How do you feel about your home? And more importantly does it matter?
The interesting relationship between our homes and our happiness.
We spend more time in our homes than anywhere else, and yet it was a subject largely left unstudied- until ‘The Good Home Report’ 2019 by The Happiness Research Institute.
Thousands of people from 10 European countries were invited to explain how they feel about their home, and how happy they are with life in general. They also asked more specific questions about the condition of their home and any home improvement efforts, they then ‘analysed the links between all the data points collected in relation to demographics and people’s lifestyles in general to find out what actually makes us happy with our home and what does not’.
Insights well worth noting are…
73% of people who are happy with their homes are also happy in general.
Happiness with our home is almost three times as important to our overall happiness as our income.
They studied 5 key emotions that we have in relation to our home; pride, comfort, identity, safety and control.
Feeling proud of our home is key to feeling happy with our home.
In fact, the link between pride and happiness with the home was more than twice as strong as any of the other five core emotions. ‘In other words, if we want to become happy with our home, it is much more important to work on our pride than any other emotion.’ However despite this being the most important feeling to have towards our home, they found very few people have it. But there is a solution! The study found that if we engage in home improvements (even if we have no actual interest in doing home improvements) we become prouder of our home.
For a home to be a happy one, several basic material needs must be met, fairly obviously the most important of these being that the home is in good overall condition (happiness does not lie in a leaking roof). The most important type of renovation to consider a home to be in good condition was found to be the bathroom- less than half of all participants considered their home to be in good condition if their bathroom needed renovating.
A surprising finding was that: ‘Adapability and space are more important to our happiness with our homes than both home ownership and the size of our homes.’ In fact the study busted several myths that are widely held regarding a happy home:
‘Owning your home does not necessarily make you happier’
‘Besides having a home in generally good shape, having a home that can be adapted to future needs is the second most important condition for a happy home.’
Size isn’t everything- ‘the size and number of rooms matter only until a certain point. It is the feeling of living in a cramped home that is the problem, not the size of the home itself.’
A really key point to understand here is the difference between size and space. ‘An objectively large home can easily feel cramped, while a small home can feel spacious. Even more interestingly, we found that the perception of space is three times more important for a happy home, than the number of rooms.’
Arguably one of the biggest take homes from the study is this:
Having a happy home is as important to our overall happiness as our mental and physical health, and it is even more important than our level of income and education.
On the one hand this is surprising, but then when you consider for a moment how important our home has been since early humans chose a suitable cave for themselves, and just how much time we’ve spent at home in the following thousands of years- it's clearly going to be super important to us!
So, the secret to a happy life may not be in the perfecting the layout of your living room furniture, but- it might be the right place to start!
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