Enhancing Comfort and Sustainability at Home

Your home is one of the most important resources you have. It’s a safe and cozy space even when the outside world is stressful. At the same time, it’s vital to ensure your home does not negatively impact the environment.

There are ways you can enhance both the comfort of your home and create a more sustainable space. Yes, it takes a little planning. However, there can be significant benefits to your quality of life and your relationship with the environment. Let’s dive a little deeper into some of the steps you can focus on.

Guest post by Katie Brenneman.

Using Light Effectively

One often overlooked aspect of the home that can be used to enhance your comfort simply and affordably is your lighting. Some adjustments and replacements here and there can make a big difference.

There are various adjustments you can make, but the most impactful include:

Embracing natural light: Wherever possible, favour natural light over artificial sources. Firstly, daylight boosts your body’s access to vitamin D. As a result, you support your health, as vitamin D ensures effective immune functions and reduces the risks of heart disease.

In your home, you can ensure that each room you spend time in gets the most natural sunlight available. Remove heavy drapes that block the light. You can also reflect the light from your windows to extend its reach by hanging mirrors and painting the walls in light colours.

Switching to light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs: One of the limitations of traditional bulbs is that they tend to have a set brightness level. This might be fine when you’re performing tasks requiring full illumination, but it’s not great for relaxing. You can get LED bulbs that come with a remote control to adjust brightness, diffusion, and colour to best suit your comfort as and when you need it.

A good thing about both of these steps is they also support sustainability. Letting more natural light in your home means less reliance on electrical illumination sources. Similarly, LED bulbs tend to be energy-efficient, as they use less electricity and last longer than traditional bulbs.

Bringing Nature Indoors

The natural world is a powerful tool for all of us. It supports our well-being and brings joy into our lives. So, why only embrace it when you’re outdoors? You and your family can thrive by taking responsible steps to bring nature into your home.

The simplest way to do this is to get a good selection of houseplants. Cultivating a selection of plants may be particularly useful if your home has sick building syndrome (SBS). This is where your home feels uncomfortable or unwell when you’re in the space without any apparent reason. Indoor air quality is central to this; many indoor plants are considered good for improving indoor air. Indeed, if you or your children are studying, studies have found correlations between indoor houseplants and academic achievement. Even the simple act of regularly tending to plants offers a moment of zen for a lot of people.

Alongside plants, consider getting decor and furniture made from natural materials or in designs that evoke the outdoors. Such items can provide a sense of calm in your space. Importantly, ensuring your furniture is made from sustainably sourced natural materials is more environmentally conscious than investing in those made from synthetics. Natural products tend not to come from heavily polluting production processes. Do a little research to ensure the manufacturers of such products are obtaining their materials responsibly.

Incorporating Stress-Reducing Resources

Your home should be a sanctuary from the pressures of work and the world. Among the ways you can boost your comfort is to find ways to enhance your home’s stress-relieving potential in your day-to-day life. A selection of mindful resources can help here.

A good place to start is by considering what stress-reducing activities you can do at home that help you relax and get better quality sleep. From here, you can identify the resources for your home that support your ability to incorporate these into your regular routine. For instance, practicing yoga at home is a calming act of mindfulness. Creating a clear and quiet zone in your home that has space for your mat and for you to stretch out in your poses can be positive.

Journaling, too, is widely regarded as a good way to explore and express your feelings, which minimizes anxiety and stress. You can create a private writing room in your home or just set up a desk with your materials so they’re ready when you need them. Even setting up an easily-accessible gaming table for some card games or a session of your favourite role-playing game (RPG) is a useful tool for relieving the pressures of the world.

Another resource you can leverage for stress relief is colour. Colour psychology theory is a scientifically-supported principle related to how different hues help to evoke certain types of moods or responses. Blues and greens are usually associated with a sense of calm and relaxation. Pops of yellow here and there can also promote joy. You could paint walls in chill-out areas of your home or invest in soft furnishings in hues that support a stress-free environment.

Boosting Self-Sustainability

Dependence is not a particularly comfortable way of life. Relying on commercial sources of food and other resources can put additional steps on your chore list, affect your finances, and even contribute to environmental harm.

There is a rising number of self-sustaining communities emerging in which groups of like-minded people collaborate to protect themselves from the negative impacts of economic uncertainty and climate change. They’re developing shared agriculture, which lowers grocery bills, mitigates the environmental damage of industrial food production, and is resilient to disruptions to supply chains. Many communities develop renewable energy resources to lower utility costs, safeguard against blackouts, and reduce emissions.

You don’t have to spearhead or join one of these communities to reap the benefits of self-sustainability, though. There’s a lot you can achieve in and around your own home, including:

- Small-scale gardening: Growing all your own food isn’t necessary, but cultivating at least a little has benefits. Doing so gives you access to sustainably grown fresh and healthy fruits and vegetables. You might dedicate a portion of your backyard to planting a few staple crops, such as potatoes, beans, and squash. If you have the space, some fruit trees also become a great resource over time. Even without a yard, you can perform small acts of self-sustainability with an indoor herb garden or some shelf planters containing carrots or radishes.

Food preservation: Growing your own food is a good first step. Learning how to preserve it helps to extend its shelf life, meaning you have reliable sources of food in the long term. There are multiple approaches you can take at home, from simple vinegar pickling to atmospheric steam canning. It’s also wise to create a cool, dark space as a larder in your home to keep these foods safe to use.

Installing solar panels: Energy independence is becoming more accessible all the time. Depending on your budget, you can use solar panels to serve your electricity needs. You can put panels on an apartment balcony or windowsill to charge your phone and other devices. If you have the space and budget, installing panels on your roof or in your yard may provide all or a portion of the power for your home. You’ll save on utility costs and safeguard your comfort even when conditions would otherwise cause blackouts to grid electricity sources.

You can also encourage your neighbours to take a similar approach. While this doesn’t result in a full-scale self-sustaining community, a couple of you banding together to plant different crops and share the results leads to more diversity in your food independence. It also reduces the negative environmental impact of your neighbourhood, which can only be good for everyone involved.

By taking a few relatively simple steps, you can enhance your comfort and sustainability at home. Everything from embracing nature indoors to growing some of your food makes a difference. Consider these as jumping-off points. By regularly examining how you can boost the sustainability and comfort of your daily life, you can gain mutual benefits for you and the planet.