Your home is meant to be the place where you can relax — a place where you can tuck yourself away and recuperate from a hard day at work. But sometimes coming home may not be the best thing for you at all — particularly if your house is an unhealthy environment of dirt, dust and clutter!
So, what can you do to improve your home environment? Well, here realbuzz.com look at the four main rooms found in most homes — the living room, the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen — and give you essential tips on how to make these areas better for your health!
The living room
Most of us are probably guilty of watching too much TV, and the ‘couch potato’ stereotype has certainly not emerged in recent years without good reason. But how can you prevent yourself from watching TV every day after work, when it’s so easy to do so when you’re tired? Well, why not store away your TV set and see if you can live without it for a while? The time you would usually spend watching TV could then be spent on spending quality time with your family, socialising with your friends, or even playing a sport — all of which can help to maintain or improve your general health in the long term.
Research has suggested that hanging up some soothing pictures — such as beautiful landscape paintings or photos of some happy occasions — around the room can positively affect a person’s mood. For example, looking at nature in a painting or photograph has been found to reduce stress and anxiety. So, improve your mood by hanging a few things on those bare walls!
Lighting in the home is one of the areas where people frequently get things very wrong. Direct lighting can trigger headaches, for example, and so it may be wise to go for a more subtle approach. Try swapping the light switches in your living room — and even in other rooms if possible — for dimmer switches, so that you can vary the brightness instead of having to suffer shock to your eyes when you instantly put on a very bright light.
A nice shag-pile carpet might feel comfortable under your feet, but it can also be a welcoming home to all manner of mites and other microscopic creatures that can cause allergies. Think about replacing the carpet in your living room with natural flooring such as wood or tiling — both of which can be easily cleaned. If you really want to keep your carpet, though, then regular vacuuming is a must.
While you may love to feel like you are disappearing into the comfy folds of your armchair, sitting on it may not actually be the best thing for you! The synthetic materials used in many armchairs and sofas can trap various allergens — so a good tip is to go for leather upholstery instead, which won’t trap things like dust and pollen and will be easier to wipe clean.
The bedroom
The bedroom is quite possibly the area where you spend the majority of your time — at least a third of your whole day will be spent sleeping! — and yet often it does not get the attention that somewhere like the living room gets when it comes to cleaning. To make sure you have a good environment in which to sleep, aim to vacuum clean the room regularly, and clean those hard-to-reach spots in the room where dust and other allergens gather.
Obviously, bedrooms are intended for sleep — and it’s always better if the body gets used to this idea and begins to associate the room with sleep rather than other activities such as watching TV or using a computer. Doing too many activities in your room may mean that your mind will be restless, which may sometimes prevent you from actually getting to sleep. So, try to keep the majority of the activities you do out of the bedroom.