hushed.life

Do we underestimate how much our environment and surroundings affect our health and mood?

Which makes you feel calmer? This…

or this….?

Both are lovely, but one makes me feel more relaxed than the other. The top ones. The others are just too busy for me, but you may love them! It’s all subjective, but us sensitive peeps tend to prefer simpler and with more space around us, am I right?

I recently stayed at a friend’s house for a week. She’s a maximalist and loves nothing more than colour and ornaments everywhere. They all mean something to her and they give her joy. I like some colour and a few bits and bobs, myself but I couldn’t believe how much it affected me. Since I am hypersensitive in most ways in life, ‘visual’ and real noise really hurt me. I felt like my nerves were jangled and I couldn’t rest my eyes. I felt headachy and stressed the whole time I was there!

Happily, she had a fantastic picture window onto an incredibly calming sea view so I stared into the distance at that to quieten the overwhelm! Love her to bits, but I was glad to get back to my own ‘controlled’ space, you know. Shows how different environments affect people differently, though, doesn’t it?

So, I was interested to read an article in The Guardian recently and discover that I am a natural ‘house husher’; I deliberately make my home and surroundings peaceful and calm; it feeds my need for harmony and quiet. I tend to like homes that have a similar colour running through them, different shades maybe but ‘tonal’, as they call it in interior design. I might have a pop of bright colour here and there, which makes me smile and, in fact, helps neurologically with brain retraining away from negative feelings to positive. More than that is just too much; I like my eyes to be able to rest.

What is House Hushing?

It’s all about eliminating visual “noise”: anything excessive, jarring, or inharmonious. “Everything in your room has a voice… taking up visual, physical and even emotional space,” according to interiors blogger Myquillin Smith of The Nester. “Quieting your space removes all those voices in a room at once.” According to the hushed-living concept, stuff you accumulate, the flotsam of daily life, but also things you have chosen – ornaments, pictures and decorative bits and pieces – create a hum. You probably aren’t even aware of it – a phenomenon often described, in a perhaps unhelpful mixing of metaphors, as “house blindness”. But the cumulative effect can be a jittery blast, like avant garde free jazz. Fewer possessions, carefully and deliberately selected, can transform cacophony into pure harmony. The Guardian

I get that jazz reference, don’t you? That jangling feeling of discordance. Ugh.

You maybe don’t have to have calming colours though; it’s more about nothing being too jarring or out of place. In one of my houses, I had hot pink and lime green in the lounge with a gorgeous turquoise in my office. Gold patterned wallpaper on the hall entrance. It sounds awful, but I let the colours sing and kept everything else minimal; it was a joyful house – three storeys with double-height ceilings, so it could take some colour!

Do you need to declutter and reduce the visual noise to lower your stress levels? If so, I hope the ideas on this site help. Since I’ve been doing this naturally for years, I thought I’d have a bit fun writing them down and musing a bit on the subject. Let me know x