Why pay more, brain-boosting benefits decluttering – and why chocolate is good for your eyes

Why spend more?

It’s tempting to go for the legal minimum, especially when budgets are tight and the future seems so uncertain. But David Poxton is just one of a growing number of residential healthcare providers investing in circadian lighting and seeing clients vote with their feet. It’s not a peer-reviewed double-blind experiment, but David is clear:  Residents get more sleep and spend more time socialising. Staff working rotating shifts recover more quickly too.

Join us on Thursday this week to hear why David’s only regret is that he didn’t install circadian lighting everywhere! 

Register here.

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.

Mind the gap  

Older adults not only start to lose visual acuity, we also take longer to see movement, potentially due to changes in the myelination in the brain – The relation between clutter and visual fatigue in children with cerebral visual impairment.

This is important when it comes to falls prevention, because older adults rely more on visual information than younger people to keep our balance: we get less information from other vital cues like inner ear and other somatosensory inputs – pressure on bone, skin and muscle) – Reliance on Visual Input for Balance Skill Transfer in Older Adults: EEG Connectome Analysis Using Minimal Spanning Tree.

So older adults need more help from their environment to stay upright with stronger neural response to vertical and horizontal edges – and greater uncertainty generated by oblique or diagonal orientations, reducing ability to judge distances and increasing risk of confusion – The oblique effect: The relationship between profiles of visuospatial preference, cognition, and brain connectomics in older adults.

If you’ve got any questions about designing for residential care, do join Ed Russell, Leanne Scrogham and the other healthcare professionals tomorrow afternoon online,

Register here.

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.

Time to declutter 

Marie Kondo is a global champion for decluttering, with hundreds of episodes of her celebrated Netflix series demonstrating the adage ‘a tidy home is a tidy brain’. 

The need for order, especially visual clarity, is especially acute for people with sensory processing issues and conditions like cerebral visual impairment – The relation between clutter and visual fatigue in children with cerebral visual impairment, and neurological conditions like dementia.

• Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) one of the changes seen in the brains of people living with dementia, impairs the brain’s ability to process visual information even when vision itself is intact. This in turn can trigger hallucinations and misperceptions that can be confusing and frightening and increase the risk of trips and falls –  Changes in perception.
• Visual clutter exacerbates these processing issues, further compounded by memory loss, making it harder for individuals to focus, to follow a sequence of actions or find an object. Altogether contributing to overwhelm, anxiety and frustration – Coping With Alzheimer’s Symptoms: Visual Clutter, Visual Clutter and Its Effect on Alzheimer’s & Dementia Patients, Reducing perceptual interference improves visual discrimination in mild cognitive impairment: Implications for a model of perirhinal cortex function, How can dementia change a person’s perception?

Here are three things you can do to create a healthier, happier space for friend or relative this weekend

1. Clean the windows and curtains to let more light in – clean windows let in more light – and save energy too – The Impact of Clean Windows on Energy Efficiency: Saving Money and the Environment, Reduction of Light Transmission by Glazing with Atmospheric Pollutants. Grime on dirty windows reacts with oxygen and sunlight to produce ozone, a major component of petrochemical smog, harmful to people, plants and pets – Sunlight liberates nitrogen from urban grime.
2. Improve lighting levels and use higher-reflectance paint, especially on ceilings to distribute available light evenly across the room – the retina of 60 year old receives just one-third of the light reaching a 20 year old’s retina – The Aging Eye.
3. Use Contrast: Incorporate colour contrasts to make features like door handles and thresholds easier to see, but avoid Busy Patterns: Replace rugs or curtains with simpler designs to minimize visual noise.

Of course design is only part of the problem – personal possessions can compound the issue of a cluttered environment. especially if someone has lived in a home for long time- or moved from a larger space into residential care.  As this excellent guide points out – Clutter Can be Overstimulating, while personal and sentimental belongings help us to maintain our identity, the loss of judgement, increased confusion and memory loss for people with dementia can cause a different type of response, sometimes with an almost obsessive need to keep possessions safe. 

This guide suggests:

1. Offering to help and offering choices about what to keep and what to remove.
2. Taking photographs to make an album of things that are no longer in the space.
3. Making sure that the objects that remain are well-organised and clearly visible.

Chocolate helps you see – and sleep 😉

If you needed another reason to tuck into an Easter egg, here are three light-related facts that might help…

1. Dark chocolate can increase blood flow to the retina compared to milk chocolate, an effect that may be protective against some eye diseases – Benefits of dark chocolate intake on retinal vessels functionality: a randomized, blind, crossover clinical trial.
2. Flavanols in cocoa solids have powerful probiotic properties and can boost your skin’s natural protection against damage from UV – Long-Term Ingestion of High Flavanol Cocoa Provides Photoprotection against UV-Induced Erythema and Improves Skin Condition in Women, Cocoa Polyphenols and Gut Microbiota Interplay: Bioavailability, Prebiotic Effect, and Impact on Human Health.
3. Eating small amounts of dark chocolate for breakfast may even help to reset your body clock, thanks to the links between those flavanols and melatonin and other hormones involved in circadian regulation – Cyrcadian Rhythm, Mood, and Temporal Patterns of Eating Chocolate: A Scoping Review of Physiology, Findings, and Future Directions.

But, sadly, not all chocolate has many of those active ingredients left after all the processing, falling to less than 0.5% – and even zero for white chocolate as the cocoa percentage count goes down – Dark chocolate: An overview of its biological activity, processing, and fortification approaches.

Dr Barbara Johnson’s blog offers a brilliant guide on what to look out for – and what to avoid – A Functional Medicine Doctor’s Guide to Choosing the Best Dark Chocolate.