The Secret To Loving Your Home

You want to love your home. ❤️🏠❤️ Maybe you already love some parts, but other parts... you just can’t stand. No matter what you try, you just can’t get it to FEEL right. It just doesn’t FEEL like home.

You want to come home and actually want to be there.

But instead of being your comfortable and cozy retreat, your home is this constant source of demands and drains that are, frankly, overwhelming. 🧹🪣🧽🍳🗑️⏱️ Cooking and cleaning and cleaning and cooking. Does it ever even end?

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You can’t seem to keep up, no matter how much you declutter and organize and prioritize. You want it to be prettier, but you don’t even know where to start. Besides, your budget doesn’t exactly match your dreams.

Somehow, even though you live with other people, so much of it seems to land on you.

Like you’re the only one who sees the problem and can do something about it. And then you find yourself nagging or resentful or just too tired to connect with your loved ones because you’ve been wearing yourself out trying to make a nice home for them.

Which makes you feel like you’re the problem because no one likes a nagger.

You can’t even relax in your own home because there’s always more to do. Maybe you’d like to have more friends but you’re embarrassed to have people over. You feel like you’re failing at something everyone else has figured out. 🤔

Let’s stop there.

Those other people: they don’t have it figured out.

Feeling overwhelmed is kind of the norm these days.

Knowing how to keep up with your home is actually the rare thing. You are definitely NOT alone if you don’t love your home right now. You’re not the only one who can’t do it all.

For all intents and purposes I should be an “expert” on the matter. Rough math adds up to over 100,000 hours that I have spent mastering all things home, and I certainly don’t have it figured out. That is, I haven’t figured out how to “do it all”, because the truth is, there’s literally no way to do it all. 🫨

Believe me, I have tried. And, I have talked to hundreds of people about their homes.

No matter which hacks and containers and edits and optimization tools you use, no matter how much you excel at using them, the simple reality is you can’t do more than is possible to be done.

Another thing that isn’t possible is making your home so pretty and clean that life magically gets easier. That’s called perfectionism, and it’s not a highly recommended strategy for coping because ➡️ it doesn’t work ⬅️. It just stresses you out more.

Somehow we got this idea that we were supposed to have these perfect lives with these perfect homes and perfectly productive days, but the more we strive for that the further we get from loving our home and the closer we get to full-blown burnout.

100,000 hours to come to a conclusion I should have known from the start. 🙈

If we haven’t met, I’m Jeri. This is my very first essay to post on Substack. A “Welcome” post, if you will. 👋

I understand how important it is to love your home. If your home isn’t working, it has this way of affecting ✨everything✨ in your life. It impacts your relationships 💞, your productivity 🗓️, your mood 😕, and your feelings of satisfaction 🧘. We aren’t supposed to be spending our time at home feeling this behind and overwhelmed.

Our home is supposed to FEEL like home.

I deeply believe in the power of using the home as a resource to live a better life, no matter what season you’re in and no matter what the challenges. Everything I write here, and everything I do professionally, draws from my background in interior design, organization, home management, parenting, and psychology to figure out ways we can love our homes more in these modern times.

Think of me as a translator in the conversation between your interior environment and your internal environment. There isa conversation, and it does matter. The language is The Felt Sense. 🤲

If you have read this far, there’s a good chance that you’re noticing there is a conversation and you’re ready to understand it better.

Now that we have our introductions out of the way, let’s deliver on the promise in the title:

The secret to loving your home is designing your home around your nervous system and your individual needs.

If your home doesn’t feel right, here’s what you can do about it:

Stop working for your home and get it to work for you.

That means paying attention to all the mental load, internalized messages, societal pressures, and FEELINGS, and then using those to guide your decisions in the home. It’s understanding where your resources go, how to restore them, and how to prevent unnecessary drains in the future.

The truth is your home can add to or subtract from your time ⏰, attention 🔍, and energy 🌟. Not to mention money 💵. Your home affects your bottom line even more than you might know. These are the resources we are working with.

If you’re running low on any of these, there’s a really good chance that your home isn’t doing its job properly.

Getting slowly and quietly drained of your resources doesn’t FEEL good.

Take a second to imagine if your home protected your time, attention, energy, and money instead of robbing you of them.

That’s what we’re working toward. Finding the opportunities to protect, and even restore, your resources AND getting your home to do the heavy lifting.💪

Pinterest boards are out. Personal insight is in.

It never was only about aesthetics. (← What I wish I knew in design school.)

A lot of design and organizing advice forgets that some stages of life are messy, that not everyone can gut their kitchen on a whim, and that minimalism isn’t always the answer. I’ve found it rarely is. 👀

No one tells us to design around our time limitations, demands on attention, energy available, and long term budgetary goals.

This is what I’ll be sharing here: the messy stages of life, what to do when you have genuine constraints, and how to focus on your individual needs so your home can actually help meet them. Let’s put the overwhelm and failure around caring for your home to rest, once and for all.

Once your home is working for you, the natural result is that you’ll love it — whether or not it’s perfect.

Because perfect isn’t the goal anymore. Feeling at ease is: able to relax, connect, and enjoy your life again. 🎯

I’d like to get a little personal for a second. This isn’t just something I talk about. I’m actively rebuilding my life after leaving an unhealthy marriage, and much of what I share here is wisdom earned through my own nervous system repair, the healing power of a home, and learning to keep one running with four kids even on days I could barely keep going myself. I chased the fantasy of perfection for a long time. Now I’m awake, and maybe you’re starting to wake up to wanting more from your home too.

And, I’ve watched incredible shifts happen for people the moment they stopped chasing an aesthetic and started making changes that actually met their needs.

If any of this is resonating, welcome. You’re exactly who I hoped this message would find. 💌

This isn’t your usual home advice Substack. I geek out harder on neuroscience than design trends these days. I care more about how your hormones affect your ability to clean (and how to have less cleaning to do at all) than achieving the perfect shine. We’re not prescribing an aesthetic or a regimen; we’re describing what tends to work and what doesn’t, so you can make informed choices for you.

Oh, and I’m really excited to share about the five home archetypes! 💧⚙️🌿🪨🔥Each one manages their resources surprisingly differently. You might be designing for the wrong one, and that could be exactly why your home isn’t working for you. There’s a lot of digging to do around that. 🪏

As we part ways today, I invite you to start noticing where your time, attention, energy, and money are going in your home.

What are the drains?

Does your home help protect and restore them?

Are there changes you can make to better serve you?

If you have noticed that your home doesn’t FEEL right, start noticing what you’re sensing. That’s incredibly valuable information. 📝

I’d love to read your thoughts and comments! And if you want more of this in your inbox - the power of designing for your nervous system and individual needs - please subscribe. I’m really glad you’re here.

Warmly,
Jeri