The personal meaning that the items in your home carry are very important to your mental health. All of our sensory experiences impact us with meaning, but none more so than our sense of sight. The minute we see things, our brain is interpreting their appearance based on any experiences we have had with the thing we are looking at. If it is a thing we have had a bad experience with, then seeing it will make us feel negative. If it is a thing we have had a good experience with, it will make us feel positive. We also interpret things visually using our subconscious. For instance, we may have never had a personal experience with the color yellow, but colors have a psychological impact simply by being colors.

The point of this is simply that people need to consider their personal connection to the items they decorate with and fill a home with because they will have a daily psychological impact on them. This is why many people choose to decorate with personal effects, such as family heirlooms, art that their kids made, favorite quotes and artistic representations of things they value. These items are directly associated with something that the decorater values, which means it has very positive personal meaning.

A person may also want to decorate with things that are less personal but still carry some kind of positive association. For instance, some people love to decorate with abstract art. There is nothing in reality that is as abstract as abstract art. Looking at it does not make us think of real life people, places or events. Instead, it brings to mind associations with concepts, emotions and states of being, which are abstract themselves. For many people, these types of associations within their personal space is more therapeutic than images of people, places or events that they are personally connected to.

People are very visually stimulated creatures. Mental health experts agree that sight is the sense that informs us of our reality more than any other sense. What we see affects our personal condition a great deal. That is why the aesthetics of our homes are so important to think about. Most of us are home more than anywhere else in life. Home is supposed to be a place of security, peace, restoration and rejuvenation, where we recharge before going out into the world to accomplish things. It is very important to our health and our sanity that our home environments are peaceful. Therefore, we need to consider the aesthetics of our homes as an investment into our mental health.

When a home is full of aesthetics that are pleasing to the eye, including art, decorations, cleanliness and order, an environment of calm is created. This aesthetically pleasing environment is based on a number of factors, including color, representation, order, cleanliness and saturation.

• Color. The colors used in decorating a home should be hand-picked by the inhabitant in accordance with their preferences. Different personalities prefer different colors, so it is wise for people to do some research to consider the effects that colors have on them before choosing a home color scheme.
• Representation. Anything a person can see has meaning to them. The meaning may be personal or impersonal, positive or negative, beneficial or harmful. Anything in the home that can be seen will carry some impact on the inhabitant’s mood, which needs to be considered for the decorating of the home.
• Order. The order a home and its decor is kept in has a major effect on how it impacts us visually. When we walk into a space that is unkempt and in disarray, we immediately feel more scattered, where as when we walk into a space that is orderly, we feel put together. The same is true for the cleanliness and the saturation of decor and other items.