How Stressful Is Moving House?
Research has revealed that moving house which includes either buying or selling your home is an extremely stressful life event. Some psychologists have even gone on to say that it is almost as stressful as divorce. There is also believed to be a link between the stress of house moving and illness.
How Frequently do Australians Move?
We Australians must be pretty stressed! We are amongst the top countries for having the highest levels of mobility ie. moving house.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) almost 42% of people aged 5 years and over moved home during the five years from 2006 and 2011.
Of those people that moved the majority (61%) moved locally and the balanced moved from a different area within Australia or moved to Australia from overseas.
The ABS also determined that there were a variety of reasons that people moved home, there was also a link between the stages of a person’s lifecycle with the reason for their move. For example older people tended to be moving from urban areas and younger individuals tended to be moving into urban areas looking for work.
How Stressful is Moving Home?
A survey undertaken by PCP Market Research on behalf of In-Deed found that the stress caused by buying or selling a home ages people by two years!
The survey was conducted in Britain with a sample size of 200 persons. According to the survey results almost 70% of respondents felt that the stress caused by selling or buying their home accelerated their aging.
Other side effects included a lower sex drive (19%), short-term memory loss (14%), and also hair loss (10%).
Another study also found that moving home is very stressful. The study conducted by the University of Virginia in 2010 revealed that children who move home frequently often have poorer well-being in adulthood.
Stress can lead to Illness
Stress can also make you sick. It has been discovered that if you experience chronic stress for a long period of time you will become ‘hyper vigilant’. This means that your body is continually flooded with stress hormones all the time. This causes people to have trouble sleeping and unwinding. This then creates more stress and more stress hormones in your body. Eventually this can cause individuals to become pessimistic, oversensitive, anxious and can even result in panic attacks.
Furthermore the increase in stress hormones in your body means that your body’s healing, reproductive, detoxification and digestion will be sluggish and underperforming. This means that in the long term you are at a significantly higher level of risk for many health problems including thyroid imbalances, premature ageing, depressions, diabetes, memory impairment etc.
It is noted that moving home itself should not cause chronic stress for a long period of time, it may however be the case for some people who had difficulties buying, selling their home, obtaining a loan or moving overseas etc.
How to Make sure that Moving Home does not cause Prolonged Stress
Moving home causes stress in many different ways. One reason for experiencing stress due to moving home is that it is a disruption of routine. Any disruptions to routine always cause stress to both you and your family. It is important therefore to keep the disruption to your routine to a minimum. This means that a quick and smooth relocation will be so much better for not only your stress levels but also for your children.
The good news is that whilst moving does cause stress it is really only long term stress that is really serious. For most of us moving home is a stressful event for a relatively short period of time. This means that while it is a stressful life event it should not lead to significant damage to your health.
One way you can reduce the stress of moving home is to hire a reputable furniture removalist that you can trust. Whilst this will not help with the stress that you experience in buying or selling your home, it can least significantly reduce one stressful part of moving.
To really help reduce your moving stress we also suggest that you engage our expert and efficient packing teams to both pack and unpack your belongings for you.
In conclusion, moving home does cause stress, however you can reduce the level of stress by engaging Quick and Easy Removals Sydney to ensure that your goods are moved from A to B safely and on schedule.