Let’s be honest. A lot of us face every day in a rush. Especially in the morning when you need to get yourself ready, get the kids off to school, prepare yourself for a hectic work day, and tackle the unpredictable challenges of rush hour traffic. Starting your day off on the right foot sets the tone for how the rest of the day will go.
If you struggle to find what you need when you need it, or worse yet your kids are calling out to you for help finding their own things, it can easily start your day out on a sour note.
On the other side of the spectrum, when you come home from that long day at work, you have to tackle other important tasks. Not the least of which is creating a meal that everyone is going to like, making sure the kids have everything they need to get their homework done in one tantrum or less, while hopefully being able to steal a few moments for a little “Me Time.”
While a little yoga and a positive mindset will certainly help, starting your day out organized and keeping everything in front of you in order will inevitably go a long way toward boosting your mood. One of the real-world things that help make this possible is having your closets not just organized, but organized to meet your needs.
How Your Living Space Influences Your Mood
In a very practical sense, your living space is an extension of your mindset and emotional state. This is especially true of your storage spaces, which might not be as visible as your everyday living areas, yet still have a functional connection to the simple tasks you do every day.
Your living spaces are meant to be your haven. They’re a place you can relax and be yourself. A growing body of research has found that stress affects your mood, which can lead to feelings of anxiety and depression.
So, by making a proactive effort to keep your interior clean and orderly you also help to support your emotional well-being and state of mind. This extends to the less-visible parts of your home like your closets, as much as it does showcase areas like your front living room.
How Your Emotions Connect with Your Living Spaces
Disorganization and clutter in your living and storage spaces can have a last negative impact on your mental health. When your home is cluttered, it feels uncomfortable and doesn’t feel like it belongs to you. Over time it can make it feel impossible to settle in.”
Though beyond simply keeping everything clean and tidy, most people find that personalizing their space and implementing custom storage solutions help make their house truly feel like their home.
Tips for Optimizing Your Living & Storage Spaces for a Positive Mood
There are several things you can do to optimize your home living and storage spaces in a way that helps boost your mood while reducing negative influences. Remember, this doesn’t have to be an overnight process. You can take on many of the following tips with small steps reaching toward a greater goal.
Step One: Declutter
Clutter is a thief that not only robs you of functional space, but it also steals your time, by making you waste minutes upon minutes every day looking for things that should be easy to find. This is a double whammy. Not only does your frustration mount as you dig through cluttered items, but all those three minutes lost here and four minutes lost there add up to a day spent feeling like you’re always being rushed.
Decluttering also lets you work with a clean slate. You can see, and perhaps even measure just how much storage space you have, only once you’ve gotten all the unnecessary items out of your way.
Step Two: Get Organized
Getting organized sounds like one of those positive reinforcement slogan posters from the 1990s with a picture of a kitten hanging from a tree branch. It’s one of those things that’s easy to say, but it can be a lot more challenging in the real world.
It’s not just enough to put round things with round things and boxes with boxes. What you really need is a customized storage system in every closet in your home that lets you find what you need when you need it.
For some, this means keeping all the work tools and the work in the same place in the pantry. For others, this means an innovative spice rack system that lets them keep small doses of everyday spice easily at hand, while larger containers live elsewhere. For a lot of families, it even means creating separate storage spaces to keep bulk items out of the way of simple stock items they need to find at a glance.
Taking the time to sit down and think about your organizing style, and what you can do to improve the state of your living and storage spaces, will go a long way toward keeping everything organized in the long term.
Choose Your Color Palette Wisely
Color is also a powerful factor influencing the mood of living and storage spaces. Dark colors don’t just look ominous, but they also make it hard to see what’s where. Especially if the space already has poor lighting.
Think about your preferred color palette, taking feedback from other family members when it comes to the closets in their own rooms. Then choose the brighter end of each of those individual spectrums. Not only does this enhance the ambiance of the space, but it also makes it easier to see what you’re looking for.
Let There Be Light
Lighting is one of the most common complaints and biggest frustrations in a lot of home closets. This is usually because most closets have sparse electrical wiring, and adding light fixtures usually requires the expense of bringing in a professional electrician.
Modern-day LED lighting rides to the rescue here offering energy-efficient modules that are lightweight and capable of running for hundreds of hours on battery power alone. Small touch-activated modules can be affixed where you want them to give you on-demand functional lighting, or create ambiance in just about any closet or storage space.
