I’ve been a mom for 14 years now, and one of my greatest challenges has been learning how to create a peaceful, organized, and aesthetically pleasing home. None of these things come naturally to me — I’ve never enjoyed shopping for furniture or art, and organization has often seemed like a mysterious code that I don’t have the key to crack. But years of disorganization and dissatisfaction with the state of our home prompted me to learn.
Of course, I started with my favorite room — the kitchen, where I spend the most time. Then I moved on to the public spaces like the dining and living rooms, then the kids’ rooms, closets, bathrooms, etc. But the one much-neglected space has been my own bedroom. It always seems so low on the priority list, and to be honest, I felt like devoting time to my space rather than our family spaces was almost … selfish.
Over Christmas break that changed. I had a few weeks off from work, which gave me time to realize how much I hated my room. Genuinely hated it. It wasn’t organized or pretty or peaceful — it was just the room where I slept and piled up the mail and paperwork I hadn’t yet filed. Of course, I’d been unhappy with it since we moved into this house last year, but I kept telling myself that I didn’t have time for something as frivolous as decorating my bedroom … until I did. And what really flipped the switch was the mirror.
When we moved, my parents gave me a mirror that had been hanging in their dining room. It’s a round mirror in a big, wrought-iron frame, and for some reason I’d always loved it. There was no good space for it anywhere in the house except my room, so I leaned it against the wall where I planned to hang it … last December. It leaned against that wall for a solid year until I finally got sick of my own procrastination and just hung it. That simple action opened the floodgates, and in the course of an afternoon I transformed my room from the place where I slept into my sanctuary.
I can’t explain what a difference it’s made, nor can I believe that I thought this would be frivolous. Creating a beautiful, peaceful bedroom is probably the most essential thing I did in 2019 … and I did a lot of things. Here are 4 reasons why making your bedroom a sanctuary is a necessity, not a luxury.
1It saves you time
All mamas know how precious our time is, and how quickly we seem to run out of it. Heck, that’s a major part of why I put off organizing my room for so long in the first place! But a disorganized, cluttered bedroom actually eats up far more time than the few hours it takes to make it orderly. It might not seem like spending 5 minutes looking for a matching shoe or 10 minutes trying to find a birth certificate is a big deal, but if you add it up over the course of weeks, months, and years, you’ll start to realize how much time a little organization can save you.
2It clears your mind
How many times do we walk into another room to get something, only to forget what we went in there for in the first place? It’s a pretty ubiquitous experience among my mom friends — after all, we’ve got so much information running through our heads at all times that it’s easy to get lost in it all. But your bedroom is your place to retreat, escape, grab a few moments of silence or a good night’s sleep. When that space is chaotic and cluttered, it doesn’t help clear the clutter in your mind — it just exacerbates it. We need peaceful spaces in order to have peaceful minds, so the place we go to find peace should be at the top of our priority list.
3It improves your sleep
The first thing I did after I hung the mirror was move my bed from its crammed-against-the-wall position to the middle of the room, with the headboard up against the big bay window. I love having the shutters open just enough to go to sleep with starlight and wake up to sunshine because it helps regulate my circadian rhythm, and having the bed as the focal point in the room has inspired me to go back to my long-forgotten tradition of making the bed each morning. I know it sounds weird, but pulling back the covers and crawling into a neat bed at the end of the day is so much more soothing and rewarding than flinging myself down into a messy pile of tangled blankets. Your sleep is every bit as precious as your time, so protect it by finding ways to make it both more peaceful and more appealing.
4It makes you happier
For some of you, this is obvious, but for someone like me who shies away from things like decorating or furniture arranging, the happiness a well-ordered and appealing bedroom has brought me is surprising. I was in a bit of a funk before Christmas, and my room reflected it. Everything was messy and uncared for, which was exactly how I felt. Sometimes we have to change our environment to change our internal state, and this was one of those times. Once I finally organized, arranged, and decorated my bedroom, I felt like myself again. I feel calmer, more peaceful, and happier than I have in a while, and that feeling is magnified every time I walk into my room. Don’t underestimate the effect your environment has on your spirit — it can make all the difference between feeling frustrated and out of control, and feeling like the calm, happy mama you know you can be.
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And today we celebrate...