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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.

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If you feel chronically stressed as a rule, and worn down, worried, and irritated by the various obstacles presented by everyday life – one of the best things you can do is to take an active interest in “self-care” as a remedy to that.

Under normal circumstances, there are all sorts of things that people will tend to do in the name of self-care – including, perhaps, booking a medical cosmetic appointment with a company such as Med Spa.

As of this writing, however, much of the world is still under quarantine due to the COVID-19 Pandemic – which means that “self-care” is something that essentially has to take place primarily at home.

Here are a few suggestions on what self-care may look like at home.

Getting enough sleep

Sleep seems like a passive and potentially even aimless use of time – which is, no doubt, a big part of the reason why so many people these days are apparently chronically sleep deprived, ranging from entrepreneurs who work late into the night, to people who simply want to catch up on their Netflix viewing after work.

When push comes to shove, though, sleep is actually one of the most crucially important things you could possibly do for your own general well-being and physical and mental health.

In his book, “Why We Sleep“, the sleep scientist Matthew Walker looks at the consequences of not getting enough rest – and those consequences are severe. Even just getting an hour or so less sleep than you need each night to really feel rested, can result in your blood sugar regulation being so badly affected that you’d be classed as prediabetic following a blood test. Sleep deprivation will also cause you to age prematurely, feel dramatically more stressed, and be far more susceptible to all sorts of terrible diseases.

Getting more sleep really is potentially the best self-care tip you could ever take to heart.

Finding opportunities every day to do things that help you to feel in touch with a higher purpose

If your everyday life is just a series of chores and routines that you don’t find particularly meaningful, you are likely to feel unfulfilled, and to have the nervous sneaking suspicion that you are wasting your potential somehow.

One of the best things you can do for your overall sense of well-being, and your quality of life as a whole, is to find opportunities every day to do things that help you to feel in touch with a higher purpose – however you construe that.

These activities don’t have to be large and dramatic – especially not at first. Consider looking into the field of “Positive Psychology” for tips on where to start.

Taking some time each day for a bit of laughter and conversation

Finding regular opportunities for conversation – that is, conversation that involves actually speaking to people with your own voice, rather than texting them – has been shown to have a tremendously positive effect in terms of reducing stress levels, and promoting a general sense of well-being.

In fact, there’s even evidence that regular social interaction is one of the key human requirements for health and well-being – even for the most introverted of people.

A bit of laughter, too, can work wonders in terms of melting away stress and helping you to step into a more carefree mode of living.

Find moments each day for a bit of laughter and conversation – even if that means just calling up a friend or relative for a few minutes of phone conversation, and watching a funny movie or show.

To really make self-care worthwhile, then you have to learn what things you can do to nurture yourself. There are going to be things that make you feel good mentally, emotionally, physically, or spiritually. And, even with the best of intentions, you might find that you have a bad day where you don’t manage your meditation, you don’t brush your hair – or you just binge watch a new Netflix series all day.

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So here are a few tips that might help you get yourself in to healthy self-care mode.

Unplug

Although you can spend time curating your Instagram feeds, twitter, and facebook to only have positive people and posts on it. Sometimes you should unplug altogether for a while. It is one of the hardest things for people to do too. We are so used to having our mobile phones or a computer that we are allowing ourselves to be bombarded with all kinds of news and opinions. And sometimes, for the sake of sanity, we need to put our mobile phones in a drawer and leave them for a while. Messages and emails will still be there when you come back to it.

Stock Up

Headaches, stomach aches, sleeplessness, and a lack of a multivitamin can really be annoying. So, if you have a habit of leaving things until you need them and then needing to head out to find soothing tea bags, hearing aid batteries, band aids, and sanitary protection. Then make an effort to stock up on a few packets of each item. It is a small thing, but it means when you need to take a painkiller and rest, you can do so without worrying, you don’t have the right things.

Multivitamin

Most of us are deficient in a range of things. While you can get a lot from your diet, we don’t all get the balance right every day. You might not be able to avoid catching a cold or getting a tummy bug – but if you do catch one, your body is in a better position to fight it off. Not only that but the energy you truly need every day, and all of the functions that your body performs will be well supported.

If you feel like you have a deficiency that needs more than a multivitamin, then head to your doctor and ask them to take some blood and explain how you’re feeling. Big deficiencies in b12, iron, vitamin D can have disastrous impacts when not taken care of at the earliest possible time.

Walk

When you have a lot to do each day, it can be easy to say that you don’t have time to take a 10-minute walk in the day. However, if you really look at your schedule, there are probably a number of places you can fit in a short walk. It might be during your work lunch break you head out and get some fresh air. It might be arriving at school pick up and parking a little bit further away and giving you room to walk.

Sleep

Start to pay attention to how refreshed you are feeling after you’ve been to sleep at night. If you are waking up and still feeling tired or not feeling rested, then there are things you can do. When we get high-quality rest, our bodies are better able to make sure that they are repairing and renewing. If you have a shoddy bedtime routine, are going to bed late all the time, then you are going to start living in a sleep deficit.

This will impact your daily life and your health too. So, look at starting a new bedtime routine that begins at least an hour before you want to go to sleep. Plan to have a hot shower or warm bath, put on some breathable pajamas, and switch off the TV for a while. A warm tea like chamomile is a great option.

The Calm app has a range of sleep stories that can help you gently drift off to sleep. Try to be strict about the routine and start it at the same time every day if you can.

Cook For Yourself

Think of a meal that you had while on holiday, or something that you have fond memories of, and recreate it in your own kitchen just for yourself. The memory of the meal, the tasty, and taking the time to create it can bring real comfort. And, feeding yourself well is a form of self-care.