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April fool’s day- time to lighten up!
Laughter is seriously good for your body and brain boosting focus and creativity – Impact of Laughter on Health, Happiness and Wellbeing, How Laughter in The Workplace Can Boost Confidence And Creativity, it helps you bond with others – Laughter influences social bonding but not prosocial generosity to friends and strangers, defuse conflict – and can even help you to cope with pain – Effects of mirthful laughter on pain tolerance: A randomized controlled investigation.
Humour interventions can protect against and even reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety – Humor interventions in psychotherapy and their effect on levels of depression and anxiety in adult clients, a systematic review. One recent study in a residential care home in China found an 8-week humour programme not only improved subjective health and wellbeing, but it even improved sleep – Effect of humour intervention programme on depression, anxiety, subjective well-being, cognitive function and sleep quality in Chinese nursing home residents.
Given that an estimated one in six of us in the UK will experience a common mental health condition like depression or anxiety in any given week, at an estimated cost to British employers of £51 billion per year. the case for creating the conditions for a chuckle is clear – Mental health facts and statistics.
So how can lighting help?
1. Start with sunlight – Access to a view is the single biggest predictor of happiness and satisfaction whether at home – Access to Daylight at Home Improves Circadian Alignment, Sleep, and Mental Health in Healthy Adults: A Crossover Study, in the office – Access to Daylight and Views Improves Physical and Emotional Wellbeing of Office Workers: A Crossover Study, at school – Daylight and School Performance in European Schoolchildren, or in hospital – Increased daylight availability reduces length of hospitalisation in depressive patients, The Impact of Windows and Daylight on Acute-Care Nurses’ Physiological, Psychological, and Behavioral Health.
2. Boost with bright, cool light – a recent study found a blast of 1,500 lux at 6,500k delivered a swift mood boost and reduction in negative bias – The Effect of Light on Negative Emotion and Cognitive Regulation in Individuals with Depressive Tendencies, potentially through a shift in dopamine levels: we’re more likely to focus on sad emotional stimuli when dopamine transmission is low – Dopamine and light: effects on facial emotion recognition.
3. Create clear lines of sight, especially the eyes and mouth, both critical zones for emotion decoding – Editorial: The interpersonal effects of emotions: The influence of facial expressions on social interactions.
Choose defuse lighting where possible as strong shadows or light from below make it even harder to spot those critical communication cues, potentially introducing a sense of dominance and reducing trust – not conducive to a belly laugh, especially in the office – Illumination and gaze effects on face evaluation: The Bi-AGI database.
4. Control the colour temperature and brightness – research overall suggests that softer, warmer light tends to create a more relaxed, collaborative ambience – View it in a different light: Mediated and moderated effects of dim warm light on collaborative conflict resolution, but preferences vary widely between people of different ages and cultures and is, unsurprisingly, context-dependent – Effects of illuminance and correlated color temperature on emotional responses and lighting adjustment behaviors.
5. Invest in great lighting for spaces where you make Teams calls as you will miss the critical non-verbal cues of body language, an major contributor to zoom fatigue, especially for women – Video-conferencing usage dynamics and nonverbal mechanisms exacerbate Zoom Fatigue, particularly for women.
As Deloitte points out that for every £1 spent in mental health initiatives returns an average of £4.70 in improved productivity, perhaps investing in lighting that creates the optimal conditions to share a laugh isn’t such an April foolish thing to do! – Poor mental health costs UK employers £51 billion a year for employees
Glass half full – Innovators in Healthcare
Depression is a major factor in cognitive decline, affecting up to 58.7 % of older adults living in Residential Healthcare, with later-life depression costing an estimated 0.85 to 2.1 quality-adjusted life years- and lifetime welfare consumption of around $16,000 per person – Family visits and depression among residential aged care residents: An integrative review, The welfare cost of late-life depression.
As well as the bidirectional effects of poor sleep on mood – Circadian rhythm disruption and mental health, dementia and other degenerative conditions erode the critical pathways involved in humour and emotion processing, compounded by failing eyesight, which makes it even harder for them to see the glass half full – Humour processing in frontotemporal lobar degeneration: A behavioural and neuroanatomical analysis.
Depression is a major concern for nurses too, directly contributing to increased risk of burnout and quitting the profession altogether – Burnout and depression in nurses: A systematic review and meta-analysis, costing 6- 9 months’ salary to replace and train – 6 Costs of High Employee Turnover in Healthcare.
What if lighting could help?
Please join Professor Shadab Rahman online on the 17th of April (link to register) to discover his remarkable scientific research- and hear how Residential Healthcare providers Ed Russell, Leanne Scrogham, Jim Hempel and David Poxton are winning awards for their investment in lighting to create happy, healthy places to live and work.
With thanks to our sponsors Circadacare, Chromaviso, Commercial Lighting Systems Ltd and Nobi Smart Lights and to our media partners darc media, designing lighting, Lighting Industry Association (The LIA), The Light Review and the SLL – Society of Light and Lighting.
Eastbound Jetlag
I’m heading East to present to the KIIEE Spring Conference in mid-May and reading up on how to handle jetlag.
If you’re crossing continents too, these resources might be of interest – all of them basically say the same thing:
Crossing time zones (especially heading East) not only makes you feel sleepy, you’re also more likely to feel miserable, anxious and struggle to think straight – fMRI scans show the neural networks involved – The effect of jet lag on the human brain: A neuroimaging study.
But people are much more sensitive to jetlag than others – it’s partly genetic as this podcast explains – SRS Podcast Season 1.
Resetting your body clock with sunlight as soon as you land is best – but super-bright artificial lighting (2,500 lux) can do a pretty good job too – Lighting scheme recommendation for interior workplace to adjust the phase-advance jet lag.
Or book a flight on Quantas – they’ve installed circadian lighting in their planes – How science can help combat jet lag.
Ps/ I’ll be in Korea from the 9th to the 16th of May – do get in touch with recommendations of things to see- or if you’re out there and would like to meet!
Happiness is handmade
It’s National Handmade day in the USA.
If you spend time making stuff with your hands, you are more likely to feel satisfied and happier – and even stave off cognitive decline, regardless of gender and background – Creating arts and crafting positively predicts subjective wellbeing.
But it gets harder to see details clearly as we get older – colours gradually get a bit duller too. So those activities we used to love steadily beome a frustrating struggle. Most of us have no idea that lighting is a problem – we just think it’s our brain slowing down and think we’ve just got to put up with it… miserable – right? – Understanding Expert Crafting Practices of Blind and Low Vision Creatives.
But there are three things you can do –
1. Sit by the window – the best source of bright light you can get. You’ll see details more clearly and your fine motor skills will be more accurate. Sunlight has more wavelengths than most artificial lights too, so you’ll see colours more accurately. If it’s too bright, add a simple net curtain – I use this spring-loaded rail so I don’t have to drill any holes.
2. Boost with artificial light. There are lots of crafting lights out there but most of them are a waste of money and will add to your frustration- the light isn’t strong enough and you can’t adjust the brightness, the magnifying lense isn’t big enough and the arm or fixing is just too short so it gets in the way. This one that combines a good-quality LED ring with a magnifier is great.
3. Find your focal point. You may have varifocals – or ‘occupational’ lenses like mine – designed to focus on a computer and at around 30cm from my eyes. If you’ve had a cataract operation, the surgeon will have chosen a lens with a focal length to suit your specific needs. A table like this one will help to keep the work at the perfect distance, reducing eye strain, neck and backache too.