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There are various roles that a home should serve, assuming everything is going well.

For one thing, your home should obviously be comfortable, and should help you to relax on your weekends or after a long day of work.

For another thing, your home should serve as a place where you can adequately and reasonably store your various belongings, without too much fuss.

Perhaps the most important function of the home, however – beyond keeping the rain from reaching your bed – is serving your overall sense of well-being and contentment.

Here are a few tips for making your home serve your well-being:

Invest in “ease of use” and accessibility features and tools

If you find that carrying out everyday tasks around your home is a lot more frustrating than you would like it to be – and that things seem to be “hard work” more often than not – this might be a good sign that it’s time to invest in some “ease-of-use” and “accessibility” features and tools, for your home.

These features might take the form of structural adaptations such as an ADA ramp, or they might take the form of smaller-scale things like a stable and convenient footstool for reaching the high shelves in your kitchen.

Whatever the particular situation, you should take steps to ensure that you can navigate your home with relative ease, and without putting yourself at risk, or straining yourself when carrying out everyday chores.

Keep the place as organised as possible – clutter and mess can significantly undermine your sense of well-being

If your home is a very chaotic and messy place, with a lot of clutter, and with things frequently being out of place, the overall effect is likely to be a significant undermining of your sense of well-being.

When your home environment is very messy and cluttered, it signals on a deep psychological level that you aren’t really in control of the place, and that everything is a bit haphazard, unpredictable, and distracting.

By contrast, if you’re able to give your home the “Marie Kondo treatment,” or something like it, and can do a good job of decluttering and organising it, you’ll likely find that you have far more mental space and energy, and a greater sense of calm, than you did before.

Make space for the hobbies and pastimes you want to engage in most, and make the unhealthy ones harder to access

It’s one thing to sit down and enjoy a film, or an episode of a TV show you enjoy, or to spend half an hour surfing the web.

But an issue with these sorts of activities is that they can very easily consume hours at a stretch, and are often explicitly designed to do this. For example, certain online streaming services automatically play the next episode in the series without you even having to get up off the sofa, largely so that you spend as much time as possible engaging with the service.

Your sense of well-being will probably not be in great shape if you feel that you waste a lot of your time each day.

So, make space in your home for the hobbies and pastimes you want to engage in the most – things like reading, or writing, exercising, or doing arts and crafts – and make the “unhealthy” ones harder to access. You could, for example, unplug your games console and pack it away in a cupboard when you’re not using it.