The spaces we live, work and play in are a reflection of ourselves and we will mentally and emotionally reflect the state of those spaces. To practice wellness for your space means to care for it as you need to be cared for. If you ignore your health, you’re probably ignoring the health of your home.
Think about how much more you enjoy driving your car right after it’s been washed, emptied of trash, vacuumed and wiped down. Your workspace – desk, drafting table, garage, etc. – probably gets chaotic and you periodically tidy it up. Offices that are shared with other people can be funny. I’ve known people who have immaculate desks due to either the nature of their job or the embarrassment of a messy desk, and yet live in chaos otherwise.
For our purposes today I’m going to be focusing on space as it applies to our homes. The place we spend the most time. The place we can hide from others. The space that is most reflective of our self-care.
There are two extremes in attending to the wellness of our space: the chaotic space and the overly tidy space. Yes, it is possible to be overly tidy. Generally speaking, any extreme is unhealthy.
Let’s address the chaotic first. This comes in a number of varieties. The home with a lot of “hotspots”, places where stuff randomly accumulates over and over no matter how often you tidy. The home that is generally clean, but has stuff everywhere. And the home that has lost the fight. This space is the one we associate with hoarders, and often is due to hoarding behavior, but not always.
To be clear, hoarding also comes in a number of levels. It is the accumulation of things due to such strong emotions that obsessiveness follows and getting rid of things can be traumatic. Please do not go into the home of a loved one who hoards and get rid of their things without their permission. They need therapeutic intervention before attending to their space. And don’t get rid of your own stuff because you think your supposed to rather than because it feels right. We have systems to attend to all of that.
I have had people tell me they’ve always been messy and they aren’t capable of not being messy. This is a label they gave themselves long ago that has given them permission to not take care of their space, and likely themselves.
Wellness in our homes follows the same formula as wellness in all 3 other areas, Mind, Body, and Soul, and involves all of them, too. Do you feel good in your space? If not, what needs to change?
That can sound daunting, so we come at it slowly and mindfully. We can only do so much at one time. We have to attend to our mind, body and soul wellness while working on our space. If we fry one of them out, we won’t be able to continue and will lead ourselves to feel a sense of failure.
I’ll never forget the day I sat hunched over my dinner at the kitchen table, looked around and said, “I hate all this fucking shit.” Yuck. Not how you want to feel about your home. I can tell you after a lot of work and a number of phases I feel happy and proud in my kitchen. Okay, it has a couple of hotspots, but they’re pretty easily taken care of now and then, and I’m alright with not being perfect.
I realized after the first full round of decluttering my own home that taking care of my space was, in fact, taking care of me. That had never occurred to me before. Has it occurred to you?
Now, let’s take some time to address those people who over clean their homes. Those of you who don’t do this may be wondering why this is a problem. Isn’t the goal to have a clean, tidy space all the time? Yes, but not at the risk of burning out.
I have known women who stay up late into the night cleaning their homes, never getting enough sleep. I’ve seen marriages fall apart because, in her desire to have a sense of control over something in her life, she neglects her spouse. I’ve heard of the children who tell their mom how mean she is whenever she does her quarterly full house clean.
These are not happy women. They are anxious and often angry and reactive. The good news is that I have also worked with these women to attend to the underlying issues and gotten them to a place where they can begin to reduce the perfectionism that is killing them.
One of the first cases like this that I worked with was a woman who, ever since her father had died, would clean her glass coffee table a minimum of 3 times a day. Any tiny smudge required a full cleaning. When we started working together, she thought it was having a glass table that was the problem, after some time she was down to one cleaning a day, and that was simply because it was part of her routine. The pride she felt radiated from her.
Wellness in your space means that it feels right. It feels safe, stable, comfortable. You can relax in your space. It isn’t perfect because nothing is perfect. But you work every day to maintain the health of your home. By doing this you maintain your own health.
To find out more about wellness in the other 3 areas that work together for your overall health check out my blogs on What Does Wellness Actually Mean?, Wellness for your Mind, Wellness for your Body, and Wellness for your Soul.