What Makes a Happy Home?

Study Shows a Happy Home Makes for a Happy Life

You might not think too much about whether you have a happy home, and that’s possibly impacting your happiness. Our homes shape how we feel about our day, ourselves and our lives more broadly. They are also closely tied to how happy we are overall in our lives.

Since we’re spending so much more time in our homes nowadays, I thought I’d look into some of the research and find out how we can change our homes to make our lives happier. Yet again, there is wealth of research across the fields of psychology, neuroscience and public health into how to design your home to make you happier.

And, in yet another surprise to me (because every positive psych article I research ends up surprising me) the Happiness Research Institute found that happiness with our home is almost three times as important to our overall happiness as our income. Who knew!?

“We have learned how we connect with our homes emotionally and what is truly important to achieve happiness in them,” said Meik Wiking, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute. “To paraphrase Winston Churchill: first we shape our homes and then our homes shape us. Homes are where we may not only live, but thrive.”

Wiking and the team at the Happiness Research Institute studied thousands of respondents across ten countries in Europe. They conducted hours and hours of quantitative and qualitative interviews, and found 73 per cent of people who are happy with their home are also happy in general.

“The most important factors are not where you live, how big your house is, or whether you rent or own,” said Véronique Laury, CEO of Kingfisher, which sponsored the study. “What matters most is having a home that gives you a feeling of safety, comfort, identity and pride. What matters is putting your stamp on your home.”

Do you feel happy about your home?

According to the research, there are five core emotions we tend to feel about our homes: pride, comfort, identity, safety and control.

Most important was pride, which accounts for 44 per cent of our feelings of happiness with our home. This is almost half of the emotional attachment to our homes! When the researchers delved deeper into this specific emotion, they found that 88 per cent of people who were proud of their homes were also happy with their homes; and the prouder they are, the happier they are.

But even though pride is the most important emotion when it comes to our homes, relatively few people actually feel it, according to the study.

Three ways to build pride in your home and have a happier home

The great news is that you can do something about this. This article would suck if you couldn’t. So, here are three things you can do to give yourself more pride in your home, and to help you have a happy home.

1. Pride through achievement

Set aside some time to do a full de-clutter and deep clean. Millions of people have bought Marie Kondo’s book and watched her Netflix series on how to declutter their homes.

According to Konmari consultant and founder of Neatly Awesome, Pilar Llorente that’s because we’ve come to realise “physical clutter becomes mental clutter as well.” In fact, the best part of the Konmari method, according to Pilar is the spiritual and emotional outcomes.

Check out this article for steps to declutter your home, and your mind.

2. Pride through redecorating

Nowadays, redecorating a room in your house doesn’t have to be hard or expensive. And it doesn’t have to be overwhelming anymore.

Start by visiting Google for ideas or visit Pinterest to collect images of looks you like. Remember the look you like has to match with the house you have, so go with accentuating what you have, rather than trying to make your house into something it isn’t.

Once you have some ideas, get to purchasing your items and decorating! Remember to keep receipts in case it doesn’t look how you pictured it in your mind.

If you’re tight on budget, don’t forget to check out your local opp shops. Or why not try Kmart and Target, which have both upped their home-deco games in recent years.

A cheap redecoration can still pack a punch. Think of picking a new fresh colour for throw pillows and a throw rug. Or you can change out your curtains, or paint an accent wall.

3. Pride through home improvement

This is the big one and it’s not for everyone. Many people just aren’t up for the disruption to their lives. Others underestimate their tiling, floor laying, plumbing or worse, electrical skills and end up making their place worse, not better. Thanks HGTV and all those home reno shows! By the way, just so we’re clear, you should never do your own electrical work. Ever.

However, if you can pay professionals to do the hard stuff (or all of it) and work out the easy stuff with YouTube videos, then this is worth doing. The Happiness Research Institute study found that 74 per cent of people who have an interest in and spend time doing home improvements are proud of their home.

That’s it. These are a few little things you can do if you’re wanting to make your home a happy home.

Also, there are a whole lot more elements to the research, if you’re interested in reading the full report, go here.

Related reading: Stress Reduction Lessons from Marie Kondo

Don’t forget to subscribe for our monthly newsletter for more tips, freebies and subscriber-only content!