Refresh your Home during the Fall season

Design can encourage us to be more active, even to workout.  Design can help you transition from making excuses for avoiding working out to exercising with vigor and enthusiasm (at least some enthusiasm).

As you start to spend more time inside and less time outside, it’s great to switch things up in your home, just a bit.  As humans, we’re most comfortable in spaces that are familiar, but we also hate to be bored.  Reconciling these drives is not as tricky as it might seem at first.  Take advantage of the opportunities presented by the days growing shorter to change a few of the pieces of art on your table tops or walls (moving something out of storage in the back of the closet and tucking away out of view whatever has been on your table or wall.  Put a different throw on the back of your sofa.  Maybe change the smell of the air freshener you use – cinnamon smells that bring holidays to mind have also been shown to enhance creative thinking, for example, and that can be a plus as you decide on party plans.  As you spend more time inside it’ll be tempting to change thing after thing about your home, but resist that urge.  Changing how it smells and a couple of pieces of art, for example, will satisfy your needs for both familiarity and novelty.

Have a read of some of our articles on keeping fit and design (search for Fitness in the top right search box) or have a read of this.

As you change things out, it is really, really important that some things are placed out of sight while others move into it.  Nothing stresses us out faster than visual clutter, as we discussed here.

Autumn (and it’s inevitable sequel, Winter) are the times when we need our homes to work hardest for us—and they can.  Science shows us how.