Design changes that are FREE!

Here is a useful list for you

• The single most important thing you can do to improve your life is to live it in natural light. Opening the drapes and blinds wherever you are (to the extent possible without glare, glare makes us tense) will boost your mood and wellbeing and how well your brain processes whatever comes its way.  If you can’t open your drapes enough to make a difference in the natural light in your home, take your curtains down and use the fabric for something else.  Remember, however, that we don’t live in our world alone so keep some sort of screening in place to block the view of others into spaces where you’ll dress and bathe, etc.

• While you’re at those windows dealing with the curtains and blinds, make sure the window sashes aren’t painted shut. Some of you live in places where the air is chock full of undesirable stuff, and you should ignore this paragraph.  The rest should make sure that you can open the windows and let in fresh air whenever outside conditions allow –and heating or air conditioning in operation won’t burst from your home to, for example, brighten the day of dog walkers on the street outside your home who will be treated to a blast of warm or cool air, depending on the season, from inside your house.  Lots of windows have been “painted shut” over the years, in other words sloppy or unconcerned painters have let paint that is meant for the trim, etc., around the windows run into the cracks between the moveable parts of the window, and you may need to pick this paint out with something sharp (be careful!) before you can open your windows.

• Whether you open the windows or not, dust and vacuum. Simply dusting and vacuuming will remove lots of undesirable stuff floating around in the air inside which can up your physical wellbeing, and what’s good for your body is good for your mind.  Cleaning up generally is good for our self esteem and reminds the people who visit us, and ourselves, that we can indeed manage our own life—plus, the smell of dishes that need to be washed, etc., makes us tense.

• Many of our homes already have some sort of “sound system.” A sound system can take many, many different forms, from an incredibly complex network of speakers and other components connected wirelessly to each other in a tangle of parts that induces nausea in all but the most technical, to a battery-operated radio.  Whatever you’ve got can be used to soundtrack your life in the directions you intend.  When you need to rev yourself up turn up the volume (but neighbours [if you have them] should never suffer for your happiness), play the soundscape of your life at quieter, neighbour pleasing volumes, when you’re set to relax.   When you’re trying to do knowledge-type work add white noise or a nature soundtrack to wherever you are; either option is readily available online.

• For too many of us, visual clutter prevails. We have lots of stuff and most of it seems to be in view most of the time.  Nothing makes us tenser than visual clutter.  Clutter busting needs to be a priority.  There’s no need to buy anything to cut the clutter in your home.  As you begin, sort through whatever is scattered across your tabletops, floors, counters, etc.  If it is trash, throw it away/recycle it.  If it is still in good enough shape that it might be handy to someone else and you’re OK with parting with whatever it is, send what’s cluttering up your home on to a new home elsewhere, and that elsewhere might be with friends, relatives, or people who frequent the shops of the groups to whom you have donated it.  We all need to see around us as we go about our daily lives items that remind us what we value about ourselves and the lives we’re living and plan to live in the future.  These items can be diplomas or photos of children or books written 300 years ago by an ancestor or something else entirely.
• Never create a space that doesn’t send you, and people who visit, messages that matter to you.  If you think about it, you’ll find that some of the things around you are items that are particularly meaningful to you.  Many people can’t de-clutter because they think they’ll need to get rid of things that matter to them—their children’s baby shoes, the floral crown they wore at their wedding, their grandmother’s handmade lace doilies.  You don’t have to.  You can leave a few things, say one or two, out on your coffee table, etc., but you can pack the rest out of sight and rotate them into view periodically when you tuck the items on view initially away—you need to keep some things that are meaningful to you in view, a barren, stark environment is just as stressful for humans as one that’s visually packed.  If you find that you never choose to put something on view, your grandmother’s lace doilies never find their way onto a table top, for instance, it may be time to give whatever it is, doilies in this case, away. Cardboard boxes and heavy duty plastic bags can keep things that are valuable to you safe in closets, under furniture, etc., and ready to rotate into more visible locations—and you probably have those bags and boxes already.  Also, a set of neatly stacked cardboard boxes, even in view, reduces the visual clutter in a space if the contents of those boxes will otherwise be scattered hither and yon, on view to all.  Unfortunately, some of us have serious psychological conditions that keep us from parting with things that really should go elsewhere, such as last week’s newspapers.  If you suspect you might be someone in this group, you should seek help from a health care professional.

• Rotating items in and out of view helps beat place-boredom. We feel best in spaces that evolve slowly over time.  When we were a young species, our surroundings during the summer months were rarely the same as during the winter, for example, and we continue to like to see some gradual, not dramatic  changes in the places where we spend our time.  Curating what’s visible in your home by rotating things you already own into and out of view, season by season or month to month, whichever you prefer, will also help keep you from buying new things for your home or office out of simple boredom.  You don’t need to change large items from one season (or whatever) to the next to refresh your space, different sheets on a bed or throws on a couch can do the trick.  If you don’t have much storage space there’s absolutely no need for you to be concerned about rotating in and out framed wall art, etc.  You can also make meaningful changes in how your home smells or sounds at different times of the year, and these sorts of modifications are just as powerful as visual ones and often take up no space (for example, if you simply tune into different music radio stations) or minimal space (you switch out the pumpkin spice scent in your odour diffuser for pine).

• You don’t have too much control of objects added to your home or office by future birthday gift givers, relatives who include you in their wills, etc., but you can influence what you yourself add. Before you purchase something, or pick it up from the curb where your neighbour has placed it for trash pick up, etc., ask yourself why you want whatever is involved and where it can go, literally, in your home or office.  Also ask yourself if having whatever you’re considering is sending you some sort of message about a self-identity you value and if it will help you move toward achieving your life goals.

• In spaces for mingling, it can be particularly useful to re-arrange your existing furniture so people can make eye contact, as desired. Generally this means facing all seats toward a central, almost always hypothetical, hub but arrangements where people talk from seats at right angles to each other, as they do in a section whose pieces meet at 90 degrees, is particularly good for conversations that lead to positive relationships.   In any one of these re-arrangements, there needs to be some centrally located focal point to which people can gracefully divert their eyes when the discussion gets tough or for the regular “eye contact” breaks that are necessary in any conversation regardless.  This central “focal element” can be anything that you have on hand, from an antique sculpture you inherited from your Aunt Berta to a bowl containing fruit that you will eat soon.

• While you’re re-arranging your furniture, create areas in which the legs of all seats are approximately the same length. A mix of leg lengths in a space (or, mon dieu seats without legs, like cushions on the floor) is not a good idea.  People who are sitting up higher, on taller chairs or on a chair at all (if others are on floor cushions), are treated as more adult, their statements carry more weight, for example, and those being looked down on are seen as more childlike, with similar respect resulting from whatever they have to say.  This sort of adult-child status differential is not a plus when all present should be treated as equals.  A useful research finding, for people with children: when people are looking upwards, in other words, when their heads are tipped chin up, they are more receptive to advice they receive than they otherwise might be.