Take a minute to look around your bedroom—with an eye toward making the room more conducive to sleep. First, clear up any clutter on the bureaus or night tables. The same goes for straightening up the bedding. It’s much nicer to get into a bed when the sheets are clean and tucked in—rather than one where they are all tangled up. You’d be surprised to find how calming a room can feel when the chaos is cleared away. Happy zzzzzzzzzzs!

It’s all well and good to feel attached to our belongings—but sometimes that attachment gets in our way. So today, give some serious thought to finally replacing the worn-out baseball glove you had as a child…throwing out that broken chair in the basement…or giving away the old vase in the cupboard. It may feel good to have some belongings from the past, but when they take up your valuable space or time, it’s better to throw them out or give them away.

Sometimes the clutter around us is so overwhelming that getting anything done feels impossible. It ’s for these times that Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project (www.HappinessProject.com) created what she calls the “One-Minute Rule. ” If there is something you can do in a minute or less, you should do it right away without procrastinating. Open one piece of mail, clean up one corner of your desk, put the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher. By doing just one thing, you clear out a little clutter. And, as Rubin says, order on the outside contributes to calm on the inside.