How Your Home Impacts Your Mental Health

Listen up - believe it or not, there are a few scientifically proven issues about your home that can actually add severe anxiety to your life and can affect you both mentally and physically.

These stress factors can include anything and everything from general maintenance and repairs of your home to the design and decoration of your rooms - they can take up a lot of thinking time, and then they can start to impact on your mental health because what we see, hear, breathe and smell in our homes, or in fact any environment, can affect our mood and stress levels, which directly impact our mental health.

Ignoring your mental health can have serious long-term adverse effects on your overall health.

So, if you think that your emotional well-being is being affected by your home, then there are a few things that you can explore and possibly change to ensure your mental health improves.

Our Home
The place in which we live is supposed to keep us safe and happy, and we tend to treat them as extensions of our own personalities and identities.

There are various things that you can positively work on if you think your home environment is affecting you - these include:

Your Home Situation
If you live in a rented home or somewhere you aren't secure, comfortable or happy, you can find it can have a seriously negative effect on your mental health, especially depression. Factors such as a poor neighbourhood, rundown property, vandalism, loud or obnoxious neighbours can have a severe impact on your mental state. At the same time, a good neighbourhood can have the opposite effect.

Aesthetics
Cluttered spaces and general disorganisation in your home can create overwhelming feelings as well as anxiety, whereas tidy spaces can invoke a sense of calm and well-being. To try and help with this, you should opt for objects in your house that have meaning to you and which can boost your mood. So, if your home is full of clutter, it can make you feel claustrophobic - remember the saying "tidy room, tidy mind". How your rooms are painted can also have an effect on your mood - try going for relaxing, mood-enhancing colours, not ones that will affect your mood, behaviour, and stress levels.

Sensory
Your home's lighting, temperature, sounds, smells, as well as the colours of your home are really important to how comfortable and relaxed you feel. Harsh, bright lighting and loud or irritating noises can lead to you feeling anxious or agitated, and dark and cold spaces can make you feel unmotivated and uninspired, especially in the winter months.

People You Live With
Poor communication, conflicts, or unreliable people in the same house or environment you live in can be extremely stressful to manage. Whereas if you share a space with someone you trust, such as a partner, roommate, friend, or loved one, it can create a sense of calm and harmony.

The Environment
If your home isn't free from mould, pests, or chemicals, you can have physical reactions, which in turn, can lead to stress and anxiety. Living in a healthy environment, perhaps near a park, a river or in the countryside, can have an excellent impact on your wellbeing.

Article contributed by bosaco.co.uk - providers of Building Services


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