Design Your Home For Calm

This educational talk explores how your home environment can influence your nervous system, stress levels, and overall sense of well-being. Drawing on research from environmental psychology and neuroscience, you will learn practical ways to create a space that naturally supports calm through sound, lighting, nature, color, fragrance, and restorative visual patterns.

This session offers simple, evidence-informed strategies to help reduce anxiety, promote relaxation, improve focus, and transform your home into a place that fosters safety, resilience, and emotional balance.

Transcript

Hi, Welcome back. Good to have you with me again today. So, I'm going to be talking here about how to manipulate your physical environment so that the space that you create and inhabit inspires your own. Sense of safety and control just automatically. So if you think about it, For most of our history, For most of our human history, More than 90% we were hunter-gatherers. So this is the environment that we really are adapted toward. This is the environment that we evolved in. Our modern day environment is very different from that environment that we evolved in. In a zoo, The ideal is to approach as close as possible the animal's natural habitat in the wild. Because if you don't copy that natural habitat as much as you can, Then that can lead to the animal starting to behave strangely. Like they can start hurting themselves or they might refuse to mate or refuse to eat. And so our modern societies, In some ways, Can be understood as a type of zoo similar to the zoos in some way. That is very different from our environment of evolutionary adaptation. So this is important because in your own home you have this man-made artificial environment which is not the same as the environment in which we evolved as a species. So one aspect of your home environment that you can be aware of, That you can pay attention to, Is the acoustic comfort in your home. Now, Evolutionarily, Low frequency sounds tend to trigger a threat response in our brains. It tends to make us feel like there's some kind of a predator. When you think of that ancient hunter-gatherer environment, A low frequency sound would have come from some kind of a danger, Some kind of a predator. In our modern day environment, We have a lot of machines that produce low frequency sounds. We have a lot of traffic noise, Airplane noise, Various appliances in our house, Our fridge, Our dishwasher, Our clothes washer, Our computers, All of these things often emit some kind of low hum. And although we're not conscious of how it's bothering us, We don't really notice it because it's just part of our environment. But these low frequency sounds are going to be interpreted by part of our brains as threatening. So if you can find ways to minimize those low frequency sounds in your house, Of course, We're not going to be able to get rid of them. Completely unless we're living somewhere out in the forest with no electricity and there's no cars around. To the extent that you can minimize them, It's worth experimenting with it and also you can cover up some of those noises with other sounds of your choice, With music, With different soundscapes of crickets and waves and different natural sounds that tend to be very calming for us, You can put this type of thing on. In your home environment that can help create an acoustic space which triggers a sense of calm and control. Okay, Another aspect is light. Studies have shown the importance of natural light on our overall mood and level of anxiety and sense of well-being, The importance of windows, The importance of having natural views through those windows. Now you may not have control over all of those things, Maybe you don't have control over the number of windows that you can have in your house, But You can control whether or not you open the curtains. You can put more mirrors on the wall in your house to reflect the natural light that is coming in from outside. Now, Moving on to indoor light and the color in your indoor space. These things have been shown to have a big impact on mood. However, They are not the same for everybody. There's not one setting that makes everybody feel good. So the point here, The key here is to start to be curious. About your own automatic appraisals in relation to lighting and to color. And try and identify that type of lighting that for you is just right, That's not too much and that's not too little. And the type of color that is just right. You can also do this online and on apps like Pinterest and things like that. Where you can look at different room decoration pictures and home pictures. And start to collect the ones that you like the best and then analyze them. Gravitate toward, Then you can start to look and see what are the patterns here? What are the colors that I'm always choosing? What are the decoration schemes that tend to make me feel the best? Is it a modern style? Is it a more classical style? What is the style that tends to trigger this feeling of comfort and inviting space that I'm after and just Just be curious. Just be curious about what it is. That you prefer because probably a lot of it is unconscious at this moment. Another important aspect to be aware of is bringing elements of nature inside. Our modern day environment has a lot less contact with nature than that environment in which we evolved. But if we can bring more of these elements of nature into our indoor living space, Into the place where we spend most of our time, Then we can have some of the benefits of these restorative effects of nature even inside our own homes. Of course one way to do this is with house plants. Another way that you can bring in nature into your indoor space is through water. If you don't have a view of water from your windows, You can maybe include artwork or photos that show scenes with water. Another way that people incorporate water into their homes is by having little indoor fountains that create that little burbling noise in the background. Another important way that we can incorporate elements of nature in our house is fractals. Now what are fractals? Fractals are patterns that repeat itself on different scales. So for example, A seashell you'll see that there is a. Smaller part of the spiral and then it gets larger and larger as it goes out and it'll have the same pattern on that small part of the spiral as it does on the larger part of the spiral. Think about a fiddlehead fern for example, Similar things happening here. So you'll have a pattern that repeats. Different sizes or different scales. So some parts of the image or object are going to have the pattern on a large scale, Kind of in a zoomed in way. And there's going to be other parts of the image or the object that are going to have the pattern in a very small version. So you see this all over in nature. You can see it in flowers. You can see it in trees. Trees will have branches, Large branches that will then branch off into smaller branches and those branches will then branch off into even smaller branches. So this pattern of branching repeating itself on different scales over the whole tree. You'll see it in River Network. And even in lightning bolts. Crystals. Snowflakes? Waves, Galaxies, And it even happens in our own bodies. You can see it in our blood vessels, In our neurons. If you look at our lungs, Our lungs are full of fractals as well. And so this is something that occurs all over in nature and it has been studied by a lot of different Researchers One researcher in particular, Richard Taylor, Dr. Richard Taylor at the University of Oregon, Has a team. That has been looking at this for a while, And they have a blog with links to almost 40 articles that have been published in relation to their research. What he and his team have found is that our visual system itself has fractals in it. Our own eyes have fractals in them. And it's a certain type of fractal that occurs very often in nature and what they've found is that when the person looks at a fractal. That has the same structure. As their visual system fractal. That that Image very relaxing. And this is what they've called a hardwired response. This is something that is true for us as a species. That looking at these types of patterns relaxes us is an automatic relaxer. And so. They have investigated. What happens when you have artwork that copies these fractal patterns. And whether or not that has the same effect on people as looking at it in nature and they've found that it does relax people as well. So that is another way that you can bring nature into your house is trying to find fractal patterns That relax you, You look at it, And you feel good. And bringing it into your house, It can be. Pictures, It can be with artwork, It can be with actual plants, You know, Houseplants as we talked about before, It can be with flowers. It can be with patterns on your. Sofa, On your carpet, On your bedspread that are fractal patterns. So because we spend so much of our time nowadays in environments that do not have these fractal patterns in these modern man-made environments. It has the result of creating more visual strain, More headaches, More overall stress. That is from the additional effort exerted by our visual systems to process these more artificial patterns. But anyway, Just starting to be aware of the facts. That these fractal patterns are real. A hard-wired relaxer for us. Okay one more way that you can bring nature inside is through fragrance. So of course there are different essential oils that can bring natural fragrances into your house. You can bring actual live flowers or pine branches into your house to bring that fragrance in. There have been studies that examine the effect of things like cypress oil as a calming agent for people and found that it does relax people. But the point here is to find those fragrances that you find most inviting, That your brain automatically gravitates to or automatically has a response that it feels pleasant, That you like it, That it makes you feel calm and relaxed and safe. So I just want to remind you of that, Of the importance. The function of your home environment as being this place that can trigger these automatic reactions that we want. So it involves the two steps. It involves, First of all, Being more conscious of the automatic reactions that our brain generates. That we're not very aware of. So increasing our awareness of those, And second of all, Making the choices in our home environment, In our situation, Manipulating it in a way that it will work with those automatic appraisals. Foster those types of appraisals that we want, That are going to help us feel less anxious. And more in control in our lives.