How Interior Design Impacts Our Mental Health

Interior design may seem like work that’s not important, maybe even frivolous. For some, it may be an unnecessary step when designing a home or office space.

But when it comes to interior design, it's important to remember that our homes are places where we can escape and express ourselves. We start and end most days within the walls of our homes, and these spaces have a significant impact on our mental health.

The science of interior design is about understanding people, their needs, how they live, and, almost more importantly, how they want to live. So it's not enough to just design for aesthetics only.

Why should we address mental health in interior design?

Modern life can take its toll on our mental health, and it's essential to find ways to improve it. It has been estimated that the average urban adult spends around 90% of their time inside. This means that people spend most of their day working, sleeping, eating, and in cars. As a result, many people have started avoiding outside areas. If by attrition, we’re spending so much time inside, it’s now more important than ever to consider how interior design impacts our mental health.

Some interior design techniques are based on psychology to improve the emotional impacts of a space. For instance, a well-designed room can help improve communication and relieve stress by opening up areas. In addition, opening a room to let in natural light can create a sense of freedom and relaxation.

Although the link between interior design and emotion has been widely acknowledged in the last decade, this connection is actually quite old. Scientists continually study how interior design can trigger positive and negative emotions in people, even going so far as measuring physiological responses from participants as they walked through different spaces. Their findings have opened the door to the possibility of designing spaces that can help people feel happy and creative.

Although studying can be beneficial, it's also essential to consider the factors that can affect our well-being when designing a room. Most of us don't notice how good or bad the design of a room is. Instead, we tend to focus on the other factors—elements in a space that can be distracting or hard to use.

So, what are the most important factors that affect how we function in our spaces?

Clutter, Disorder, Chaos.

Studies have revealed that the emotional effects of cluttered spaces are similar to those of post-traumatic stress disorder. Mothers, in particular, experience increased cortisol levels (stress hormone) when their floors are littered with stuff by their children.

If we look at the cluttered environment as a depressing reflection, it's likely that people suffering from depression will feel that their cluttered lives are unsurmountable. This could explain why some feel like they cannot cope with daily life tasks.

However, a well-designed space can help alleviate those chaotic feelings and help people feel more creative and productive. While we can’t always change things easily like ceiling heights to promote positive emotions, as interior designers, we can help choose the right furniture and help create the ideal arrangement for your room. Paired with that, an organizational system can help free up floor space, storing books, toys, and even accessories.

Balance is Most Important

If you take only one thing away, remember that the most important interior design principle is balance. This concept states that all the furniture, fixtures, and accessories in the room should feel like they belong. Ideally, the pieces should be slightly similar to each other to create a cohesive and balanced look. Cohesiveness is important to make the home feel unified and make us feel more relaxed.

Let in Light

It’s commonly understood that having a light-drenched room makes us feel happy, and the research supports it. Sunlight can boost mood and a person’s productivity. On the flip side, especially in work environments, people who are only given artificial light exhibit signs of poor sleep.

Opening blinds and window treatments during the day, moving your favorite chair or desk closer to a window, or spending more time in our sunrooms or on our porches, are all ways we can let natural light improve our mental health.

Color Me Happy

Even if you’re new to the science of interior design, you’ve probably heard of color theory—how the colors of a room can have psychological effects on people. One of the most important factors in designing a space that positively impacts our mental health is colors. And, changing the primary color in a room can drastically affect our mood.

Color therapy, also known as chromotherapy, is a type of treatment that originated in ancient times and uses the visible spectrum (colors) of electromagnetic radiation to cure diseases.

It’s not just the color at work here; the saturation and brightness of a given color can significantly affect our moods. Lighter, pale tones can have a relaxing effect. Darker tones, when saturated and less bright, can actually be soothing. Warmer colors can make us feel physically warmer, and cool colors make us feel cooler. In fall and winter, we find ourselves drawn toward reds, browns, oranges—in the summertime, we’re drawn towards shades of blue, turquoise, and teal.

To dive even further, certain hues can elicit specific emotional responses or even trigger memories—both good and bad.

To truly understand why our homes make us happy or not, it’s important to know how all the pieces in a room make us feel. It’s not just the design of our homes but also the objects that surround us each day that affect our mood. There are a few more principles to look at, but we’ll save them for another post on another day.