Five ways clean living spaces improve your health & wellness
At Dupray, we pride ourselves on designing products that help people keep their homes pristine. A clean living space goes much deeper than feeling that amazing rush of accomplishment or impressing your houseguests: clean homes are scientifically proven to reduce stress, improve productivity, increase feelings of general wellbeing, and much more.
1. They lower your stress
A 2021 study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that messy and cluttered spaces are directly associated with higher levels of stress and anxiety. Humans are visual creatures: if we’re surrounded by clutter, it’s a constant reminder that we have unfinished tasks to attend to, which can spike our cortisol and negatively impact our mental health. Maintaining clean spaces increases our sense of control over our homes, which extends to feelings of empowerment in the other parts of our lives.
2. They improve your focus
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, a significant number of North Americans have swapped their cubicles for home offices. Even if that’s not the case for you, there are plenty of tasks around the house that require pretty significant focus from us. Focus is all about visual attention – something that a famous 1958 study found we have a limited amount of. Essentially, we only have the capacity to process a few objects at any given time. So if your desk or toolshed is covered in dirt or clutter, the brain is less capable of focusing on the task at hand! By organizing and cleaning our homes, we’re removing mental barriers for success.
4. They support deep sleep
We’ve established that clean spaces support two of the main components for better sleep: reduced anxiety and stress, and improved air quality. Stress is directly correlated with insomnia, or difficulties in both falling and staying asleep. Since clean spaces reduce the impacts of stress on the mind and body, it’s a quick way to improve an essential part of your health and wellbeing. Poor air quality (air filled with pollutants like dust, dander, and more) can cause sleep disruptions, respiratory problems and even snoring. If you have trouble with any of these, it may be worth it to try air purification. Especially one that would look amazing in your bedroom - like Bloom™!
5. You'll even be more productive
Clean spaces enhance our productivity in some of the ways we’ve already discussed, like removing distractions and preventing health problems. But the underlying improvement is actually all about time management. When our workspace is clean and organized, it’s easier to find all of the things we need to get our jobs done. Reducing time spent searching for items (and stressing out while doing it) creates more opportunities to focus and complete our tasks at hand. Lack of clutter also prevents us from interrupting our flow states, which are scientifically tied to peak performance.