Reset Your Kitchen for Calmer Living

Your physical environment is one of the fastest and most tangible things you can change, and the effect on your daily sense of calm can be immediate.

Your home is not just a backdrop to your life. It plays an active role in how you feel every day. Physical clutter increases cortisol, the body's primary stress hormone. A home set up for a version of your life you have outgrown may also drain your energy and certainly won’t lift it.

It is not about achieving a magazine-worthy interior, or about minimalism. It is about creating a home that is genuinely calm enough to live in. One that supports your nervous system and that reflects the woman you are now rather than the woman you were five or ten years ago. It is also about making your home feel like yours.

We spend a lot of time in the kitchen. It is a good first space in your home to reset, to make it a space you genuinely love being in, even when you are not preparing meals.

Here are some easy ways to reset your kitchen. Before you start, though, have a look at the space objectively in its usual state. What provides calm and what works? What drains your energy?

The things you find immediately draining are the ones you can start rectifying first. A quick warning. It is tempting to want to fix everything all at once. Start with one thing, then stop, reassess and take your time working through the suggestions below that call you.

Here are some things you can consider removing:

• Duplicate utensils & gadgets used fewer than three times a year

• Expired pantry items

• Containers without lids and lids without containers

• Mugs and glasses beyond what you genuinely use

• The contents of the "everything drawer" that are neither useful nor easy to find.

What you can organize or simplify:

• Group pantry items by category so you can see what you have at a glance - decanting into similar see-through containers does make for a calmer space, and makes things easier to find

• Create one clear surface that you commit to keeping clear permanently

• Store items by how often you use them: daily items at easy reach, occasional items higher or lower

• Reduce the number of cleaning products to what you genuinely use.

What to stop tolerating:

• The appliance you feel guilty about never using but cannot bring yourself to remove - get rid of it!

• The collection of shopping bags that has become unmanageable. Reduce them down to what you need

• A layout that requires you to walk across the room to get to things you use together.

• The recycling system that has never quite worked - change it!

To do today

Clear your kitchen sink completely and wipe it down until it is clean. Leave it that way tonight. A clear sink is the single most disproportionately calming thing in a kitchen. It signals order even when everything else is imperfect. Starting tomorrow, make an empty sink the last thing you do before bed. If you have time, do your dishes, put them away and wipe your benches too!

One thing to do this week

Choose one surface, for example, the counter where things accumulate, the kithen table, or te windowsill, and clear it entirely. Decide that this surface will be permanently clear from now on. Nothing lives there, except if it feels like you, place a vase of flowers or a fruit bowl here. Things pass through it but do not stay. Keep it clear for seven days and notice the effect it has on how the kitchen feels every morning.

One thing to do this month

Go through a cupboard and drawer in one session every month. Remove anything duplicated, expired, broken, or not earning its space. By the end of each month, you will have a kitchen stocked with everything you need without looking twice.

The one thing that will genuinely make your kitchen calmer

Remove everything from your worktops except the things you use every single day. Every item sitting on a worktop is a visual decision your brain has to process every time you walk in. Most people have six to twelve items on their kitchen surfaces that they use once a week or less. Put them in a cupboard for two weeks. If you haven't needed them, they don't need to live on the surface. What remains should be only what earns that prime real estate daily. The kitchen will immediately feel larger, quieter, and easier to clean.

And that is your kitchen reset! I hope you’ll try it and let me know how you get on.

The Kitchen Reset is part of the Elevated Living Calm Home Blueprint, a reset guide for each room in your home, following the above principles for each space, with additional decluttering techniques, suggestions for which technique to use when, and a bonus home-sensory section.

The Calm Home Blueprint has just landed for US$9.99 and is the perfect guide to helping you create the living environment that supports the life you want to live right now.

Join us on the journey to calmer living! Inge x