Autumn Fall is upon us and Winter will be here soon—how should you be preparing? Step 1 – Deal With Your Plants!
We’re spoiled at the end of the Summer. We’ve had all sorts of access to all sorts of green leafy plants, at our homes or in nearby parks or other spaces for months (well,...
Add some gentle Movement in your Home….
Winter and time spent inside can be both stressful and boring. Some gentle movement in the spaces where you live will change all that. Here, we are talking about curtains that sway slightly and...
Creating places to mentally refresh?
When your brain has grown tired learning, remembering, etc., design can encourage a quick mental refresh when: You can see through a nearby window to nature outside, particularly if quietly flowing, “friendly” looking water...
Nature makes us more sociable!
Arbuthnott learned via a literature review that “Nature exposure increases prosocial behavior, decreases antisocial behavior, and increases ratings of social connection and satisfaction. Prosocial and antisocial behavior effects are observed with brief nature exposure,...
Why is gardening good for you?
Lehberger and Sparke’s work confirms that gardening is good for our mental health. They “replicated a study conducted in 2020 in Germany, which focused on comparing garden owners and non-garden owners. Almost exactly one...
Get out there and go for an Open Water Swim!
Overbury, Conroy, and Marks determined that “Open water swimming may lead to improvements in mood and wellbeing, reductions in mental distress symptomatology, and was experienced as a positive, enriching process for many. Blue spaces...
Nature and Mood
Bardhan and teammates report that they “conducted one of the first longer-term investigations of daily nature exposure and mood with a mobile app as part of the NatureDose™ Student Study (NDSS). The NatureDose™ app...
ASMR and Biophilia
Mahady, Takac, and De Foe report that “Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a nascent phenomenon wherein a pleasant and relaxing tingling sensation occurs in response to audio and visual triggers like whispering and...
Too much tech in hotel rooms, bring on the Biophilia!
There is a natural limit to everything, including the amount of automation in our lives, and as Amy Tara Koch reports in “Encountering the Infuriating, Overwhelming and Unwanted Smart Tech in My Hotel Room”...
We hear silence…
Silence is not simply the absence of sound; we actively hear it. Goh, Phillips, and Firestone found that “silences can ‘substitute’ for sounds in event-based auditory illusions. Seven experiments introduce three ‘silence illusions,’ adapted...
Boosting Physical Health, Via Place Design
The most obvious ways that design can improve physical health is by not actively harming users—off gassing fatal to inhale chemicals, being appropriate ergonomically, etc. Once all of the active threats are eliminated from...
Wild Swimming
Wild swimming has been having a moment, for the last few decades, and likely will get even more attention when people swim in the Seine during the 2024 Paris Olympics—although jumping into the Seine...
What shape and colour apartment?
Kleeman and Foster’s study of the implications of spending extended periods of time in home apartments during the COVID-19 lockdowns are fairly predictable: “Compared to the pre-pandemic period, after the lockdown residents reported less satisfaction...
Feeling Happy at Home
Shepherd, Selvey, Earon, and Wiking studied row house communities in Denmark and in the United Kingdom and learned that “The key drivers to happiness [resident wellbeing]: balancing the private and the communal; personalising the...
Neuroscience of Water – Seeing it, Hearing it
Water has been and will remain crucial to our species continued existence—so, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that neuroscientists have studied how seeing and hearing water influences what goes on in our heads,...
Sensory Mashup
For better or for worse (mainly for better), most of us have multiple senses working at the same time, all bringing information from the world around us into our brains. All of that material...
Plan in Nature Sounds
There are oodles of benefits from hearing nature sounds as you live your life. You may not have added a nature soundtrack already because you think they’re hard to find or expensive. Not so! ...
Pulses of Background Music
Felszeghy and teammates set out learn how listening to music influences stress levels and performance of manual tasks by studying dental students listening to what was categorized as “slow background music”: “the music reduced...
Setting the Thermometer!
This is the season for thermometer debates—the windows open (or close if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere) and in homes and offices people use whatever means at their disposal to get the temperature set...
Adding Water
Water can be a great addition to an interior space—not the random water burbling in through a broken pipe or flooded field—but water in a gently moving desktop fountain or in an aquarium stocked...
Power Scenting!
One of the most often bemoaned side effects of COVID-19 was loss of sense of smell. Why? Because smelling the world around us has a powerful effect on our wellbeing, how we think and...
Closer Greenspace Less Likelihood of Postpartum Depression
Sun and colleagues found that “A reduced risk for PPD [postpartum depression was associated with total green space exposure based on street-view measure [500 m buffer. . .], but not NDVI [normalized difference vegetation...
Living Your Best Life in a Small Space – Intro
Living small is living thoughtfully. You may be living small for all sorts of reasons, but it’s unlikely that you’re doing so by mistake. To actually live and work in a small space, and...
Create Refreshing Views – Garden Design 101!
We’re not apt to think how our gardens can work for us, the way our home offices and kitchens do. Your garden can refresh your mind and cut your stress levels just as it...
Biophilically Designed Gardens
The gardens that have the most positive effects on our minds and our bodies actively apply important principles of biophilic design. We have discussed biophilic design in detail in here (and search in our...
What to hear in your Garden?
Listening to just the right sorts of nature sounds can be as cognitively refreshing and good at reducing our stress levels as seeing nature, in real life or in photos or videos, all of...
Smelling the right Smells outdoors
Gardens can be planned so that the scents that they generate serve well those that smell them. From a psychological perspective the best scents for your garden to produce (also, the best garden-based scents...
Virtual Reality Forest Bathing
Frigione and colleagues report that their “study investigates the effects of natural and indoor virtual environments (VREs) on psychophysiological and cognitive responses. . . . participants were exposed to two VREs (i.e., a forest...
Benefits of Being in a City
Movies and television shows and books and magazine articles (every sort of media, it seems) makes city living seem oh so exciting and in many ways quite irresistible. Country living is presented as fine,...
How to Live in a City
Once you get yourself to the city, renting or buying a place, you have to spend time living there. But humans developed into their current forms living in nature. Over the aeons our brains...
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