So much togetherness!

As we spend time together at the end of the year, in the sort of log cabin retreat that’s featured in many a holiday movie, a sleek modern ski hotel, or our own living room, we can start to feel that we need a little space of our own, physically and mentally.

Humans and groups, such as families or work teams, need to feel that they have a space that’s theirs, where they can have at least some control over what happens. They’ll often mark their territory in some way, adding things to it that send messages to visitors (and the owners themselves) about ideas that the owner values—for example, commendations for great performance indicate that an employee values doing their job well.

When people, alone and in clearly defined groups such as immediate family members, have a territory they are less stressed and their minds therefore can work more effectively, whether they’re trying to resolve some complicated issue or figure out what they should talk about with the person who will soon be sitting across the table from them or who is already there (gasp!) and sharing the holiday goose because they are part of the same nuclear family. Their wellbeing is enhanced.

For an individual, even the arms on a chair, that keep people from edging ever closer as they can on a sofa, can establish a personal territory and for a group a rug that marks out a space around a sofa and a few chairs can do the same thing, just like the area that’s lit (versus not lit) by a light—although there’s no way to ever make a territory as clear as with walls to the ceiling and doors that close.  Middle- and upper-class children with their own bedrooms and parents with bedroom suites, complete with their own baths, spend time in spaces whose ownership is never in doubt.

It’s important to make it clear that just as individuals need territories, so do groups.  A family room at home just like a team room at the office deepens the bonds between its “owners,” helping them overcome the inevitable challenges in their lives.

Territories are places to which people can retreat, as needed, during their day. They may be more or less private and more or less suited, by design, to whatever people might plan to do in them—their single definitive defining feature is that their use is restricted to their owner (or owners in the case of a parental bedroom suite or team area at work).

Assigned seats in workplaces have been linked to higher employee mood and performance on the part employees—but they can be expensive for organizations to provide, particularly when people don’t spend as much time in the office as they used to.

Teams at work definitely need a space, a room or a zone, that they can claim as their own – having one builds team cohesion and performance.

Guests to your home need their own territories also.  Sometimes a territory for a guest is only “theirs” at certain times of the day, but during those times trespassing is verboten except in cases of emergency.  From lights out to dawn, for example, the person sleeping on the sofa in your living room needs to be able to anticipate that you will not enter their domain.  Any sort of visual and ideally also acoustic “shelter” that can be placed around where the guest will be sleeping, supplied by tall plants or walls and a door, for example, will also make clear what is whose and up the relaxation factor.

When people are in private areas, they’re better able to process and understand the events taking place in their world—whether that is third grade or complex international trade negotiations.   Privacy is different from being distraction free because when we have privacy, we have control of who sees and hears us and whom we see and hear while if we’re spending time in a distraction-free zone all that visual and acoustic shielding (again for individuals or for members of clearly identified units, such as families or work teams) can disappear in a moment.

All the research on territories calls to mind the line penned by US poet Robert Frost, noting that fences can make good neighbours.