Getting your Home ready for the Fall

Autumn can be the most depressing season.  Sure, the leaves all turn pretty colours and the nip in the air means it’s OK to have a nip or two of hot spiced punch (with rum in it, for good measure, of course)—but what else good can you say about the time when you have to transition from all of the pleasant lushness of Summer, spaces and pastimes, to the drudgery of Winter barrenness.  From spending time wherever you choose outside or inside to inside full time (unless there’s something unusual about you and you enjoy being outside, cold, and damp).  Sure there are end of the year holidays, but do they really make up for the rest of it?

Anyway, enough moaning about Autumn.

What can you do to make your home or office a good place to spend time, particularly since you’ll be doing a lot more of that as the thermostat drops lower and lower?

Creating an indoor garden-type experience is a good way to make up for not having an outdoor one.  Please note the “-type” in the last sentence. 

Scientists have found that seeing green leafy plants indoors has all sorts of effects on what goes on in our heads.  After seeing them, we’re mentally refreshed and our stress levels fall.  Our cognitive performance improves and we also think more creatively and get along better with others.  Both that increased creativity and getting along better are particularly important as the calendar year creaks to a conclusion and you need to select gifts for family and friends, some of whom you only see at the end of the year, and then, much you your (and their, no doubt) unhappiness, you need to spend time with them, hour after hour.

It’s important to go with green leafy plants, they’re the ones that we respond most positively to in study after study.  Spike-y cactuses are just not as good for our mental wellbeing.

In addition to being green and leafy, the plants you need to make sure are in your home as Summer becomes Autumn need to be alive, or at least look like they are.  We are, not surprisingly, distressed by looking at brown, crispy plants.  They don’t lower our stress levels, they make us feel more tense.

Before you ask:  plants are good for what goes on in our brain whether they have flowers on them or not or whether they plants are really not plants at all but bouquets of flowers.  We’re apt to be more helpful when we can see cut flowers, so if you need a favour, carry them with you when you go to task for help.  See flowers is also a great stress-buster.

If potted plants at the local nursery recoil when they see you coming as you’ve developed something of a reputation as well, a plant-killer, do not despair.  Artificial, yes plastic and silk, plants have the same positive effects on us as live ones. The fakes have to be good fakes however.  No trying to pass off something that obviously was a Tupperware container or rain boot in a prior life off as live.  Be honest and fair.  If you need to reach out and touch something to decide if it’s real or not, whatever you’re reaching out to will boost your mood and your mental performance once you bring it home and introduce it to its plant-mates.

But how many plants should you have in your home.

Your home is your home and you should have as many as you see fit to possess and can keep healthy, with feedings and grow lights and whatever else is required.

Researchers claim that it’s best to look at one or two plants at a time, each no more than two or three feet tall.  A couple of moderately sized plants is what the science supports and what will make you feel good—and don’t worry if you plan to add a Christmas Tree sometime towards December, it won’t count toward your plant “limit.”  The plant police are not going to show up at your home and demand that you re-home plants above the two plants in view limit.  If more than a couple of plants are in view, you’ll up the visual complexity in the space.  In short, you’ll give your brain so much visual information to process, over and over again as you stay in the room, that you start to feel tense.  Visual complexity is something we talk about a lot here at The Space Doctors—for example, here.

Gardens have plants, and they also have smells and sounds.  Let’s focus on the best sort here, not the ones that lead you to check the bottom of your shoe. (see our next article)