11 Simple Living Tips: Get Calm, Content And Clutter-Free
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With all the things we have to do, and all the stuff we seem to acquire, it’s so easy for our lives to become busy, disorganised and complicated.
Often we find ourselves rushing around with too much to do, too little time and not enough money.
Sometimes it all just gets a bit too much.
I talk a lot about frugal living, and I think it ties in quite a lot with simple living. Often when trying to be more frugal we need to start prioritising what’s important to us, and cutting down on the things we don’t necessarily need.
While I don’t believe in making yourself miserable just to be frugal (you really can be frugal without being cheap), I do think that living more simply can help our lives become less cluttered, both physically and mentally.
Both living simply and frugally involve removing the excess where we can, in order to fully enjoy and focus on what matters most, with more time, and more money. That’s where the two can really complement each other.
Here are some simple living tips to make life easier, cheaper and more peaceful.
10 Simple Living Tips For A Life With Less Stress
1. Define What You Value
Knowing what you value and what matters the most to you, means you can organise your life in a way that creates time and space for those things. It’s the simple start to creating a life that prioritises what you really value.
2. Declutter
Have a look around, how much stuff do you have just filling up your home? Is it overwhelming? Having a declutter can help you feel less stressed and more relaxed. Take one room at a time and go through it evaluating the things you really need. Donate or sell the rest. Reducing the clutter around you can make a really difference to how busy your life feels.
Here are some quick tips for stress free decluttering >>
3. Adopt a frugal mindset
Living a more frugal life often goes hand in hand with living a minimalist lifestyle. It often means buying less, which leads to having less clutter in your life. The easiest place to begin is to cut back on spending – work out which costs are necessities, and which are not.
A good place to start with this is by looking at your subscriptions. You might find you’re paying for things such as satellite television, which provides hundreds of channels you probably never even watch! Simplify life by choosing a cheaper package, which cuts down the overwhelm of choice and saves money in the process.
Read more: 13 habits of highly frugal people >>
4. Limit social media
Social media is the ultimate distraction. Thinking honestly, how much time have you spent mindlessly scrolling through endless newsfeeds, status updates and pictures of other people’s cats? As well as being a time suck, social media clutters up our minds with the ins and outs of other people’s lives, which can lead to us comparing and feeling inadequate or envious.
Deciding to limit the time spent on social media can free up our minds as well as our time.
5. Simplify Your Wardrobe
I’ll be honest, my wardrobe is easily the place I find hardest to declutter, so out of all these simple living tips, this is where I struggle the most!
I have clothes from my student days, comfy clothes from pregnancy, clothes that are probably never going to fit again (I live in hope), breastfeeding accessible clothes, sports clothes (who am I kidding?) and the bunch of jeans and jumpers I actually do wear all the time. It’s a mess.
Along with taking up space, and looking cluttered or messy, there can be emotional ties to keeping all these things too. Having all those clothes that don’t fit or just never get worn because they don’t fit into your life anymore can lead to negative feelings about your size or how you look.
Why keep things that make you feel negatively towards yourself?
Decluttering your wardrobe is also a great way to make a bit of extra money selling your excess clothing.
Here’s a guide on the best ways to sell your secondhand clothes for profit.
6. Try to stop multitasking
Too often we find ourselves trying to do ten things at once, which usually only leads to none of them being done properly!
Take a step back to evaluate. Work out which tasks are most pressing, and prioritise.
Try and focus on one task at a time. This way, it gets the attention it needs and you can concentrate fully which will help the task get done better.
7. Get good at scheduling
Take some stress away by making sure your life is well organised and structured. Keep a calendar or scheduler and make sure to add all your appointments and events in as you organise them.
Keep everything scheduled in one place, so it’s easy to look and see exactly what you’ve got going on on any given day.
8. Simplify finances
Our financial lives can often end up being the greatest sources of stress and use up a lot of our mental energy.
One easy way to simplify finances is by automating as much as possible. Most companies have an autopay option for bills so you don’t need to spend time and energy on those.
One thing that I struggled with was going over the data allowance on my mobile tariff and getting sent unexpected bills. Asking for a cap so you can’t go over is a good way to get rid of that worry and extra cost without having to constantly check.
You can also automate your savings. A lot of banks will offer a sweeping service, which moves money left at the end of the month across into savings. Alternatively there are lots of savings apps which have an auto-save function whereby they work out using AI how much money you can afford to save and move regular small amounts of money over to savings for you. Personally I use and like Plum for this, but Chip is also a good option.
Creating a simple budget you can update and amend when needed is a good way to keep on top of finances without too much effort. It will take a little time initially to set up, but once you’ve done it, it’s easy to maintain and will mean you can easily get a good overview of your finances.
9. Go For Quality Over Quantity
Choose fewer quality things that bring value rather than more that aren’t as good. This will simplify the amount of stuff you have, and should also help save money, as the things you do choose should last longer and need replacing less frequently.
10. Focus On Simple Pleasures
Think about the small things in life that make you happy and focus on making time for those. It could be things like sitting and having a coffee in the garden, taking a walk, or reading a book.
Taking time out to enjoy small pleasures like this can help us feel more relaxed, content, and reenergised.
11. Embrace tech that helps you conquer stress
We often think of modern technology as a major contributing factor to living a stressful and cluttered life. But this isn’t always the case. Though it’s certainly helpful to put down your smartphone, some gadgets help elevate your mood and create a more calming environment.
Take Hapbee, for example — a tech-savvy headband designed to help conquer stress using low energy magnetic fields, which mimic signals your brain can understand.
Want to simplify life and enjoy the moment? Learn more about embracing tech focused on wellbeing here: https://www.instagram.com/gethapbee/
Hopefully these simple living tips will help create a life that’s calmer, free from clutter and more content.
Related reading:
- How To Declutter When You’re Overwhelmed By The Mess >>
- Simple Frugal Living Tips To Save Money Everyday >>
- Financial Resolutions To Up Your Money Game >>
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