Environmental Self-Care: The 5 Key Habits
Compared to the other pillars of self-care, like physical, mental, or emotional, the environmental dimension is often neglected if not completely dismissed and ignored. However, making sure you live in a peaceful environment that makes you feel good and serene is important to avoid causing more stress and tension in your life.
Knowing where to start, however, might be tricky. So in this post, I’ll share with you the 5 key steps of environmental self-care to help you get started and create a living space where you feel good and relaxed.
The 5 key steps of environmental self-care
1. Reflect and Identify
The environment we live in has a huge impact on how we feel, but sometimes with the hustle of our busy lives, we can forget to make sure our living spaces don’t hinder our well-being.
If you’re interested in making sure your living space is actually helping you feel good, a good place to start is by reflecting. Take a step back and assess your environment, see if you can identify anything that negatively affects you, and then figure out a way to change or improve it to help you feel more peaceful and serene.
Tip:
Whenever you notice something starts grating on your nerves in your house, makes you stressed or irritable, do something about it right away. This way you won’t have to deal with it later.
2. Declutter and Organize
If you live in a messy and cluttered environment, it can negatively affect your well-being and make you feel on edge, tense, and overwhelmed.
Sometimes, when our living spaces are messy, it can be an indicator that we just have too much stuff at home. Lots of bits and bobs we don’t necessarily need, yet still keep purchasing and hoarding anyway. But at some point, it becomes too much. We don’t have room for them, and keeping everything neat becomes a hustle that comes with the price of our time and peace of mind.
Decluttering your house is always an excellent way to let go of things you don’t need anymore, and helps you feel better and lighter afterward. Besides, the fewer items you possess, the less time you waste cleaning which is an amazing bonus because then you get more free time to do other things than you actually love doing and make you happy. (Well, except if you love cleaning.)
One tip to keep things organized:
Find one spot for each item, and whenever you pick it up, then put it back there when you’re done. I know it’s an easy and obvious tip, but I know people who really struggle with home organization and they have a tendency to pick up something and then leave it lying around instead of putting it back where it belongs. (If you do this once, it’s not really a problem, but if you do it several times a day, then clutter will build up quickly.)
3. Clean and Tidy
Making sure you live in a clean and tidy space can definitely make all the difference in how good or bad a room makes you feel. It goes hand in hand with the previous point. If you’ve gotten rid of all the stuff you don’t actually need, then now it’s easier to keep your living space clean and tidy.
So yes, try to focus on always maintaining a clean and tidy environment because it is important to ensure your home is a stress-free place where you actually feel at peace and relaxed.
4. Create a comfortable, Stress-free environment
What does a comfortable environment mean for you? What are the first things that come to your mind when you picture it? A neat and tidy place, a cozy room with candles and a lovely decoration, a quiet and peaceful space? Figure it out and then go ahead and try to arrange your home to match your idea of a comfortable living space that makes you feel good at home. (This, of course, doesn’t mean that you should empty your wallet, though.)
See: How to create a stress-free home in 5 simple steps
5. Open your windows
Opening your windows to let fresh air in first thing in the morning is essential to improve indoor air quality and circulate the air. Yes, it is an obvious step, but one that is important if you want to live in a healthy environment. Opening your windows prevents allergens (dust, pollen, etc…) and chemicals (cigarette smoke, pollutants, etc…) buildup inside your home, and helps reduce indoor carbon dioxide levels which can accumulate and perturb the quality of your sleep.
Last tip
While this whole post focuses on your living space, I should meantion that it doesn’t have to be exclusive to your house.
When it comes to creating a stress-free living space, you can apply the same principles to your office or other workspaces. By just following the same steps, you can also create a work environment where you can actually feel calm and focused instead of stressed and anxious.
Bottom Line
Even though environmental self-care is often ignored, making sure you live in a healthy and relaxing environment is one of the key steps to feeling good in your life. Your living space plays a crucial role in how you feel, after all, so making sure it’s comfortable and supports your well-being is essential.
Remember, the key to environmental self-care is to focus on creating and maintaining a healthy and comfortable home so that you don’t have to feel more stressed and anxious, but peaceful instead.
So that’s it.
As always, please do not hesitate to share any tips, tricks, and ideas that could help others with environmental self-care if you have any that work for you.
Don’t forget to be gentle and take care of yourself. I wish you a joyful and agreeable day.