It’s a well-known secret that moving house can be an extremely stress-filled transitional period in one’s life.
In fact, most experts rank moving house as one of the most stressful events a person can experience, right after a divorce.
Only, your move doesn’t have to be like that.
Take advantage of some practical tips for managing the stress of moving, including proven de-stressing techniques you are encouraged to use to keep your anxiety level within reasonable limits.
Here are the top 20 ways to handle the stress of moving.
Take a deep breath and keep on reading.
1. Understand why moving is so stressful
One thing is clear: it’ll be so much easier to deal with the stress of moving when you understand the main reasons why moving house is so stressful.
Then, once you’ve answered the WHY question, the home moving process will suddenly become much easier to handle.
What makes moving stressful is the tricky combination of several stress factors at the same time:
MONEY. Moving house is expensive, your savings will be put to the test, and you have no idea how much your move will cost.
TIME. You have a very limited time window to get ready for Moving day.
DISRUPTION: You will be taken out of your comfort zone, away from family, friends, and familiar surroundings.
UNCERTAIN FUTURE. You don’t know what your post-move life holds for you so the fear of the future is a real thing.
The mere thought of you failing to complete the pre-move preparations by the set deadline (usually movers knocking on your door in the morning) can easily stress you out more than necessary.
The nerve-wracking formula TOO MANY THINGS TO DO + TOO LITTLE TIME can turn out to be detrimental to your emotional equilibrium, especially if you’re dealing with a last-minute move.
One excellent way to reduce stress during a move is to give yourself as much time as possible.
Remember that it’s never too early to start work on those moving tasks.
If possible, initiate the preparations at least 8 weeks before the day of the move.
Have your moving cost calculated by professionals to reduce the moving stress.
As expected, money can be a huge stressor during a house move.
You’ve heard or read from reliable sources that moving is expensive and that professional movers charge a lot of money for their services.
To make things worse, you don’t have the slightest idea of how much your move will cost you in the end.
To reduce the stress of moving, you just have to know how much money you’ll need to cover all the moving expenses.
Don’t postpone this any longer.
Use our free Moving Cost Calculator to have top-rated professionals get in touch with you and schedule in-home surveys for accurate cost estimates.
4. Hire top-rated professional movers
Without a doubt, the best way to avoid stress when you’re moving is to hire a good moving company – experienced, reputable, trustworthy, and affordable.
This is especially true when you’re moving long distance with plenty of high-value items, and you don’t have any previous move-related experience or reliable friends to count on.
What better way to handle the stress of moving than to let experienced movers help you out with the most difficult aspects of the residential move?
This way, you’ll be left with enough time to do a number of important de-stressing tasks such as saying goodbye to your family, friends, and even favorite places.
It’s important to have enough time to prepare properly for the day of the move, but even more important than that is to use that time period efficiently.
As explained above, the less time there is until move day, the more stressed out you will feel for fear of not making it on time.
In practice, proper organization is the key to reducing stress during a move.
The solution is simple enough: stay organized during your move by creating a moving checklist and following it down to the T.
Write down all the tasks you must finish and start marking those tasks as COMPLETED, one by one.
Unsure where to start? Take a look at our interactive MOVING CHECKLIST – it will surely give you some great ideas on what you should do.
The more cluttered your home is, the more anxious you will be simply because, whether you realize it or not, clutter can cause a lot of stress during a move.
Just one look at all your earthly possessions is enough to make you genuinely worried about PACKING, TRANSPORTING, AND STORING all those items you may never get to use again in your life.
The solution is obvious: you must get rid of the clutter before you start packing up your things.
It can be really frustrating to lose precious time packing and then lose hard-earned money in transporting tons of things that you’ll wonder how to get rid of after the move.
One good way to reduce the stress of moving is to know that your things are perfectly safe inside those cardboard boxes.
One of the most common accidents on Moving day is cardboard boxes getting broken under their own weight, thus risking serious damage to whatever items are packed inside those containers.
If you can afford it, you’re recommended to purchase all your moving boxes brand new for maximum protection for your items. Thus said, you can still use second-hand boxes as long as you’ve checked them carefully and made sure their overall quality is good.
Ensure the packing boxes you’re using are strong and dry, and have no visible signs of any pre-existing damage. Of course, the cartons have to be infestation-free as well.
Take safety to another level by double-taping the bottoms and sides of all cardboard boxes you’re about to use for packing.
The stress of moving will decrease as soon as you’re done packing up your things.
Another great way to cope with the stress of moving is to make sure the most challenging task of them all is being successfully tackled as the move day approaches.
That’s right – of all the entries in your moving checklist, packing for a move will prove to be the most demanding one in terms of time, effort, and money.
Get one step closer to a stress-free move by starting the packing task as soon as you know you are moving house for sure.
Gather the required packing materials and initiate the packing job from the toughest rooms to pack – the storage areas in your house or apartment.
Use a packing checklist for ultimate speed and efficiency.
Dealing with the stress of moving goes beyond the pre-move preparation and includes the first few days in the new place as well.
Therefore, you’ll need to think a few steps ahead and ensure that you won’t get stressed after the move for something you have failed to do before the move-out day.
You may not think that labeling your boxes is an important task, but you can be sure that skipping that final packing step can cause too much confusion and time-wasting scenarios right when you’re ready to start unpacking those containers in the new residence.
Spare yourself from the chaos of boxes delivered to the wrong rooms and the mess of opening random boxes just to find the coffee maker.
Instead, label each box as soon as you pack it up and close it with packing tape. Write down its contents, destination room, and any special handling instructions, if applicable.
When looking for good ways to reduce stress during a move, one thing that will let you sleep better at night is to know that your valuables will be protected when they are being transported from your current home to the new house or apartment.
And the best way to make that happen is to take the small valuable items with you.
Never give movers valuable items such as jewelry, electronics, bank cards, cash, keys, and so on.
Anything that you can carry yourself and that has great sentimental or monetary value should stay with you.
Your larger valuables such as antique furniture, a piano, a grandfather clock, etc. should still be entrusted to experienced movers but not without purchasing adequate moving insurance first.
The stress of moving house will keep building up and it’s your priority to keep those stress levels within healthy limits.
And then your move will get even manageable as soon as you realize that it’s nearly impossible to do it all by yourself – you will need help from family and friends to make it work in the end.
How to take the stress out of moving? Reach out to your good friends and close family members for assistance whenever you fall behind your packing schedule, or when you need more hands to move heavy furniture pieces around.
It’s never easy to ask for help but you know how it is: desperate times call for desperate measures.
It’s only normal that your stress level will go up as the most unpredictable day in the entire move (MOVING DAY) approaches.
All those days of hard work and meticulous preparation come down to a single day – the time when strong emotions can take over and freak accidents may happen in the blink of an eye.
Make sure you and your family members are perfectly safe.
Hire somebody you can trust to watch over small kids or pets in a room far from any possible danger.
If you’ve decided to move without hiring professional moving services, then arrange that your good pals are there to help you lift all the heavy items.
Also, don’t forget to use the right type of moving equipment to keep things safe and damage-free.
If you were a robot, you would probably handle the stress of moving just fine. But since you’re not, the emotional stress of moving is likely to get to you sooner or later while you’re getting ready to move out.
And when the stress levels get too high and too dangerous, it’s time to get some time for yourself – a bit of downtime so that you can be more efficient in your work when you restart, just like a computer after a freeze-up.
What you do with that little time to let off some steam is up to you – you can read a book for a while or go watch a movie. Or you can do some yoga or practice meditation to clear your head of anything move-related.
Unplug yourself for a bit from the world of moving to ease the stress of moving.
15. Leave time for goodbyes
Saying goodbye to your friends may be the hardest aspect of your entire house move.
Part of the moving stress is caused because you are being forced to leave behind good friends and sometimes even loyal family members.
Moving away from friends is always tough: sad and painful at the same time.
And when the time comes for you to pack up and move away, make sure you allow yourself the time to say goodbye to the people that mean so much to you.
Reduce stress when moving house by organizing a farewell party for your pals, spending quality time with your closest and dearest persons, and going to your favorite places to see them one more time.
All these goodbyes, including saying bye-bye to your home, will help with the transition to your new life chapter, thus reducing the moving stress and anxiety you must be feeling.
In some cases, it’s the seemingly little things that will add up and put up a good fight against the stress of moving – the infamous anxiety and constant worries that precede the event of moving from one home to another.
One underestimated way of dealing with the stress of moving house is to make sure you get enough sleep and eat a healthy diet so that you can rely on your mental strength and physical stamina to survive the move.
It’s always a bad idea to sacrifice your regular sleep hours in order to finish more move-related work. You may be forced to do it once during a critical moment but doing it constantly during your preparation will prove to be counterproductive in the end.
Also, create a healthy meal plan and make a genuine effort not to miss any meals as you’ll need all the energy you can get during the day. Packing for a move takes many days to complete, remember?
Whenever you sense that your stress level reaches dangerous values, play some relaxing music to calm down your mind and body.
That’s right – one great trick to deal with the stress of moving is to use music as a powerful stress management tool.
Don’t be quick to dismiss music as an efficient de-stressing technique.
According to PsychCentral, “Listening to music can have a tremendously relaxing effect on our minds and bodies, especially slow, quiet classical music. This type of music can have a beneficial effect on our physiological functions, slowing the pulse and heart rate, lowering blood pressure, and decreasing the levels of stress hormones.”
You’ve got nothing to lose here – just play some relaxing music over the speakers or in your headphones while you’re packing or working on some other moving task at home and see your stress level drop like a stone.
The good news is that by now you should know perfectly well how to handle stress when moving to a new home.
And yet, one problem you may encounter when getting ready to move out is that your motivation will soon be tested, especially when you get down to packing up your home for the upcoming move.
So, with little or no motivation to work on your moving checklist, your progress will slow down or may even come to a temporary halt.
What do you do?
Create a self-reward system to keep you going.
You may opt for smaller rewards when completing an important task in your moving calendar – go to the cinema, book a massage, or go out to dinner.
Or you may prefer a more substantial reward after the move is done and over with – buying that big-screen TV you really want or going away on a little vacation.
Don’t be too hard on yourself. Instead, give yourself more time to process the changes around you.
Ultimately, all these tips for a stress-free move come down to how you approach the entire home moving process.
If you make an effort to see that moving house is really a hard time full of emotional highs and lows and existential changes, then there’s a chance that you don’t beat yourself up for being stressed up, sad, exhausted, bad-tempered, and overly pessimistic.
The moment you realize that you’re doing the best you can, you’re likely to calm down and reduce the overall stress you’re feeling.
Keep taking care of yourself – do all in your power to eat properly and sleep a decent number of hours amidst the super-busy move preparations.
Whenever possible, steal some time for yourself – reading a book before going to sleep, meditating for a bit when things tend to get crazy, or just doing whatever it is that you love to do in your spare time.
The stress of moving into a new home is real and you should not underestimate its effect on you and the people around you.
Most of the time, it’s the fear of the unknown that is likely to make you really anxious since you’ll be leaving your comfort zone and you have no idea what exactly awaits you at your destination.
To eliminate the emotional stress of moving, you will need to focus on all the positive aspects that the upcoming move will bring into your life. Make a list of the benefits of moving out and quit worrying too much about all the things that fall outside your immediate control.
Moving house is an adventure so you might as well enjoy the ride.
Recruit as much assistance as you can. You can’t do it all on your own, and friends and family will be happy to lend a hand. Accept all offers of help. Even if someone isn’t able to lug boxes upstairs – if they offer to cook you a meal, accept it with a smile. Equally, if a task – such as packing – feels like it will defeat you, consider spending money on professionals to do it. I see this a lot.
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Recruit as much assistance as you can. You can’t do it all on your own, and friends and family will be happy to lend a hand. Accept all offers of help. Even if someone isn’t able to lug boxes upstairs – if they offer to cook you a meal, accept it with a smile. Equally, if a task – such as packing – feels like it will defeat you, consider spending money on professionals to do it. I see this a lot.