When we decide we want to improve our health we typically think of eating better and moving more. Taking care of yourself means taking care of ALL of yourself and that’s why I take a 360 degree approach when it comes to helping you take care of you.
One area we tend not to think about as much as we should when we decide to improve our health is our stress management.
Our stress levels have an impact on our hormones, our eating habits, our sleep habits, how much we exercise, our mood, how shouty-a-mum we are, our mental health – the list goes on and on, and yet we tend to neglect this area because life is just too busy. Or we make a throwaway comment about how we need to get more organised, maybe put a bit of work into it and then just neglect it again – usually because life gets busy again and there’s no time.
While there are a lot of areas of our life that we don’t have a huge amount of control over in terms of making them less stressful – one area we do have control over (to a point if you have a partner and kids living there too!) is our home environment.
While I don’t LOVE cleaning, I do love a clean and tidy house and the difference in my mood when the house is the latter is quite significant.
I’m not about to give you a cleaning routine – there are so many people out there who can do that so much better than me.
(I Recommend Flylady, Cleanmama or Team Tomm if you are stuck!)
I do suggest though that you try it!
Our brain likes to automate things to make them simpler and it means that it gives you more brain space to think about things that are new and not on auto-pilot. It’s how you can drive to Tesco and not remember the journey at all and yet somehow you made it there without crashing. Your brain has learnt how to drive and what to look out for and it does it on autopilot.
Imagine for a moment it’s a Wednesday morning, the sun in shining, you are about to take the kids to school you have your workout clothes on and you are really looking forward to doing a workout that you’ve been thinking about all morning.
So, you drop the kids off – and you walk into your home and your heart sinks as you walk in through the door because there is stuff everywhere, you’ve just remembered you haven’t done a load of laundry for a few days and if you don’t wash clothes today nobody will have uniform tomorrow. The floor is grubby, you should really clean that, but first you need to hoover through and that will mean tidying first and by the time you’ve done (and all the random bits that get added on each time you do a task) either it’s going to be time to pick up the kids again or it’s going to be time to pick the kids up or you know you will just not be bothered to do your workout.
And so it repeats.
Day after day.
Imagine with me…
Now, imagine with me the same vision – but this time when you walk through the door that you still have the same things you need to do as a mum, but it’s okay because you do a load of laundry every morning as part of your morning routine – so that’s not a stress for you, you do 15 minute house resets throughout the day where you put everything away so you know the stuff left out from the morning rush will only take you 10 minutes to put away. The floor is a bit grubby but that’s okay because Thursday is floor washing day, it was done last thursday and you will do it again tomorrow – so it’s all in control.
You do your workout.
Now do you see why I am trying to push a routine on you?
Having a routine in place doesn’t mean that you are being rigid and boring – call it a rhythm if you prefer. It’s just the natural way your day goes (with a bit of intention from you).
Having a routine makes your day so much less stressful because the more you do it, the more automated it becomes, and before long your house will pretty much take care of itself.
Which leaves you more time to take care of yourself.
How do I find or make a routine?
There’s two ways to go about creating your routine – you can either sit down or walk room to room making a list of all the things you need to do on a daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/annual basis and then see how you can fit those things in to your week.
If you are working or out all day on a Thursday – Thursday isn’t the day to do the weekly clean of your home.
Make it work for you.
The second way, is to follow a ready made routine for a while until you find your feet with it and then tweak it to make it work better for you.
There are so many routines out there, I promise there will be something that works for you.
- Task a day routines (Bathroom Monday, Dust Tuesday, Hoover Wednesday etc).
- Block cleaning (One day of cleaning, a second day for a specific zone or area of your home)
- Room a day cleaning (Bathroom Monday, Kitchen Tuesday, Living room Wednesday etc)
- Area cleaning (each week of the month is for a specific area – kitchen week 1, living room week2)
It all depends on what suits you and your personality.
If you were wondering, I’m a block cleaning kinda girl.
A good tip to remember is that the less stuff you have, the less mess you will have and the less you will have to clean.
It that isn’t big enough motivation to get decluttering, I don’t know what is!
The point of the routine is not to have an immaculate house all the time, it’s to take the pressure off it for you.
Your home should be somewhere you want to escape to, not escape from.
Do you have a routine? Share it in the comments!
Beth x