Dining Out Magazine

Home Stress Points

By John Lawless @BestHeatingUK

Britain’s Home
Stress Points
Our Heated Household Dramas

Stress is a feeling often associated with our place of work, but we all know that the fun doesn’t stop while we’re earning a crust – what about when we get home? 

Believe it or not, but 82% of us Brits admit to kicking off about everyday things in our homes on a surprisingly regular basis. 

It’s not just the temperature of our homes that rises when the heating is left on, we can rage over some really trivial things like the TV remote and tensions can rise over toilet rolls. 

So, because we’re a helpful (and nosey) bunch here at BestHeating, we wanted to dig a little deeper to find out what people get so hot-headed about around the home. 

We surveyed a few thousand people and were surprised to learn what gets the proverbial goat of the Great British Public.

These are your home stress points.


Living Room


Unsurprisingly, the room that causes most of our conflicts is the place where we do most of our living. 

With ever changing TV channels and crumbs on cushions to fight over, the living room invites us into a world of opportunities for a good scrap. 

It may look like a cosy safe haven on the outside, but over a third (36.6%) of all household fallouts take place in the living room. 

Most of these involve the age-old battle over the remote, with 34% of both men and women saying they had a barney over TV choices with their partner.

From when to put it on to what to set it at, 1-in-10 households also get the hump over the heating – “too hot, too cold” – it sounds like we need some help from Goldilocks to get the temperature just right.

Living room fallouts infographic

Kitchen


Moving on to the second biggest battleground – which is quite unsettling considering the easy access to sharp objects in there – the kitchen is responsible for 31% of all household fallouts. 

A hot mess waiting to happen if you ask us!

Whether it’s dirty dishes, too many cooks or terrible tea bag habits, the so called ‘heart of the home’ certainly suffers from attacks every now and then. 

All we can say is keep calm and put the knife down before getting into a kitchen kerfuffle with your loved ones!

kitchen fallouts infographic

Bathroom


Picture this, you’ve just got home from a busy day at work and there is a hot bath waiting for you surrounded by scented candles and luxurious soaps and scrubs to wash away all your stress.

Sounds like heaven, right? 

Sadly, this isn’t the reality for lots of us Brits. 17% of household stress is created in the bathroom – that’s pretty much 1-in-5 of us losing our temper in the home of R&R!

Instead of cleansing our minds, we are tormented by dirty towels and distressing toilet situations that lead us to feel more stressed leaving the bathroom than we did before going in! 

16.7% of women we surveyed said that damp towels were their biggest annoyance, whereas 14.6% of men were annoyed most by partners and kids not cleaning up after themselves.

bathroom fallouts infographic

Bedroom


So after a long day of getting stressed out of your pants in the living room, kitchen and bathroom, there can’t possibly be anything left to fight about in the bedroom, can there? 

Wrong. 

There’s still a good 12% of spats that go down in the bedroom. 

Nearly half of those nightmares arise from snoring, stealing covers and having a relationship with your phone. 

And when it comes to temperature control we’re not much better at dealing with that in our abodes either. 

Around 6% of bedroom battles are a direct result of leaving the heating on all night. But is there anything worse than waking up at 3am feeling like you’re trapped in a sauna? Not really!

bedroom fallouts infographic

Cool It

After all that daily stress to deal with – without even beginning to consider the stresses of the workplace –  it’s no wonder you can feel your rage boiling over by the end of the day! 

The smallest aggravations tip us Brits over the edge and what was just a crumb on the cushion turns into a full-blown eruption, a huge argument and, potentially, grounds for divorce! 

So save yourself a complete and monumental meltdown and just take a few minutes to cool down the next time you’re on the verge of a heating war!


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