Is Your Kitchen Stressing You Out?
After a long winter in Minneapolis, spring has finally arrived. The sunshine has me yearning for days kayaking on lakes and spending more time outside. Gary has taught me how precious the 12 weekends are between Memorial Day and Labor Day and I sure don’t want to be inside organizing a cabinet that is bugging me. Do you? Spring is the perfect time to de-clutter your kitchen and create an oasis of relaxing calm in your home.
A study in the Huffington Post revealed that 84% of Americans worry that their home isn’t clean or organized enough, and within that group 55% called it out as a source of recent stress. According to the study, 91% of Americans were stressed out about something in the past month, and 77% said they were stressed out regularly.
The problem? All of this stress raises levels of cortisol, which is a stress hormone in your body.
Too much cortisol causes us to feel anxious and agitated, unable to settle down and often unable to sleep. Too little cortisol causes us to feel exhausted and unmotivated. Cortisol at the wrong times of day disrupts our energy levels, our mood and our sleep patterns. If you are feeling stressed out and unable to sleep you may want to get your cortisol levels tested through four saliva tests at key times done in one day. This would help determine if your adrenal glands are functioning.
The survey also suggested that that people who got stressed out about their disorganized homes were more stressed out in general every day. Your kitchen is the heart of your home; the place where you nourish and nurture yourself and the people you love. Clutter in your house can have lots of side effects.
My mom came every year to bake me her famous no bake cheesecake for my birthday. She has not come the last 14 years. I wish I would have known the last time she was here was going to be the “last time.” Savor the good times you don’t know when they will end.
What to do? Start by buying less processed food. If you buy real food and less processed you will have less to store in your kitchen. If you do have lots or packaged food in your kitchen, go through your shelves and arrange by “first in, first out” (FIFO) to use your kitchen staples more efficiently and before they expire on your shelves.
Use a kitchen timer and set it every day for 14 minutes and see how much kitchen organization you can get done. I have two timers. One in my office and one in my kitchen and use them daily. My client Stacie has set her time for 14 minutes (for the year 2014) every day to de-clutter her house and she claims it is life changing. Give it a try, it works like a charm!
Here are six more tips from the kitchens of my Registered Dietitian friends to get yourself organized so you can get out of your kitchen this coming summer!
What are your kitchen organizing tips? Please share with our Taste Life Subscriber family.
I love my life! I have a passion and a purpose to share my recipe for health and happiness with RDNs and others – maybe even more so now that I’ve officially retired. If you want to learn what I discovered through coaching 1000 people over 9000 hours check out my final post, “Live Like This Is Your Last Day. Someday It Will Be!”
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