We all know those restaurants that make us feel like we could spend hours lavishing over a dish or chatting with our friends. Compare that with a McDonalds. The differences in furniture, music, and lighting can encourage us to loosen up and stay awhile or gobble up and get moving. But our surroundings can do more than just change a mood – they can influence our wellbeing in an instant.
Since ever, we’ve needed to be perceptive to everything around us to survive, which means we have an innate perception of our environment and seek out an environment with certain qualities.
Before all else, humans have a strong need for safety and security and look for those characteristics in their own homes. We also crave physical comfort, such as an environment with the right temperature. Even so, we seek an environment that is psychologically comfortable: for instance, surroundings that are familiar but offer the right amount of stimulus.
Well, you should consider that prior to your home remodel and prior to changing your home’s lighting. The amount of light and the type of light you’re exposed to causes psychological responses in the body that affect things like hormone balance, immune system, and cognition. Obviously, you can’t always control the lighting you’re exposed to throughout the day, but you can still control the lighting you’re exposing yourself to in your home.
The healthiest type of lighting for your home is natural light. No doubt here. But since not all homes can be designed with floor-to-ceiling windows on all sides, you will need an effective lighting system to help you function at your best and maintain a healthy sleep-wake cycle.
How Environmental Cognition Works?
Two psychology professors from the University of Michigan have performed several studies on the way humans react to their environments. On this matter, one of their studies titled “The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective” included some exciting findings that can help us better understand the way light affects our mood.
The study found that humans tend to cognitively match their memories with the respective environment when they’re exposed to new environments. This ability allows us to interpret and understand a new environment – making it even less frightening or daunting. In other words, finding familiarity in the unknown helps us adapt to environments.
This is where lighting intervenes – highlighting certain elements in our homes, spaces, textures, and painting can considerably change your state of mind. Brightness, saturation, and hue can work on our emotions. While brighter lights can intensify emotions, the low ones don’t remove them but rather keep them steady.
Of course, we’re not suggesting that modern artificial lighting is harmful to our health. Rather we should consider what we know about our circadian rhythm and use it as a framework for creating a better lighting system for our home using smarter technology.
Not happy about your home’s lightning? Try layering it!
Ceiling-mount fixtures or overhead lights work wonders for your general interior lighting but tend to shine and glare unattractive shadows. Ideally, overhead lighting from https://www.lepro.com/ should constitute 25 percent of your overall lighting.
Mixing different light sources at varying heights works wonders for the aspect and feel of your home. In rooms where you want to create a relaxing environment, using lamps for tables, lamps and walls will help mimic the dynamic setting of natural light and reduce unflattering shadows. In the kitchen, home office, or bathroom, where bright light is important, installing desk lamps, pendant lights, integrated cabinet lights, and wall lights provides vital task lighting and adds an attractive feature.
Switching To Smart Bulbs Simply for Convenience
You can take your home’s lighting system to another level by using smart bulbs. These bulbs fit into any of your current fixtures and can be easily controlled through your smartphone. If you choose the same manufacturer for all of your home’s lighting, you can easily control it from your phone using the same app. Why not customize your entire home’s lightning in the way you feel? You can program the smart bulbs to start a slow ramp-up 20 minutes before you wake up, so when it’s time to go out of bed, it’s no stress because you’re already awake and ready to start the day.
Light it Right: Ask a Lighting Expert
When working on a new or refreshed lighting landscape, it makes sense to hire a professional to design your lighting plan. Of course, a designer or a landscape architect are quite knowledgeable about all things lighting and landscape design. Yet, not all designers are born lighting experts.
On the other hand, a lighting expert will not only be able to suggest a spot for https://www.lepro.com/led-flood-lights on the porch but also plan a blueprint and design an amazing lightning framework that will highlights every aspect of your indoors and outdoors – often even including ideas that you might never think will alter your mood. Besides expertise, when you hire a lighting expert to create your desired lighting plan, you have the guarantee that you will receive the highest quality products on the market.
With plenty of studies pointing towards light’s importance on our mental health, emotions, and general wellbeing, it makes perfect sense to hire an expert that can do the lighting work for us. Whether you need twinkle lights to feel cozy, bright lights to concentrate, or natural light to ward off depression, it’s a good thing, and sometimes enough that you have that control in your home. Simply being aware of the impacts of lighting on your body can make you think twice about some of the choices you would otherwise make in a trice – whether buying that lamp for sale in the market or even just checking your Instagram one last time before bed. After all, it’s the little things that matter – those we often fail to consider that have an invisible effect on our day-to-day life choices.