Stress-Proof Your Home

Mita Banerjee, a Pune-based educationist and social worker, used to be a self-confessed “cheerfully messy” person. But after she got married to a stickler-for-organization Air Force officer, she made a conscious effort to change. Her family shifted base every few years and that required careful planning. “We’d pack our entire home into trunks and I had to remember which one contained the woollens or the schoolbooks or my husband’s formal dinner shoes,” she says. “I realized that some planning on the same lines, in normal times too, helped save a great deal of time and trouble.”

Banerjee uses a few simple tricks to deal with clutter. “I save good cardboard boxes, and biscuit tins. They’re handy for storing things neatly. Don’t be surprised if you find a pressure cooker carton in my wardrobe stacked with saris and matched blouses. Lingerie and handkerchiefs go into other cartons.”

Clutter is not the only source of stress that may make a house anything but the haven it ought to be. Ringing phones and loud TV sets, for instance, can disrupt peace, as can conflicting demands of career, homemaking and parenting. “Today, as we constantly strive to work harder, to earn more, the lines between one’s professional and personal life are blurring,” says Dr Kartik Kashyap, consultant psychiatrist at Pragnya Brain Mind Clinic, Bangalore. “That can create an undue amount of stress.”

Though a certain amount of stress may be inevitable, its causes can be controlled. Here are some practical ways to achieve the peace and calm we so desperately desire at home.

A Central Place. Experts are unanimous that scheduling and organizing will reduce stress. Even so, why do so many of us resist suggestions to get organized? Probably because doing so requires an initial investment of time and energy we feel we can’t afford—even though the payback comes in dramatic savings of time and money. You must, therefore, try the strategies of Mita Banerjee and others, or even use them to evolve your own.

When Nupur Roopa, a Delhi-based homemaker and freelance writer with a three-year-old daughter, decided to get organized, she set about creating a system that involved scheduling activities meticulously in her home journal and kept it at hand, for ready reference.

“My journal has a monthly calendar,” she explains. “On the last day of each month I jot down routine tasks for the coming month. So the bedsheets are changed every three days, and the fridge is cleaned once a month. I mark out an ironing schedule for the kids’ uniforms, like, whites on Mondays, yellows on Wednesdays... Another monthly list takes care of the provisions to be ordered. Other lists track financial obligations, so that credit card and insurance premiums are paid on time. Every Saturday morning, clutter is sorted out, filed or discarded. Important phone numbers are listed on the back cover of my journal. I can’t imagine life without this book.”