I am not talking about the typical thing people suggest for relaxing at home. Reading a book or taking a bath might work once when you are pretty less stressed. But when it gets more and more, these tips will not help. How many baths should you take or books should you read when you are in the middle of a project with deadline
What you can do at home is to create a space where you feel instantly at home and relaxed. When we are in our relaxing area, we feel secure, and our parasympathetic nervous system can switch on, and our mind and body starts to relax. Our stress goes away. This works by a combination of a calming surroundings and training our central nervous system to switch to the relaxing state. We condition ourselves.
All the things in our eyesight are always grabbing for our attention. Then more you got and the more it just lies, hangs or stays around it catches our attention. Our eyes wander from one thing to another thus our sympathetic nervous system is more in the upper hand of scanning our environment for danger. But there is no danger, it is our home so we should feel safe and relaxed.
What happens when you de-clutter and is part of the effect people get from minimalism is, that your rooms are looking much spacious and much less attention grabbing. Our eyes can relax and the rest of our body too.
You do not need to start with minimalism or with de-cluttering your whole house, you can start with a small area and make it your recreation space. Make it clutter free, use calming colors, pleasant objects, some plants, a cushion or whatever it is helping you to relax. Less is more. And keep it that way, do never ever clutter your recreation space.
Tell all members in your household what this space is for and that they should not leave their stuff there. And most important, they should not disturb you when you are in your recreation space. You need to connect feeling relaxed with your recreation space.
Your recreation space by itself will already work wonders. You got your own personal space where you now feel at home and secure. Thus you can shut down and unwind. To get even more out of it, we need to train our brain a bit.
The first thing, what I already mentioned above, is that we start to create a connection between feeling relaxed and our recreation space. This helps our mind and body to shut down when we enter our recreation space. Like the Pavlovian conditioning; he did test it on dogs, but it unsurprisingly also works on humans in a similar way. He had fed his dogs and every time before he did that he did make a noise. After some time he just made the noise, and his dogs started to salivate even when there was no food. They were conditioned - noise = food.
We can do that too with us, but instead of noise we use our recreation space and to condition us we start doing active relaxation techniques, like meditating or yoga, in it. After some time we already get the relaxation effect when we are in our space and it can even go so far as thinking of our recreation space alone is enough to feel relaxed. Now image you did make your whole home your recreation area and every time you enter the door your stress drops off and stays outside. Priceless :-)
Start slowly and give it some time. Reconditioning needs time and constant repetitions to work its magic. In our case good magic.
