It is that time of year when you start to think about spring cleaning your house and your life. The huge motivation you get from the new year may have faded. So, as the warmer weather comes in, you probably want to have that fresh feeling again.
The trees have shed their leaves and are growing brand new buds, so why shouldn’t we? Cleansing your life means removing anything that isn’t serving you and replacing it with alternatives that support your wellbeing.
Spring cleaning your life and not just your home can have so many benefits.
This is a list of 7 ways to cleanse your life:
1. Declutter Your Space
As spring approaches, you want to ensure your space is clear and organised ready for the next season of the year. This is the time where you can declutter the areas of your home that have the pile of things ‘you need to sort’, the ‘I need to get rid of’ pile and other things that you have been meaning to clear out. You can get rid of the items that are collecting dust. So, you know that junk drawer you are always avoiding? Start decluttering! Having a clear home not makes it easier to clean; it also makes you feel calmer and more relaxed.
2. Refresh Your Finances
This is an awesome time to take a closer look at your finances and organise them. This means you can look at all of your outgoings and see where you can make savings. Are you paying for a subscription you don’t need? An unused gym membership? Make up or beauty subscriptions? This can be the reminder you need to save yourself the money you keep meaning to. You can also look at your savings and what you can do to improve them.
Read: How you can save money when you are on a low income
3. Re-evaluate Your Friendships
If these past few years have taught us anything at all, it is to invest our time and energy in the people ad things we value most because our time is precious. Do you have relationships in your life that are toxic or draining? You should consider setting some clear and loving boundaries.
Carrying out an evaluation like an honest audit will enable you to identify the people in your life who lift you up, support you and love you. These are the people you should refocus your energy and attention on, the relationships that add value to your life.
When you have made sure that you only have good relationships, you ca start to look at your social calendar. You can ensure all get togethers, activities and events are aligned to your values, your deeper goals and make you feel good about yourself.
4. Declutter Your Documents
Whether it is physical or digital, documents, recipes, emails or forms can clutter up your home as well as your digital space.
For your paperwork, it is important you have a designated place to keep them safe and secure. I use a file storage box with separate tabs for different documents. You should set aside time to review your paperwork, filing priority papers and shredding all unnecessary documents. Then continue this practice once a week.
For your digital paperwork, it is just as important to ensure that it is organised and ordered to avoid a cluttered inbox. Unfortunately, like spam letters, you can also receive all those pesky sales emails too. This is the right time to start unsubscribing from the sales or spam emails you keep receiving and deleting any older emails. For important emails, you can archive them for safe keeping. Having a clearer inbox will mean that you are less likely to miss any emails.
In addition, by deleting your emails, you are actually helping the environment. For a typical email, the electricity responsible is equal to 4g of CO² emissions. If the email has a picture attachment, this needs extra storage and takes longer to transmit, so the carbon footprint rises to an average of 50g! Every email you keep, unread or otherwise, needs electricity for storage. If everyone around the world deleted 10 emails (spam or not), that has the power of deleting 1,725,000 GB because just 1GB of emails (1,000 emails) takes 32kWh, generating 55.2 million kWh! Take the time to declutter those emails!
Read: 10 other ways you can reduce your carbon footprint
Photo by Tu Tu on Unsplash
5. Password Reset
Password security is really important and you should always consider your online safety. Regularly changing passwords should always be a habit you stick to. Your computer or device stores and provides access to a lot of sensitive information. This is even more so when you are connected to a network, so keeping all your data safe and secure should be a priority. Your passwords should be changed every 3 months.
6. Declutter Your Wardrobe
Like everywhere, your wardrobe can also get cluttered with items which you probably don’t even reach for. Use this time to go through your wardrobe and clear out any items that don’t fit, or you don’t like. This can be so therapeutic and it means that your wardrobe will look far more organised.
Remember to not just throw good clothes in the bin. You should consider other options such as donating to loved ones or friends, a charity shop, a shelter, or even a clothes donation bin at your local recycling centre.
7. Spring Clean Your Phone
You may be thinking ‘how can I spring clean my phone?’ Like any device, it can get clogged up with unwanted and unnecessary things.
Clearing out your phone can mean that your phone will work more efficiently and you will be able to find the things you need more easily. Here are 4 ways you can spring clean your phone:
Your photos – Are you a hoarder of screen shots? I know I can be. Have you got photos that are blurry or of nothing in particular? Taking some time to go through your photos and deleting any irrelevant and unwanted photos can clear up space in your phones storage. It also allows you to find the photos you want a lot quicker.
If you have a lot of photos that you want to print, I use FreePrints. You are allowed 45 free prints a month and you only have to pay P + P; you can of course choose to pay to print more if you wish.
Your notes – The notes app on your phone that you use to drop down information, shopping lists and important numbers should be cleared out regularly. I am guilty of using notes for shopping and then not deleting the note when I have finished. This will declutter your phone and allow you to find that information more easily.
Your contacts – This is always a great one to spring clean. You can delete all old contacts that you no longer require. I love to do a contact clear out!
Apps – You can look through your phone and remove all the apps you no longer use. This can be a useful practice to free up storage on your phone. Also, if you find you are spending too much time playing games on your phone and this is inhibiting your productivity, you can remove them. I have found apps that I never really use, so deleting them has cleaned up my home screen.
I have compiled a list of other areas you ca spring clean in your life:
- Declutter your mind
- Reorganise your schedules
- Clean out your car
- Spring clean your desk
- Change up your routines – find a new way of doing things
- Cleanse your social media – followers and DMs
These are 7 simple areas that you can spring clean to improve your life. A spring clean helps to clear mental space and promotes positivity. In addition, following a spring declutter can alleviate anxiety, depression and stress.
How are you going to spring clean your life? I’d love to hear in the comments.
Great tips, so many areas to spring clean! I love a declutter of the digital space since we tend to overlook it but that is one area that causes a lot of stress. I love that you mentioned deleting the emails regularly, so important.
Thank you for reading and commenting. Can you link your blog?
Yes thank you, here’s my blog.
I love Free Prints! It’s such a great service and SO cheap too! I made my boyfriend a little book of photos of his dog for his birthday once through them. Some great tips here, I need a huge spring clean of my life at the moment, it’s an absolute mess.
I love free prints as well! I feel like not many ppl know about it
I made a little book for my girlfriend. They are such a great brand! Thank you for reading and commenting.
This was just in time! We’re moving soon and I’ll be having to do some spring cleaning as well but I love it! Nothing like a nice clean fresh space
I love this article! I learned something new about deleting emails! Thank you!
Need this right now…spring clean my life. my phone too is full of photos & vids, need to sort that ASAP thanks for the reminder♡
I need to MAJORLY declutter my digital life, my wardrobe and my husbands studio. Now that the sun is shining in all you can see are cat hairs and fluff!
I think when the sun is shining it makes you want everything to be clear and clean. Thank you for reading and commenting.
I love this! Spring cleaning is always so much fun, and this year I really want to up my game with it. I can’t wait to do a massive declutter of all my draws and my wardrobe, and going through my phone is a must too! Thank you so much for sharing some really helpful tips x
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Great post!! Some awesome tips in here!!! Thanks for sharing! 🙂
I love that this post hasn’t just focused on home clutter. I often forget to declutter my phone but it is always very satisfying when we do. Taking time to reflect on your friendship is a really poignant point. Thank you for sharing!
It is definitely about Spring cleaning all areas of your life. Thank you for reading and commenting.
Wonderful post! Spring cleaning can be more than just physical clutter, such as re-evaluating friendships and the energy we surround ourselves with. Thank you for sharing!
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You’ve reminded me that I need to reset a few passwords as they are quite weak! It’s always good to have a spring clean in your life x
Lucy | http://www.lucymary.co.uk
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I don’t reset my passwords often enough, so this is a good reminders for me to do that. Never thought to include that as part of my spring cleaning routine, but I will do so from now on.
Awesome. Thank you for reading and commenting.
I just spring cleaned and it feels so good! Gotta go change some passwords though 👀
Oooo I love it! I did a post like this before with similar points but I never tire of reading someone else write about ways to spring clean our lives. It’s so refreshing and motivating. I’m a sucker for this stuff and the idea of getting super organised (a task that oddly enough never seems to finish) 😂 Thanks for sharing!! xx
Needed this Spring Clean post for a while now; this totally motivates me to go declutter right away. Amazing post 🙂
great tips… especially our phones, we sometimes accumulate a lot of clutter in those devices…
~B
These are some great suggestions for how to spring clean your life. Thanks for sharing
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Great tips, I have decluttered my space and ready for the new spring, but need to add some decoration. Thank you for sharing these awesome tips!
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This post has reminded me I need to have a digital declutter on my laptop and also on my phone. I have SO many photos on my phone, I really don’t need them all, and the ones I want to keep would be much better off backed up safely somewhere – thank you for the reminder, Lauren!
Thank you for reading and commenting. Good luck on your digital declutter!
I never thought about the energy use of email, very interesting. I shall go right now and delete some!
I really like these ideas! Especially spring cleaning your phone, something that is definitely essential. A decluttering always helps my mental health x
Great list! I do many of these regularly. Recently, I’ve had to focus on Friendships (and other relationships). 😕 My phone and documents are next. Thanks for sharing!
I just did a declutter of my papers after filing my taxes and it felt SO good! Next is definitely my phone, which I try to clean up every couple of months – along with my laptop and external hard drive. Great tips here!
Thank you for reading and commenting.
Love this list & love how you factor in other parts of your life other than cleaning! Definitely need to make a start on my spring cleaning, so will come back to this. Xxx
I’ve never done any spring-cleaning with this specific idea in mind – by which I mean I just really do it naturally every few months. And I think that time is coming soon to do it again for me – but more consciously this time. I’ve already started working on reorganizing my finances and I definitely need to declutter my room and wardrobe! Great tips!
Good luck with your Spring clean and declutter. Thank you for reading and commenting. I hope the tips helped!
Can you link your blog so I can return x
These are great ways to spring clean your life! I know I need to declutter my wardrobe as it has been a while since the last time & there are some clothes I no longer wear. Also that’s a good idea of spring cleaning your phone. I have 1000s of photos on my phone so it would be good to go through them.
you should start spring cleaning when you can clear out a solid day or two in your schedule to devote to the task. For many, this may be the weekend. Keep the weekend or your day clear and dedicate it
Good Read, I literally just put “Spring Cleaning” on my to-do list. Just what I needed.
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So many great tips, and at the perfect time of year for spring cleaning. I like that you have included more than just decluttering the physical space, I depserately need to go through my devices and get rid of any unused apps etc!
Thanks for sharing!
Aimsy xoxo
Aimsy’s Antics
I am glad you found this post helpful. Thank you for reading and commenting.
All great pieces of advice. There is something about spring that implies freshen up, clean up, spruce up, etc. It’s a time of re-birth and start fresh for sure. Thanks for sharing,
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Great article! Clear and concise about spring cleaning!
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You write really well!!
Your work has a purpose and a sense of importance. These ideas are easy to follow. Thanks for sharing
It always feels so liberating to declutter. I’m always in such a good mood after getting rid of lots of clutter. Great post, thanks for sharing.
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These are all very lovely tips! I’ll definitely try out FreePrints as well; I might have a few photos I would love to have printed. 🙂
Yeah I love FreePrints. Thank you for reading and commenting. X
Great post! Currently decluttering after moving house and it’s amazing what it does for the mind! Feel so much better for it. Thanks for sharing.
Jade MumLifeAnd.me
That’s great. A good decluttering can be really beneficial. Thank you for reading and commenting.