Feeling Better Physically, Via Design – The Long Read

You may be thinking that the only way your design decisions will influence your physical health is if that oh so pretty throw you buy to make your winter sofa cozy or that incredible rug you find at the Moroccan street fair off gasses something deadly into your home.

If that’s what you’ve been thinking, you would be wrong.

Clearly, filling your home with deadly chemicals has an undesirable effect on your physical health, but in this era, as consumer protection laws get more and more powerful, at least in the West, few options available to you will fill your home with meaningfully unhealthy vapors.

Today, the most significant ways that design is likely to influence your health is by raising or lowering your stress levels.  When we experience higher stress levels all sorts of undesirable things start to happen to our mood as well as our bodies’ operating systems—our immune system doesn’t fight off diseases as well, our heart works harder, and our veins and arteries get pounded extra forcefully by blood moving from our hearts to elsewhere, just for starters.  Being stressed can be especially hard on our digestive system, causing all sorts of undesirable and persistent conditions.

When it works to keep stress levels in check, by calming and revitalizing us, design can help us stay healthier.  Design that keeps stress levels low also frees up more of our mental bandwidth to deal with the situations in which we find ourselves and to think our best thoughts.  Design is not magic, however.  If your boss makes your life nearly unbearable by contacting you relentlessly during the times you are away from the office, for instance, painting your bedroom a relaxing colour is not going to make everything peachy keen and perfect.  That restful paint colour may help you fall asleep a little faster than you otherwise would however, just as a carefully designed and refreshing snug, where some of your favorite green leafy plants are tucked away along with photos from your last vacation in the country and not so bright warm light abounds (say from a candle) will help keep your blood pressure readings from moving into four digits, even if your life is not the proverbial bed of roses.  We’ve talked about designing relaxing spaces in more detail in this article.  https://thespacedoctors.com/index.php/2022/09/27/re-nesting-the-long-read/

Design can add to the stress level you are carrying in all sorts of ways, and in most cases a few straightforward fixes will help you eliminate environmental irritants:

• Natural light does help keep our stress levels down, so try to keep drapes open and blinds up during daylit hours.
• Few things are as stress-inducing as glare. Do what you can to keep it from ruining your life but keep the sunlight flowing into your home.  Add shear curtains to your windows to keep out glare.  Rearrange the furniture so that sunlight doesn’t fall into your eyes as you’re trying to relax or on too many shiny surfaces—if you run a risk of glare, select matte finishes whenever you can instead of shiny ones.
• When we’re getting lots of information visually from the world around us, when it is visually cluttered, we’re stressed. Determining when we’re stressed by visual information and what to do about combatting it are discussed in detail in this article.   https://thespacedoctors.com/index.php/2022/12/01/live-a-full-life-clutter-free-the-long-read/
• Using natural materials in an area, particularly wood with visible grain, helps us feel calmer in a space.
• Noises that are random, unpredictable, and that we will clearly hear, whether they are loudish or quietish, make us stressed. Fix any of the systems in your home or workplace that emit them. If some are inevitable, say the heating system will cost thousands of dollars to replace but until you do so will come on with a bang, install sound proofing and sound dampening materials wherever and whenever you can to reduce the size of the area in which the stressful sound will be heard.
• Quietly played, barely perceptible, nature soundscapes make it more likely we feel calm and refreshed.
• When temperatures are too high or too low or winds blow through places where they shouldn’t because of drafty windows (for example, through our snug in the winter when all the windows are down), stress ensues. Fixing heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems and drafty windows, however you can, will reduce your stress levels.
• When the design of a space prevents us from doing there what we’ve planned, we feel stressed. An office where you can’t concentrate but you need to, a living room where you can’t entertain as you’ve planned, a spa bathroom that seems more like an industrial cleaning facility than a place to decompress, all will raise stress levels.  We’ve covered how to align the design of places with the sorts of situations we want to develop in multiple articles; we’ve discussed how to create home offices where you work well here, https://thespacedoctors.com/index.php/2021/12/27/creating-your-new-home-office/ for instance, designing for entertaining here  https://thespacedoctors.com/index.php/2021/09/30/entertaining-and-eating-together/, and creating spa retreats here, for example.   https://thespacedoctors.com/index.php/2021/04/30/bathroom-renovation/
• Bad ergonomics are also highly stressful, but ergonomics is a topic best addressed by trained and licensed professionals—but you can always use your common sense.

Beyond keeping our stress levels in check, design can help us live more illness-free lives by:

• Encouraging healthy eating. We’ve talked about using design to make it more likely we will eat in a good-for-us way in this article.  https://thespacedoctors.com/index.php/2021/07/01/healthy-eating-aided-by-design/
• Supporting sleeping and napping. Our bodily systems, just like our minds, work better when we’re properly rested.  We’ve covered designing places where people fall asleep faster and sleep more deeply in previous articles, for example, here.   https://thespacedoctors.com/index.php/2022/10/31/designing-for-sleeping-zzzzzz/  Some tips from the linked to article:  keep it dark, quiet, and smelling like lavender in sleeping areas.
• Building in opportunities for activity. Some of us have spaces for at-home gyms and some of us couldn’t pack a bar bell into our homes.  You can increase your physical activity level by walking up stairs instead of using elevators whenever you can, consciously creating some “inconveniences” in your home (placing items on high shelves so you have to stretch to reach them, for instance), and installing a sit-stand desk and spending as much time as you feel is comfortable working while standing.  Don’t have the money for a motorized desk whose surface gets higher or lower with the push of a button?  Keep your current work area the same and create a standing height worktop (pile a few very sturdy boxes on top of each other, for instance); you can create the same sort of standing and sitting height combo for your kids.  Move your laptop between the sitting height and standing height options whenever you choose.