If you don't know where to start with declutter, always declutter your hallway first. And if you're lucky enough to have a garden or backyard, tidy that up next. Only once the hallway and garden are done should you tackle the lounge, bedroom, and the rest of your home, especially if you're also making home improvements at the moment. It turns out there's a very good reason for decluttering your home in this order – and it's got nothing to do with the Marie Kondo tiyding up method.
- Keep reading: Organization ideas for every room in your house
Researchers Darby E Saxbe and Rena Repetti conducted a fascinating study (opens in new tab) of how people talk about their homes while giving a home tour. They looked for correlations between subjective feelings we have about how tidy or mess our homes are and our cortisol (stress hormone levels).
The results of the study are fascinating. It's not just that perceiving a home as cluttered or unfinished raises our stress levels and makes us depressed (especially if we're women), but the researchers also found that 'focusing on those features of the home that are restful or that incorporate nature may ease the transition from work to home.' People who immediately focused on 'piles of clutter' or 'a long list of to-do projects' had higher stress levels and lower mood than those who, upon entering their home, were able to focus on areas that were clutter-free and/or had elements of nature.
The first thing you see when you step inside your home sets the tone for how you talk about it, and how you talk about actually changes your feelings about a house. Just uttering words like 'calm', 'soothing', 'backyard', and 'patio' makes people, especially women, less stressed. Even if it is unfinished and you are in the middle of a home improvement project, having areas in your home that put you in an uncluttered mindset is crucial. Our hallway ideas and garden design ideas should set you on the right track for creating oases of calm. It turns out it really doesn't matter that much that your whole house is perfect and clutter free – does anyone ever have that? – but that you have a couple of uncluttered spaces that make you feel better about the mess elsewhere.
