It’s often said that the most stressful things you can do in life are getting married, have a baby and moving house. A quick Google search will confirm all these are on various Top 10 lists of things that can stress you out along with illness, the death of a loved one, pressures of work among others. Yet we all probably know someone who has done 2 or even all 3 in the same year.
So is the stress of moving house truth or urban myth? Is moving house really a stressful undertaking?
Something that might give us an insight is the Social Readjustment Rating Scale developed in 1967 by psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe. They created a list of 43 events, rated and weighted them to give each event an appropriate number of points – 100 down to 11. You run your finger down the list and tick off any of the events that have recently impacted your life to get your score.
The top 5 events are
Before you scan down the page where would you rank moving house?
Well, moving house doesn’t actually feature specifically on the list. The closest event to moving house is ranked number 20 (of 43) ‘A large mortgage or loan’, which is 31 points or ‘change in living conditions’ ranked number 37 and 25 points.
This is at odds with those Top 10 Stressful events list on Google. While we don’t have a psychology department at Buska we will hazard a guess as to why moving house doesn’t feature explicitly on the Social Readjustment Rating Scale.
If you take all the incidents in isolation moving house isn’t as bad as death, illness, monetary problems or jail time. But moving house, packing & moving boxes is not an event that happens in isolation and here is where we begin to introduce the stress. Moving house has to fit in with your normal everyday life. Your workday, looking after the kids, the housework, the taxi service for the kids, the shopping and everything else that goes with a normal household. Packing moving boxes and moving house must fit into your already hectic schedule.
So despite what Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe would have you believe, we know moving house is a stressful event.
Buska can help remove a small part of that stress by providing you with heavy-duty moving boxes. If you’re in the market for a change of home, why not check out our packages over HERE.
Buska rents heavy duty moving boxes and packing supplies that make moving easy, and the best part is, we’ll deliver them to your home at a time that suits you.
Thanks for reading,
Mark Browne
1800 444 888
