Designing for Health and Happiness

Design can definitely make you feel happy, what’s technically known in the psych biz as improving your mental health. Being happier can be good for your physical health, it can make your immune system function more effectively, but it also makes your brain work better, helping with problem solving and creative thinking, for example, all while making it more likely that you’ll get along better with other people—even if you’re not a member of their fan club.

The single most important thing you can do to keep your mental health in tip-top shape and yourself in maximum friendliness mode is to make sure that the space you’re in and the objects it contains send you—and others—positive messages about who you are and what matters to you.

“Positive” is one of those mushy, many meaning words that psychologists love to use—but it doesn’t matter how the psychological world may think of describing “positive,” it matters how you yourself define it.  Proud of your accomplishments as an amateur musician?  Make sure visitors can see your cello, set up and ready to play.  Value your achievements as a sailor, maybe because you stuck with the sport despite challenges?  Put photos of you sailing in prominent positions.  Want others to know you live a well-ordered life, carefully planned and managed?  Keep your home neat and tidy and don’t pass up opportunities to introduce some symmetry into your décor.

Our homes are our tiny kingdoms, ruled over by us and those we live with.  When the people who reside somewhere don’t “see” themselves as they open their front door, they feel unmoored, at sea, lost.  We need our homes to express who we are, so that we ourselves remember also, and can rebuild our self-esteem/self-confidence after a day filled with situations that can destroy our self-identity, whoever we are.  The world is packed with challenges and for us to return to face it again, day after day, our homes need to remind us of our core character.  Our homes are our refuge against the storms outside it, but their role is active, not passive.  We need to shape them so that they serve our psyche by helping us feel good about ourselves.

One of the reasons it’s important to keep our homes tidy is because of the messages we send to ourselves and others when it’s not.  A disheveled house sends the message that we have difficulty managing our life, and when should we hear or transmit that?  Not ever.   Your house need not be eat off the floor clean, but if people (yourself included) find the concept of eating there at all off putting, it’s time to break out the mop and the dusting clothes.

While our homes are reminding us why we matter and that we have the basic skills required to keep our lives together, they do a lot to promote our mental health.  Our heads get tired, however, from all that thinking we do away from our chateau and in it, and we need to give our brains a chance to refresh, to revitalize themselves for good mental health.

How can we mentally refresh in our homes?  The very best and most straightforward way is to try to connect with nature while we’re there.  That means having a few (really, just a few, not a jungle) of green leafy plants to look at along with some surfaces made of natural materials, like wood (grain visible please!) or stone.  Some nature images, real or a little abstract, photographs or paintings, still or moving, inside or viewed through a window help here.  So does using a couple (not more) nature-reminiscent prints on upholstery fabrics or the rug on the floor or hangings on the wall or something similar—more than just a few will make the space visually cluttered (aim for a look that has about as much going on visually as a residential interior designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), which is a no-no. Softly playing the sounds of a meadow on a lovely Spring day (a burbling brook, gently rustling leaves and grasses, peacefully singing birds, etc.) will also help you refresh.  Use colours that are not very saturated and relatively light, such as sage greens with lots and lots of white mixed into them.

To increase the likelihood that people can refresh while home, make sure a few seats feel secure (for example, their backs are tall or against a wall or in front of a large plant, etc.) and positioned so that they have a view of the door to the space.  Our brains still feel most relaxed when we can see potential predators approaching—for most of us today those predators, such as lions and tigers—have only been encountered in adventure movies, but our heads still process much of our world as they did hundreds of generations ago, so we still relish seats with prospect and refuge.  Want people to feel particularly secure as they sleep? Put their bedrooms above the ground floor and place their bed so that as the door to their bedroom opens the opening door shields them from the view of whomever is coming into their space, at least for a moment.

We like to feel that we can make at least little changes to the spaces where we spend time, based on our needs at a particular moment, so mental health is improved when we can.  Give yourself some lighting options and furniture that you can scoot about based on your needs at the moment, doors or screens that you can close/reposition to give yourself some alone time.  Socializing with those we choose how we choose is really important to us as human beings, so having control of who we spend time with and being able to do so however we like is key to our mental wellbeing.  Design can support socializing in lots of different ways, as discussed in this article, or here for example.  Using warm colours on surfaces such as walls has been linked to more pleasant interactions with others, for instance, as has sitting on cushions as opposed to hard surfaces.

Having to make too many choices too much of the time makes us tense, so tune a space for what’s likely to best suit your needs while maintaining a carefully curated set of tweaks you can use as you choose.

And once we’re all refreshed, caught up with our own self-identity, etc., for our mental health to be at its best we need to be able to accomplish in our homes whatever we’ve decided to do there.  If we intend to do our office-type job at home we need a home office that “works” for us, for example, as The Space Doctors previously discussed in these articles, for example.  If we intend to de-compress by baking fine French pastries we need an at-home oven that works reasonably well.  If we’re going to be practicing that cello mentioned earlier, we need neighbors who like to hear us practice or some sort of soundproofing (which might simply be a garden between us and them).

Design can increase the likelihood that we’re in a good mood and when it does our mental health improves.