How To Create A Calmer Home (And Feel Better)

Your nervous system is listening to your home long before your mind has an opinion. The light in the hallway, the constant hum of the telly, the buzz of notifications, the piles that never quite get put away all of it adds up to a simple internal question: do I feel safe here? When the answer is “not really”, you can end up feeling edgy, exhausted, reactive, or stuck in that background stress that makes everything harder, including sleep, digestion and pain.

I’m Naomi Mills, chiropractor, author and mum, and I walk you through a down-to-earth way to think about nervous system regulation using the one place you often have the most control over: your home environment. I share a personal story about caring for my sister and how her lower back pain became a clear signal of overwhelm rather than “just” a mechanical problem. From there, we explore what safety cues look like in real homes, including sound, clutter, temperature, smell, technology, and why silence can feel uncomfortable at first but still be exactly what your body needs.

You’ll leave with five practical, low-effort steps you can try straight away: removing screens from bedrooms, reducing background noise, creating a daily moment of connection, adding more nature indoors, and building a calm corner that anyone in the family can use. If you want better sleep hygiene, less stress at home, and a more grounded way to support teens and adults alike, press play, then subscribe, share, and leave a review so more people can find their way back to their body.

Transcript

Welcome And Core Philosophy

Naomi Mills 0:01

Welcome to You Are the Answer, the podcast that helps you reconnect with the most powerful healer you know, your own body. I'm Naomi Mills, chiropractor, healthcare professional, and believer in the natural intelligence within us all. In this podcast, I explore what it means to trust your body, decode its signals, and take ownership of your well-being without quick fixes or health fads. Whether you're just beginning your journey or deep in transformation, I'm here to guide you back to the truth. You are not broken. You are the answer. Hello and welcome to episode 34. I can't believe we are here. Thank you for joining me. I am Naomi Mills. I am a chiropractor, an author, a teacher, and mother person who is really obsessed with helping people discover their own nervous systems and ways to take care of themselves that are just super easy and straightforward. And

Family Care And Pain As Overwhelm

Naomi Mills 1:13

that's really what today's episode is about. Now I will say, and hopefully my beautiful older sister won't mind me sharing this little tit, that as a clinician, and I guess in any job that you do, working with your family is really, really difficult. And I used to try and adjust my sister, and it didn't always go particularly well. Being the one that kind of told her, here's what's going on in your nervous system, and here's all the things you need to do to be less stressed. And she's actually great now, not because she never has acute lower back pain, she now sees it, she knows that she's been overdoing it. She will call me when her regular chiropractor is unavailable and say, I've been overdoing it, I've been pushing myself, I've worked too hard, I've not slept enough, I can't get in there. Please will you take care of me this time? And of course I say yes. And what I love though is that she understands that her back pain isn't just a mechanical cause, it is her body expressing this overwhelm. And the great thing about me sending her to someone else, apart from it being better for our working relationship, was that this other carapactor that she went to see gave her all sorts of home and lifestyle advice. To be fair, a lot of which I had given her. But who did you think she listened to? And when she actually tried it, it made such a big difference to her. And I want to be really clear here: yes, taking these actions can make a big difference to your overall sense of well-being, your calmness, and therefore your health. But for me, the goal isn't to microcontrol everything so that we never get stressed or we never sleep badly or we never digest badly. For me, the one and only true goal is to bring you the awareness of what's happening. Because awareness is where empowerment sits. Empowerment isn't in, let's make sure this never happens. Because stress is good. We're gonna get sick, we're gonna have hard times. There are times when you might be creating an amazing project or planning a wedding or a house move or having a new baby. There are times in our lives when our nervous system are going to be under much more strain. We don't want to stop that. It's where we build resilience, it's where we get to take advantage of all the goodness, hopefully, that we're building into it so that we can recover and get through those episodes without any lasting damage to our health and our well-being. So the empowerment is the conscious awareness. And so you might be saying, okay, I get it, my nervous system matters, but what can I do about it?

Why Home Environment Shapes Safety

Naomi Mills 3:52

Because I, as me naomi, I'm not trying to sell you a particular way of taking care of your nervous system. So I'm going to talk you to you about environment because actually that can make a huge difference, both for better and for worse, and it's something that you probably do have the most control over. So I'm really talking about yes, schools and workplaces, but let's focus on the environment that you have control over, and you have control over for your child, and that is your home environment, your physical environment. Because your nervous system is always responding to the world around you. So that's the space that you live in, the sounds that you hear, how much daylight you have. And particularly when it comes to technology, where we keep our screens and how loud they are. There are so many little nuances that are affecting your nervous system even when you don't know it. Because ultimately, your nervous system is always asking, like, do I feel safe here? And it's always taking that measure unconsciously, whether you're aware of it or not. So I just want you to imagine in your mind's eye for a moment. We're gonna imagine walking into two different houses. The first one is calm, it's got lots of natural light, people are talking in softer voices, the space is clear and tidy and clean. There's maybe some music playing quietly in the background, you're greeted warmly, and you have a sense of kind of peace. So even when the kids come in and the family get going, it's a very warm, convivial space that the energy can build, and then the environment is allowing it to dissipate again. Versus house two. And the moment you walk in, you are greeted by the blare of a television, people running around, highly raised voices, piles of clutter, bright artificial lighting, phones going off, everything just quite loud. And neither environment is dangerous, none of them are gonna, you know, kill you. But your body is going to respond extremely differently when you go into those spaces. And so today's invitation is for you to think alongside your teen, especially, but to just taking out all of the the judgment, because the reality is some days your life might be like house one, or we all want to live in house one. I don't live in house one, but perhaps we live a lot more in house two because we ourselves are in overwhelm. We're busy, we haven't had time to do a deep clean for weeks. There are piles of things that need sorting out, and FYI, like those are those little undone tasks that especially I can say for myself, that can lead me to a sense of feeling in a bit of overwhelm because there are lots of nice little tasks that when I do them, I feel like I'm really on top of things, and when they get left undone for too long, I start, I do come into my consciousness of going, I am feeling a little bit out of control here. I'm not feeling as relaxed in my space as I want to because it isn't looking and feeling as I want to, and we're not talking about perfection, we're not talking about mopping the floor every day and everything being pristine all the time, but a general sense. And when we think about the spaces that our young people are coming into that we are living in when it comes to environment, there's a lot we can offer around smell and relaxing smells. There's a whole world of colour therapy and what the colours on your wall, what they are bringing in terms of activation or regulation, and different spaces will want to have different outcomes. So maybe you want to think about where you spend your most time, whether that's sort of the kitchen, living room, their bedrooms, starting to think about where you want to bring technology in and what where you want to keep it out. And so when we think just about nervous system regulation and we kind of let go of that idea of what's right, wrong, bad, good, happening or not happening, what are some simple things you can do? So I talked

Quieter Sound Softer Light Fewer Screens

Naomi Mills 8:38

about my sister at the beginning. One of the things that she found really useful, and I find it's very useful in households, is turning everything down, the physical volume, turning the radio down, the speakers down, the television down, and what that does, that quieter level, is it also brings our nervous systems down. It also means that we have to be slightly more quiet so that we can hear it. Lighting is also another great way that you can help manipulate your environment to help your nervous system to be in that safe, calm, eased space. So you might want bright, clear lights in the kitchen because people are cooking, you're doing homework, that might be your hub of activity, that's where you need to be able to see. But maybe in places like the lounge or especially bedrooms, we allow softer lighting to be there, and that is always then signalling to our nervous system this is a wind-down space, and it's why I would really advocate not having any television screens or computers in our sleep spaces, and that's because we want to be really clear with our bodies and our subconscious and our nervous system as a whole what those spaces are for. So when we bring really stimulating things into our sleep spaces, that is giving the opposite signal, and of course, you will have to work around your own values, your own compromises, and your own workarounds for that. And so it's not black and white. I have some great families who will obviously you've got some older children that want to have certain technology in their rooms, but then it can be switched off and taken away at certain time. We are great advocates in our house of if we're watching, sitting down to watch a film or we're doing something as a family, our daughter will collect up our phones and she'll put them in another room. So when she does that, I actually do notice in my body it's easier for me to focus. Because on a subconscious level, I'm now not being distracted, even if I'm not looking at it. It's not even in my awareness anymore. So it's coming back to this level of awareness. And

Read Your Home Signals And Stress

Naomi Mills 11:01

before I say any more, I would really like you to think now, when you walk into your house normally, what are the first signs and signals you're getting? I encourage you the next time you physically do this to become really aware. What's the smell that hits you? What's the kind of feeling or the emotion of the sense of busyness or calm? Do you have places for everything to go and you're able to make some time to have a tidy, have a clean so that it feels like a less cluttered space? What uh temperature are you keeping your house at? Because you want to keep it at a nice ambient temperature, not too warm where you're switching us into like the nervous system goes into almost shut down. Do you want to think about the noise levels of your machines? Even for me, I have two budgies and a very barky dog who I love dearly, but there are times I also know when I'm feeling a bit stressed because I actually find it grating rather than joyful, so that can be a really nice signal how your environment is affecting you, and some days it's good and some days it's not good, and it's all because you've changed, they haven't changed. But then where can I find spaces where I don't hear them? And there are days because they often come into my adjusting space with me. If I really want a peaceful, quiet shift for myself and for my clients, I won't take them in there. So it's actually what is going on in your environment at home that might be bringing your nervous system into a higher state of stress than you want. Because your system doesn't consciously think, oh no, there's there's laundry on that chair and it's not been done, it's not been put away. It's a lot more subtle. It's actually your environment almost whispering, there's more to do, you've got more to remember, you've not done this yet, there's some unfinished business here, and eventually those kind of little whispers become your background stress. When you've got lots of input happening, so if you're going from one room and there's a radio going, and maybe then your podcasts are in, there's a conversation in another room. That's a very common thing for a lot of us. You put the TV on or you put something on on your phone when you're putting the laundry away. But our nervous systems evolve to have natural pauses. So one of the things I do in my home environment now that I didn't used to do was just go and do some tasks with no noise. Take nothing with me. Don't chat to someone while I do it, don't put something on to listen to while I do it. I just allow myself to be in silence as I make the lunch or doing something in the bedroom or cleaning something in the bathroom, whatever it is, but actually doing it in silence. And that's not emptiness, that's allowing some regulation to happen. And a lot of us will actually feel uncomfortable initially in silence because we're not used to it. So

Five Simple Steps To Regulate

Naomi Mills 14:23

if I could give you my top five practical takeaways for creating a better environment for your nervous system at home, it would be this removing screens from your bedroom, number one, because this is your biggest kind of bang for your buck thing that you can do. If possible, even taking away mobile phones as alarms and getting old-fashioned alarms. We've done that as well. And setting yourself screen-free time before bed, everybody in the household. The second thing I would do would be to reduce your background noise. Asking yourself, does this need to be on? So TV, radios, phones, tablets, notifications, ear pods in, everything running simultaneously, creating pockets of quiet. And you will need to do this for your children consciously as well. The third thing I would do would be to try and create a daily moment of connection between everyone. So those times when the phones are out of the room for everybody, the screens are out of the room for everybody, and you just do something, even just for a few minutes. And it can be a family dinner, it can be a hot drink before bed, a quick 10 minutes around the block, which is great, reading together, having a very conscious conversation to connect with someone in your family, that really works. And number four is actually something I didn't go into in this episode because it was more about assessing the environment and maybe things to take away. But something really important you can add in is more nature. So one of the simplest ways to regulate our nervous systems that we have available, bringing some plants into the house, some greenery, using more natural materials than artificial materials, all of those things help us feel more connected to the outside, and we are just simply wired to unwind when we do that. And then the fifth thing that I would encourage you to do would be to create yourself a calm space. You might not be able to get the whole house clean, cutter, clutter-free, quiet, etc. etc. Soft and cozy, all the things that make us feel safe and warm. So create a corner, something that you and anyone else in your family can use, which is peaceful, which is clutter-free, which is soft and warm and inviting and quiet. That's where you want blankets, books, colouring. If you're going to have sound, it's calming music, it's soft lighting. It might be where you choose to journal or meditate. Just a space that is a regulation space that anybody in the family can visit at any time. So even before you try and change your behavior or do any of these five steps, I just invite you to become more aware over the next few days of your environment and all those elements within your household and see where you can make some really simple, effective changes. And I would love to hear how you get on. Because if your home was helping your nervous system regulate, what would be different for you? More quiet, more routine, more connection, more nature, fewer screens, a slower way of starting your morning, a shared meal, a calm corner or space that you can go to. These are all wonderful ways that you can really give yourself a big shift without having to do a lot of internal effort. So go forth. I feel like I could talk on and all around this subject for much, much longer. But that's more than enough for us to get started. And good luck and enjoy your new space.

Closing Thanks And Next Steps

Naomi Mills 18:39

Thank you for joining me on You Are the Answer. If today's episode sparks something in you, share it with someone you care about and leave a review to help others find their way back to their body chip. For more tools, inspiration, and resources to support your journey, head to www.uareanswer.co.uk. And until next time, stay connected, stay curious, and remember, you are the answer, and you always have it.