeover list. Paintings, photographs, sculptures or illustrations will make fine additions to your home, you just need to make sure you bring in the right kind of art.
No one needs artworks depicting affliction, pain, war, distortion or any other negative or passionate expressions in their home. You want to invest in artwork that is family-friendly and calming to look at. With all the different African art styles out there, you will find the pop of colour, happy-to-look-at and beautiful art pieces to add to your home.
Take Laolu Senbanjo’s The Sacred Art of The Ori series, for example. It’s a series of artworks created under the influence of the Yoruba religious rituals where you become one with yourself. A perfect example of how art in the home can be inspiring, complex, beautiful and calming. If that doesn’t make you feel good about yourself at the end of a hard day, then at least there are still more things you can add to your home to make it more relaxing and rewarding.
Every home has a smell, but that’s something you get used to after living there every day for a long period of time. You have the power to perfume your home with a scent that’s pleasing and calming to welcome you when you get home. Lavender is especially useful in the case of stress and anxiety and is know to relax most people. Other scents that do well in the relaxation department include lemon, jasmine, cinnamon, peppermint and rosemary. More than enough for you to choose from. You could even have scent-themed rooms complemented by the colour of your walls as an extra reinforcement of relaxation.
There are different ways in which you can bring in serene scents into your home. You could have air fresheners placed around the house, make use of scented candles, have incense burners, use essential oils in diffusers, use reed diffusers or create your own scented drawer sachets.
Plants reinforce life, freshness and all the tranquillity that goes with nature. Buy indoor plants to nurture and grow in your home. Not only will they last longer than flowers, but they will clean your air and be a relaxing pastime when caring for them. Not everyone has the space to landscape an entire garden or well enough behaved pets to grow beautiful flower bushes, so this option is one way to bring the outdoors inside.
Green is a calming colour and is associated with nature, luck and good health. Through plants, it’s everything you need to feel relaxed at home without painting all your walls green. Green doesn’t have to be your favourite colour, just choose a beautiful plant and you won’t even notice its colour, just its calming effect.
If you truly want to relax, you need to be surrounded by relaxing textures and materials. Soft (yet supportive) couches, fluffy blankets, comfortable scatter cushions, silky sheets, smooth tiles and down-feather pillows. There shouldn’t be one area of the house that isn’t comfortable or relax-worthy.
Even when you consider the lighting in your house, it should also be comfortable on your eyes. Bright and harsh lights are clinical and invasive to your eyeballs. Make use of the natural light by opening the curtains and install dimmable LEDs around the house. There should be no reason to strain any part of your body when you get home to relax
It’s all good and well to spend the time and effort on these relaxing additions to the home, but it all means nothing if your house is not organised. Clear the clutter and keep everything clean. Messy homes are incredibly stress-inducing, no matter how many calming contemporary artworks, scented candles, natural light sources and plants you have.
