“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
ROBERT FROST, “THE DEATH OF THE HIRED MAN”
Your home is an extension of yourself. What you put in it and how others perceive it inspire as much second-guessing and anxiety as any other aspect of your personality. There’s a reason those HGTV shows are so addictive. Every detail of your home not only says something about who you are, but it’s something you have to live with every day—and it’s likely affecting your well-being in ways you don’t even realize. Neuroscientists and psychologists are increasingly finding evidence for what interior designers and architects have always known: Your environment impacts your happiness.
But figuring out the ways in which it does so, and how to create a home that maximizes your satisfaction and enjoyment, is easier said than done. Anyone who has spent a few hours at the hardware store deciding between two hundred shades of light blue paint knows that decisions about interior design can be very personal and surprisingly complicated. Should you tap into some life-changing magic by cleaning up your clutter, or will you get more joy by leaving your stuff all over the place? Is fêng shui the way? Does hygge hold the answers?
Here we look at some science-backed hacks to bring more joy into your home, from what you put on your walls to the shape of the walls themselves; from the texture of your living room furniture to the type of light in your bedroom.
Brighten Up
Feeling down? Turn on some lights—or at least turn them up. In three separate studies, researchers at the University of Toronto and China’s Sun Yat-sen University found a correlation between people’s feelings of hopelessness and their perception of room lighting. During a fourth study, participants indicated greater feelings of hopelessness when in a darker room.
Another study of 988 people from four different countries found that those living closer to the equator had more consistent psychological moods compared to those farther north, where light varied significantly throughout the year. In those more northern countries, subjects’ moods were found to be at their lowest when lighting felt too dark and at their highest when respondents felt lighting was “just right”; they then declined when lighting was felt to be too bright.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed with life, brighter lighting may help alleviate negative emotions, and potentially restore positive feelings.
• Add a few more lamps around the house and increase the wattage of the bulbs in them. Use multiple sources of lighting and dimming switches for ceiling lights.
Beware Blue Light
There’s little that’s as effective at boosting mood as natural light. Studies have found that exposure to natural light throughout the day is more likely to improve your mood, help you sleep better, and better your quality of life as compared to artificial light. A key reason natural light is so healthy, particularly for your sleep, is its impact on melatonin production, which contributes to both your sense of drowsiness when it’s time to sleep and how alert you are during the day. The pineal gland that produces melatonin is highly sensitive to light: It’s triggered by darkness or dim light and suppressed by bright lights—including artificial “blue” light from smartphones, tablets, and energy-efficient bulbs.
And, it turns out, this blue light can trick your body into thinking that it’s daytime when you should be sleeping, leading to disruptions in your sleep and causing all types of emotional and physical trouble. As a Harvard Medical School newsletter noted, “Blue wavelengths—which are beneficial during daylight hours because they boost attention, reaction times, and mood—seem to be the most disruptive at night.” And with smartphones and tablets everywhere, including the bedroom, we are more exposed than ever to these blue wavelengths.
• Keep mobile devices out of the bedroom, especially at night. Use a dim red bulb—which is least likely to depress melatonin production—for your reading light.
Create a Fake Sun
In the morning, it’s a different story. If your home, or just your bedroom, doesn’t get a lot of natural light, you’ll be happy to hear that even just simulating the sun can benefit your well-being. A team of Swiss researchers tested a group of people over a forty-eight-hour period using three different light conditions: a blue monochromatic LED, a dawn-simulating light, and a dim light. The researchers measured subjects’ mood and well-being—including melatonin and cortisol levels—every two hours. They found that the light simulating the dawn had a positive effect on cognition, mood, and well-being far more than the other lights.
• Your body is surprisingly gullible. If your bedroom doesn’t get much natural light, pick up a dawn-simulating lamp to fake yourself into thinking the sun is shining in.
Bring In the Sunlight
“Our research looked at office employees and how much natural light they had. We found that those who had natural light throughout the day slept forty-six minutes per night more on average than those who did not. And there was another puzzling finding: they tended to spend more time outside in their free time than those without natural light. I don’t know exactly how to explain that, but it may be that those who had natural light felt more energetic and were keen to do more activities at the end of the day.”
—Mohamed Boubekri, professor, Illinois School of Architecture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Place Your Desk Sideways to the Window
But to get the most out of the natural light coming through your window, don’t face it head-on. A study looking at the impact of sunlight on a person’s emotional state found that the amount of sunlight penetrating a room had a significant impact on subjects’ feelings of relaxation—when they were sitting sideways to the window. The level of relaxation decreased when the person was facing directly toward the window or had their back to it.
Be Messy—in Creative Places
We’ve all heard the stories of how creative types embrace their messy side, but researchers have also found empirical evidence that messiness can help you think more imaginatively. A trio of experiments dove into this topic, comparing how participants performed when asked to complete a creative task in a cluttered room versus an organized room.
In the first, participants were randomly assigned to either a messy room (with paper and books strewn about) or an orderly room (with all those papers and books carefully stacked and organized) and asked to complete a puzzle. In the second experiment, participants were asked to complete the Remote Associates Test (RAT), designed to identify creative ability, in similar conditions. Finally, a different set of participants was asked to complete a drawing of their choosing in either a messy room, a cleared room, or an orderly room; the drawings were then scored for creativity by a panel of judges. The results were consistent across the all three experiments: Those in the messy room completed the puzzle fastest, scored highest on the creativity test, and earned the best marks from the drawing-judging panel.
• In areas where you get creative—your home office, workshop, or (for you kinky types) bedroom—let things get messy. But remember that a little clutter goes a long way: The researchers warn that excessive messiness can cause sensory overload and mental shutdown.
But Skip the Abstract Art
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, especially when it comes to the sort of art you put on your walls. If you’re finding yourself feeling a bit stressed at home, you might want to rethink how you’re decorating your walls. Architecture professor Roger Ulrich, who studied how hospital design affects patient well-being, found that art on the walls generally elicits positive feelings and keeps patients’ attention—even distracting them from discomfort or worries. But not all art proved healthy: While patients found landscapes and nature scenes pleasing, in interviews patients reported feeling disturbed by abstract art.
Ulrich dug into this trend further, and found that seven paintings had actually been targets of physical attacks over the previous seven years, with five of those having been attacked more than once. All seven were works of abstract art, and all were eventually removed.
• If you’re finding yourself feeling stressed or itching to attack your wall, change the artwork on it.
Warm Up Your Walls
Add some excitement to your life by changing up your home’s paint colors. While there have been numerous studies on the relationship between color and mood, a big area to consider is whether the color is warm (such as red or orange), cool (blue or violet), or achromatic (neutral grays, black, or white).
To figure out how people respond to these different color temperatures, researchers developed two “virtual living rooms” and varied the placement of the window, furniture, and shelving units in them. Participants were shown three pictures of each room, each with a different type of coloring (warm, cool, or achromatic).
Warm colors were consistently rated as more stimulating and exciting; cool colors were considered more spacious, restful, calm, and peaceful, while achromatic colors had the lowest positive ratings.
• Boost the “excitement” of rooms like kitchens and home gyms, where you’ll want to have high energy, with warm colors. Go with cooler options for places where a more calming feeling would work best, such as a bedroom or study. Skip the achromatic colors altogether.
Raise the Roof
If you’re working on a project that requires creativity, seek out a space in your home where the ceiling is at its highest—or maybe just go outside. A pair of marketing professors conducted a trio of experiments looking at individuals’ responses to rooms that were identical except for ceiling height. They found that higher ceilings induced a greater sense of freedom in individuals—not to mention sharper memory.
Love Those Curves
Does your home or office put you on edge? It might be that it has too many sharp edges. People find curved surfaces more pleasing than sharp ones: When presented with 140 grayscale images of various items (such as watches and cooling fans), participants expressed a preference for those with curved edges. This tendency was also true for meaningless patterns drawn with either sharp lines or curved lines. So if you’re picking out a desk or dresser, look for one with rounded edges. Extra bonus: Curved edges hurt a lot less when you bump into them.
Place a Notepad and Trash Can Near the Mirror
Sounds like a weird tip, but hear me out. Researchers have found that by giving thoughts a physical form, as through writing, people are able to throw their thoughts away, literally.
In the study, participants were randomly assigned to write either positive thoughts or negative thoughts about their bodies. They were then randomly asked to either throw the written thoughts into a wastebasket, or check their writing for any grammatical errors. Afterward, they completed a questionnaire to determine their attitude toward their bodies. The thoughts—whether positive or negative—that had been “thrown away” were found to have had less of an impact.
So throwing them out is an effective way to get rid of negative thoughts, but a similar logic works for internalizing positive thoughts. During a second experiment by the same researchers, participants were told to pull out the page on which they’d written thoughts about their body image, fold it, and put it in their pockets, while members of a control group were told to just fold down the corners of the paper so it could be identified later if needed. All were then asked to fill out a questionnaire about health and diet. Participants who had kept their thoughts safe responded more positively or more negatively (depending on the type of thought written down) than the control group.
• Having a bad hair day? Worried that top makes you look fat? Cut down on these negative thoughts by placing a notebook and trash can in front of your mirror, so you can “throw away” negative thoughts about yourself in the moment—or choose to keep the positive thoughts in your pocket.
If You Build It . . .
You get more joy from the things in your home that you make yourself. That was the finding of a group of researchers from Harvard, Duke, and Tulane Universities, who found that when a group of subjects exerted effort to produce three different products (IKEA storage boxes, origami, and Lego models), it increased the value that they placed on those objects.
The researchers found that this tendency to place value on items that took effort to assemble held true not just for individuals who considered themselves do-it-yourselfers. Participants who hardly considered themselves handy also placed greater value on what they’d made. There was also a tendency to overvalue the items that participants had built themselves—placing more importance on the built items than on those made by experts or machines.
• Instead of just buying a piece of furniture, try to build it yourself (even if IKEA does most of the work for you). Add a few self-made items around your house, whether by putting knickknacks on shelves or hanging art you’ve made on the wall.
Get Some Flowers
Flowers can do amazing things for your well-being. In one study conducted by researchers from Rutgers and La Salle Universities, three experiments were used to explore the relationship between flowers and mood. During one of the experiments, participants received a delivery of either flowers or another “gift” (fruit basket or candles) to their homes. Experimenters measured the initial response of the participant (specifically their smile) and conducted interviews later on.
All of the participants who received flowers smiled upon the delivery. Furthermore, researchers found during the follow-up interviews that participants who had received the flowers tended to put them in areas where they could be enjoyed by others, and reported more positive social interactions throughout the day in comparison to the groups who had received a different gift. So get to a florist already!
Get a Pet
“Pet owners tend to have greater self-esteem, tend to be in better physical shape, and tend to be less lonely than non–pet owners. When people have recently experienced a social rejection, thinking about their pet improves their well-being to the same extent that thinking about their best friend does.
“Obviously, the social support you get from your pet is perceived—your dog or cat isn’t interested in having a conversation with you—but when you feel like it cares about you and is attentive to you, you get a lot of the same benefits that you would from having a conversation or a social interaction.
“We’ve never found differences [in emotional benefits] between dogs and cats. The primary difference is the extent to which you anthropomorphize the pet: If you view your iguana as having human-like compassion and qualities, it’s as good as a golden retriever. It’s all in the mind of the owner.”
—Allen McConnell
Numerous studies have found evidence of the happiness-boosting benefits of spending time outdoors and looking at natural surroundings. But if you don’t have time for a hike, simply looking at trees can help reduce stress. A study of prisoners found that those who had views from their cells of the surrounding landscape suffered stress-related illnesses less frequently than prisoners who did not have these views. Another study of patients recovering from gall bladder surgery showed that those who could view trees from their beds improved more rapidly than those who could not.
In addition to helping overcome stress, viewing trees helps to sharpen people’s attention. In a comparison of college students, those who had views of nature from their dorms felt less mental fatigue than those who only saw parking lots and sidewalks.
• Try to find a place with a view of trees and nature. Take a minute or two each day to appreciate the view.
When You Feel Bad, Reach Out and Touch Something
You’re more sensitive to touch when in a bad mood. Through a series of five separate experiments, a pair of marketing researchers demonstrated that those in “negative affective states” (bad moods) were especially sensitive to the feel of a product (skin lotion, in the case of the experiment), describing it in tactile terms, rather than the visual terms they used to describe it when in a positive mood.
The heightened sensitivity led participants to feel “a more positive hedonic response from the enhanced tactile stimulation,” as the researchers put it. In other words, the worse you feel, the more sensitive your touch. The researchers suggested that this grows out of our evolutionary biological functioning: When we are injured, hurt, or vulnerable, there is a biological need to find protection, warmth, and security.
• Keep soft objects on hand and create tactile comfort. After a hard day, you will be extra sensitive to them and they may even turn your bad mood around.
Create a “Relaxation Room”
When feeling stressed or anxious, turning on calming music can be as relaxing as a massage. Researchers studied a group of sixty-eight participants who suffered from feelings of anxiety. They randomly assigned them to three treatment conditions: therapeutic massage, thermotherapy control group (in which warm heating pads and towels were placed on various parts of the body), and relaxing room control group (where they listened to relaxing music through a CD player). Participants attended weekly one-hour sessions a total of ten times within twelve weeks.
All three groups showed significant improvements on anxiety tests following treatments, but researchers did not find that massage or thermotherapy was more effective than simply relaxing and enjoying music. They hypothesized that the common elements to the three groups—a safe environment, the opportunity to take time out from life, and encouragement to practice deep breathing—may have been responsible for the improvements.
• Skip the $200 massage and just download an album of relaxing music. Create a relaxation room in your home that can serve as a refuge from the rest of your busy life and household—even if it’s just for half an hour.
Turn Off the TV
The warm glow of the television might actually be bumming you out. A pair of researchers looking at what happy people do differently from unhappy people reviewed data from the General Social Survey (GSS), which tracks changing social characteristics and attitudes through personal interviews over a span of thirty-five years. These researchers looked at information from more than 45,000 people on what they did in their free time. Happiness was rated based on respondents’ self-reports.
They found that happy people reported being more engaged in social activities, religion, and newspaper reading (okay, so the research is a few years old). The only activity that correlated negatively with happiness was television viewing—meaning that people who watched more hours of television in an average sitting were more likely to report that they were unhappy. While this research does not prove that television viewing causes unhappiness (unhappy people may use television to escape from reality), it does show a correlation between the two.
• Get away from your TV and call some friends. Review your viewing habits, and cut back on the hours spent streaming.
Get a Savings Jar
In Chapter 3, we discussed how spending money on life experiences, rather than on material objects, leads to greater levels of happiness. But whether buying things or experiences, making a purchase has been found to generate three distinct types of happiness: anticipatory happiness, momentary happiness, and afterglow happiness.
You can increase anticipatory happiness in your home by using a visual tool—a savings jar—to remind yourself of the purchase goal you are working toward, whether it’s to buy a new pair of shoes or book a vacation. The jar does not need to be large—this study looked at purchases of around twenty dollars—but it should note what the money will be going toward, to maximize your anticipatory happiness as well as to help you focus on your goal.
• Maximize the joy you get from making a purchase by putting a savings jar in your house and note what the money will be going toward.
Reconsider That Open-Concept Kitchen
Open-concept kitchens are all the rage, but if you’re trying to cut back on how much you’re eating in order to enhance your overall wellness and health, you might want to add back a few of those walls. Research has found that dining areas’ floor plans have an impact on the amount of food we consume. In a comparison study of open and closed floor plans, an architecture researcher and a design researcher found that closed areas resulted in fewer servings being consumed, presumably because diners could not see the extra food that was available.
• Add a divider screen, if not a wall, between your kitchen and dining areas.
Move Closer to Work
A long commute can take a serious toll on your level of happiness. Research in Sweden found that happiness ratings decreased the longer the commute. It was also found that commuting by walking or biking was correlated to higher happiness ratings than having to rely on public transit or a car.
• When choosing where to purchase or rent your home, give extra weight to the length of the commute.
Rent Instead of Buy
The question “Should I rent or should I buy?” has tormented people for decades, with no easy answer. Considerations ranging from personal budget to family size to location shape how one comes to a decision. But for those looking to enhance their level of happiness, the answer seems pretty clear: Stick with a rental. The Telegraph conducted a survey of 5,800 United Kingdom citizens to investigate whether people were happier renting or owning their homes. The survey questions focused on how financial circumstances contributed to happiness and stress levels, and the results showed that those who rented a detached home were the least stressed.
Even though the survey found that people who rent their homes tended to spend a greater portion of their finances on housing, the survey results also showed that homeowners were just as likely to list money as their biggest concern. The survey also found that people renting a room or a detached house were more likely than those who owned their homes to believe they had a good work-life balance. Not only that, renters reported enjoying relaxing at home more than homeowners, who tended to put traveling as one of their primary keys to happiness.
• Consider simplifying your life and reducing stress by just renting your place.
Reduce, Reuse, and Smile
Going green is not just good for the planet—it has also been found to put those who do it into a better mood. The Happiness Research Institute of the Danish Ministry of the Environment found a link between behaviors that benefit the environment and individual happiness. Those who instituted household practices such as using recycling bins, composting, or installing water-saving faucets or energy-saving appliances reported an uptick in their level of happiness. Data on fourteen European countries showed that people who recycle are happier on average than those who do not (by about 0.2 on a three-point scale). One report found that living more sustainably—for example, riding a bike to work instead of driving a car, or waiting to start a load of laundry until the machine is full—promotes a more fulfilling and happier life. A study of residents of fourteen Chinese cities showed that those who work to reduce waste and save energy score higher on life satisfaction than those who are mildly engaged or unengaged in sustainable behaviors.
The researchers suggest that this occurs because of evolutionary factors: We experience feelings of pleasure whenever we engage in activities that increase the likelihood of species survival. These behaviors can also lead to greater feelings of personal accomplishment and feeling more connected to our communities as a whole. Or maybe we’re just glad not to have so much junk around the house.
• Pick up a recycling bin, start composting, or do something else to help out Mother Nature.