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- [00:00]
A
If you're exposed in the evening to 30 minutes of blue light, that's as alerting as awakening as a cup of coffee. I think that people nowadays really are seeking safe places to escape all of the many fears and troubles of the world we have no control over whatsoever. And your home can be your sanctuary. And if you pay attention to these features and to intentionally include them all around you.
- [00:40]
B
Hi there. Welcome back to Homing. Today's episode is part of our foundation series and I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Esther Sternberg. She's a physician and researcher whose work focuses on the relationship between mind, body, body and environment. Esther's the author of the books Healing Spaces and well at Work, which both explore the growing science around how the spaces we inhabit affect our health. Esther argues that our homes are constantly sending signals to the nervous system. She believes that architects should think of themselves not just as designers, but almost as health professionals. In this conversation we discuss how our environments shape the body and the brain, the role of light, sound and nature in well being, and how small changes to our homes can help create a sense of sanctuary in an increasingly anxious world. I think there are some really interesting ideas in here and they might just encourage you to look at your home in a slightly different light. That's the idea anyway. So here it is and I hope you enjoy it. So the first question I ask most of my guests, and I want to ask you as well because I'm curious, how would you define the word home?
- [02:01]
A
You know, I think, Matt, it's a really interesting question. And your second question that you sent on your pre recording notes of whether it's a physical place or a psychological place. And I think it's both. There's no question that it is both. And you can think about it when you're looking for a place to live, you walk into a space and right away you feel at home or you don't feel at home. There are subtle cues that I think most of us aren't consciously aware of. I certainly wasn't consciously aware of these kinds of cues before I started working with architects and, and building experts. So for example, if I can give you an example from my own life. I moved into a new house in Washington D.C. and I redid the deck in the back overlooking the garden. And I didn't realize until the deck was finished that I had exactly reproduced my mother's deck in my mother's home in Montreal to the extent that she had a beautiful lilac tree outside the old deck. And when they redid the Deck. The contractor said, we can widen this by cutting down that lilac tree. And she said, no, no, no, you can't cut down the lilac tree. So she ended up with a much narrower deck. Well, I had a holly bush in the Washington D.C. home, and I did the same thing without even realizing it. And when it was finished, it just reminded me of my mother's deck. And I think that's what happens. You walk into a space and it brings back certain memories of childhood, positive memories of vacation, for example. So the elevation of the house, the way the sun comes in the windows, the sounds, even how close it is to traffic or far away from traffic or country sounds, all these things feed into your memory bank and your emotions. And you react to a space without even realizing it in a positive or a negative way. That actually goes back to animal studies, animal behavioral research, where we know that in conditioning animals, like rats, for example, or even if people have cats and dogs, researchers will put a rat into a cage with very specific physical features. Even the lighting, the texture on the floor, the patterns on the wall around the cage. And the animal will become accustomed and conditioned, just like Pablo's dogs, to that space. And they will either react positively or negatively to that space depending upon their experience in it. So if they've received a negative experience, like a shock, a mild shock, they'll have a negative reaction to that space, even if they're not shocked. If they have a positive reaction, like they get food, they have a positive reaction to the physical space.
- [05:23]
B
I see what you mean. It puts me in mind of. I've been reading a bit about place attachment and obviously John Bowlby and his ideas around interpersonal attachment and how when we're infants, you know, we attach to our primary caregiver, usually our mother, but of course, in parallel, we also attach to the physical surroundings we're brought up. And I think it's really interesting what you're saying. You know, it's kind of home is kind of a vessel of memory, isn't it? It's a sort of. It's a tactile, multi sensory form of memory, I think.
- [05:56]
A
Yes, absolutely, absolutely.
- [05:58]
B
I mean, given that, then do you think that a home can make you happier?
- [06:04]
A
Oh, for sure. There's no question a home can make you happier. And you can do things on purpose to make you happier in the home. So, for example, we were talking to your producer who's in Athens, and my par were from Romania and came before World War II. My father came after World War II to Montreal, and I grew up on essentially what is identical to a Greek Mediterranean diet. And when my Greek neighbors saw me writing on my computer on my deck in Washington D.C. they rang the doorbell and they brought me this wonderful Greek food. Tzatziki, dolmades, musaka. And right away we connected. And I didn't realize until afterwards that it was the familiarity of the smells, of the fragrance of that food that made me immediately connect positively to them. And that's how I ended up going to Greece with them and spending time in their cottage in Lentas. But that's another story. But yes. So everything about your home, if it reminds you of positive experiences through what you see and hear and smell and touch and do in the space and eat in the space, can make you feel happy. You can consciously do things to bring back those positive memories. So, for example, when I came back from Greece, I on purpose planted a jasmine tree in a pot on my deck so that I could smell the fragrance in the evening that reminded me of the lemon and orange trees that I smelled in Greece. You can do things consciously to enhance your home, wherever you are, even if you're in an apartment, you can do this. And to enhance those positive feelings, if you dig into your memory and try to remember what it is that made you feel happy in those places, it's kind of like Proust and the madeleine, you know, he finally remembers that the reason he feels such warmth and comfort eating the madeleine dipped in tea is because it reminds him of his aunt's embrace when he was sick as a child.
- [08:32]
B
Okay, it sounds very nostalgic and it puts me in mind of. I was reading about a study that they took a vote in America about what style of house most Americans felt that they would like to live in. And most of them chose what's called a Cape Cod house. Right. I'm sure you'll know what that means better than a lot of our English listeners, but I guess it's a kind of, you know, timber clad building with sash windows and a pitch roof.
- [09:03]
A
Yes, yes.
- [09:04]
B
And they sort of admitted, when they thought about it practically probably didn't work for them that well. But they just love the idea of it somehow. So I think what you're saying is, and actually I think it's quite an interesting take on this idea of home, is that it's really so linked to this form of memory and emotion that you have going back many years throughout your life and what you've experienced.
- [09:27]
A
Personally, it sounds like, well, it's that. But when you talk about the shaker, the Salt shake. It's called like salt shaker. How salt shake. That I think has more to do with cultural memory because a lot of the. And it's generational also. A lot of the television programs that my generation. Generation grew up in showed that kind of house. So even if you lived in a cramped apartment in a busy city and noisy and no green around, and certainly no pitched roofs and anything like that, then that's your ideal image of a home. I think the current generation actually prefers mid century modern. That's their idea of what's ideal. I grew up in what was really a home that was built in Montreal in 1910. So it was a very old house. And it had these, in retrospect, beautiful oak moldings and stained glass windows and Lalique sliding glass doors. And my sister and I used to tell my mother in the 60s, why don't you get rid of all this horrible stuff? Get rid of it and paint over it and take out all that. Thankfully, my mother did not do that. But, you know, every generation has a different ideal. Maybe watching Downton Abbey here, people are gonna go back to that kind of, you know, turn of the turn of the 20th century aesthetic.
- [11:07]
B
Totally. Well, exactly. It comes in waves, doesn't it? And also, I mean, the other thing is that during times of sort of political upheaval, people tend to gravitate more towards minimalism because they need that kind of order. So, you know, there's a reason why I think the clean lines of Le Corbusier and modernist architecture emerged out of the Great wars is for that reason. So it's, you know, I think it's so interesting all that. But I suppose there's also. I wanted to ask you about the kind of health aspect of living, clearly. So, you know, second big question of the day, but do you think a home can make you healthier as well?
- [11:46]
A
It can make you healthier and it can make you sicker. We spend certainly in America, I think probably in Europe as well, or at least in Northern Europe, over 90% of our time indoors. Since COVID not before COVID but since COVID there is a much greater public realization of the importance of clean indoor air. Because you saw during COVID all those animations around the Internet of the virus being spread through the ventilation systems. And that's absolutely true. And in fact, knowing that germs are spread allergens, germs and so on are spread through ventilation systems has been known for decades. In fact, after I wrote my book, well at creating well being in any workspace which applies to creating well being in any home space. I learned that Richard Lord Riley, a British person of, I guess, aristocracy descent in the 1950s, I think it was, or earlier, had discovered that tuberculosis could be spread through the ventilation system by putting rats in a different room, but near the ventilation from a patient with tuberculosis in the other room. And that was sort of one of the clearest, earliest definitions that show that you could spread germs through ventilation. And then every 20 or 30 years or so the public becomes more aware of this with for example, Legionnaires disease and sick building syndrome, and certainly with COVID that these kinds of bacteria and certainly allergens and others can be spread through the ventilation. So it's essential that you start with excellent fresh air, frequent fresh air turnover, excellent filtration. I think again during COVID people became aware of the importance of keeping your filters clean if you have forced air. I think actually in Britain, and certainly in Montreal, we didn't have forced air, we had radiator heat. But here a lot of the heating and cooling goes through forced air. And you can have the best ventilation system. But if you don't keep your filters clean, you're going to get exposed to all those things that get stuck in the filters. So that's the baseline. That's just keeping your home healthy from a physical point of view. But it is also, and this is what I talk about in well at Work, essential to create environments that enhance emotional well being. There's many ways that you can do this. You can do it through what you see and hear and smell and touch and think about what reminds you of home and positive experiences. The other framework that I use in well at Work is the seven domains of integrative health in that framework. That was a framework devised by Dr. Andrew Weil and the center for Integrative Medicine, where I was research Director from about 2012 until 2025. Those seven domains are sleep, resilience. What is resilience? It's how quickly you bounce back from any challenge. It's the stress and relaxation response. It's the environment that includes clean air, but also the green environment, relationships, movement, spirituality and nutrition. You can design any space to enhance each of these behaviors, each of these domains of integrative health. And you can then maintain your health and your emotional well being without even realizing it when you're in these spaces.
- [15:56]
B
How interesting. That's a great framework. So how would one start then in terms of looking at those buckets that you've just listed there? What would be the most Important things you could do practically.
- [16:08]
A
One of the things is each of those are important and they each overlap. So let's say start with sleep. A lot of people are concerned about sleeping well. Well, in order to sleep well, it's counterintuitive. But what you do during the day and in the morning affects how you sleep at night. So in order to sleep well, you need to be exposed to at least 30 minutes in the morning of full spectrum circadian sunlight. So that means that, you know, if you're working, I'm working here, I'm facing a window. Put your desk in front of a window. You know, I've had people who've read the book tell me, wow, I used to have my work desk in the basement when I was working from home. I moved it upstairs to be in front of a window and it made all the difference. Or be outside if you don't have a window. Or, well, everybody has a window. But if you don't have a window that really has sunlight coming in, take a little walk outside, sit outside and have your breakfast outside if you can, depending on the weather. Movement is really important, we discovered. So I worked for 25 years with the U.S. general Services Administration when I was at the National Institutes of Health. I was a senior scientist and physician and research scientist. And I worked from the year 2000 to about 2023 with the U.S. general Services Administration, which is the agency of the U.S. federal government that builds and operates all non military federal buildings. We used wearable devices to measure the impacts of the built environment on health well being and performance. We could measure people's stress responses even if they didn't feel stressed from their wearable devices. We could also measure movement and measure sleep. We found that the people who moved more during the day were less stressed, physiologically less stressed at night, even though they weren't aware of it and they slept better, they fell asleep faster and they woke up the next morning less fatigued and in a better mood. So the kinds of things that you can do to shape your environment to encourage you to move more can also help you sleep better. What are the other things that influence stress? Relationships are very important, positive relationships. So you want places to gather so that you can be with people in a positive way. You also want to take away things that stress, like noise. Noise is one of the biggest stressors in an environment. So you can, ideally you should have materials in an environment that absorb sound, that absorb noise. If you don't have that, you can wear headphones. If you're working from Home, you can have white noise that blocks out or sort of masks negative sounds or startling sounds. There's all kinds of ways to address reducing noise. Green environments are really important. It's tremendous literature that shows that looking at beautiful views, being in nature reduces stress. We're doing studies in virtual nature environments recharge rooms started by studio elsewhere in New York City. We find that 15 minutes a day in those virtual nature environments reduces stress, reduces anxiety, helps people sleep better, reduces burnout, and even reduces your stress hormone cortisol. But there's a dose effect of 15 minutes a day. So if you don't have, you can put plants around your home that will enhance. The more plants the better. As long as you're not allergic to molds and things, you have to be careful about that. But if you don't have that, you can make sure you take a walk and be in a park, local park and so on, going around the circle of each of these domains. There's healthy food, of course, that I mentioned. And spirituality is sometimes it's a word that triggers positive and negative reactions in people. But really spirituality is staying in the moment, having places and spaces to just be in the moment. So for example, I told you about the jasmine tree I put on my my deck in DC and I also just bought a jasmine bush here for Tucson. Even just a few seconds, deeply inhaling the fragrance of that jasmine. Or I have rosemary and oregano herbs in pots on my deck here and when I water them, I get that little hit of the fragrance of these plants. And that's allows you to be in the moment to reduce your stress, just even for a short time. That will reduce the total load of your stress of all the other stressors that we're exposed to every day, especially now.
- [21:30]
B
Yeah, absolutely fantastic. I really enjoyed that. That's such a great list of things to help there. I think I was really interested by this when I was reading a bit more about you, Esther, you said that that architects or designers should think about themselves almost as health professionals, right?
- [21:48]
A
Yes.
- [21:48]
B
That's quite radical actually. So just tell me about that. Why do you think that and what do you mean by that?
- [21:54]
A
Well, so as I said, I first started working with building experts designers when I started working with the General Services Administration. I wrote my previous book, Healing the Science of Place and well being, published in 2009. I was invited by graduating architecture students back in 2009 to speak at the American Institute of Architecture Students national conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota on December 29, 2009. Now, for anybody who's been in Minneapolis or Minnesota in late December, you know that the temperatures are minus 30 Fahrenheit, which is I think, about the same as minus 30 centigrade. So I went and it was the beginning of the downturn here. I think you had a downTurn back in 2008, 2009. Did you have that there? Yeah, especially in the home, in the building industry. And I was the second keynote speaker. The first keynote speaker was. And I actually tell this story in. Well, at work. The first speaker was a business person from the field of design, architecture, buildings. And he spent the whole time saying, you fifth year graduating architects are really out of luck. There are no jobs. The Gary studio has shed 30%. All the major studios have shed 30%, 50% of their workforce and most of them are the junior people. So just forget about it. So I had to stand up and talk to this audience. It was like talking at a funeral. And I decided at the beginning of my talk to ditch my planned presentation. And I said, you, the design professionals of the future, are our health professionals, partners in the health of this nation. We cannot do it without you. I cannot tell a patient to go home and exercise more if there's no place to move, if there's no place to exercise. I can't tell somebody to feel less stressed if there's a lot of noise going on or if they're living in a cramped situation with multi generational family and no place to have a tiny little space to be alone for a moment to contemplate. You are our partners in the health of the nation. And so after the talk, I didn't know, but there were two presidents of the American Institute of Architects in the audience and they came up to me at the book signing and said, you've given us an idea. We want to establish a design and health leadership group to bring health front and center across all the knowledge communities of the American Institute of Architects. It was front and center for health care design, which is obvious. You want to design a hospital for health, although I have to say a lot of hospitals were not designed for the health of people in them. But that's another story. But it was part of the mandate of architecture to design for health, but it wasn't really front and center. And also to design for physical health was definitely part of the mandate, like I said, with ventilation, clean ventilation and no toxins and so on. But designing for emotional well being was not front and center. It began to be more recognized back after that downturn, but really became front and center. After Covid, Yeah.
- [25:58]
B
With that in mind, what do you think should be the starting point for someone designing a space? Like, let's say they've got a small apartment, you know, because I think the temptation always is just to concentrate on how something looks right. You know, choose some furniture you found on Instagram you like the look of and so on. But how would you. What would be the starting point if you wanted to do it more from a health perspective, would you say?
- [26:25]
A
I think lighting is very important. So if you don't have the luxury of having the circadian light coming in, think about the smart lighting that is available. There's a tremendous amount of smart lighting now that gives you full spectrum sunlight. There's huge literature back at least 40 years showing that full spectrum sunlight, that's the kind of white light that you see from bright sunlight, reduces seasonal effects disorder, the kind of depression that comes from being exposed in northern climates, like where you are actually to long periods of low light. And that's why we have snowbirds coming to Arizona in the winter from Chicago and from Canada. That's why you have your folks in the UK going down to Greece and Italy and so on. But full spectrum sunlight is really important and you can mimic that now with all kinds of smart lighting. I actually am working with my full disclosure daughter and son in law who are professors at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. And their expertise in design is lighting. And we work together to create or to help advise on creating an ambiance that is healthy and improves your mood. And there's a lot of information about that. I have some of it in my book. You can look up smart lighting. I can certainly, if people want to reach out to me through my website, I can connect them to these experts. So we have a lot of technology now that can really help. And as I said, lighting is important not only for positive moods, even if you don't have depression, it's important for sleep, it's important for healthy cognition. And so that's a start. There's also noise. If the apartment is in a noisy space, you want to think about ways to dampen that noise. Drapery, carpets, things like that. Again, technology can help. In your bedroom, you can have white noise. There's also what we call pink noise, which is not really colored noise, but the sound. But it's more sounds. In the field of defining different kinds of sound and noise, white noise is kind of like white light. It's made up of the full spectrum of all the wavelengths. So white noise, white light is all the colors, white noise. Noise is all the wavelengths. If you just have a few of those wavelengths, it's called pink noise. Not because it's pink, but because they're selected sounds. They can be sounds of nature, which in some cases just mask the other noises and in other cases give you that positive memory of sounds that are calming. Rain on the roof, a breeze, the seashore, birds chirping. Again, it taps into your memory and what is positive.
- [29:58]
B
And what about red light? Because we hear a lot about red light, especially in the moon, being beneficial.
- [30:04]
A
Yeah, really, really important. So what you want to do is you want to mimic the sunrise and sunset. So in the morning there's a lot of blue light. Then as the afternoon comes on, it becomes red. If you're exposed in the evening to 30 minutes of blue light, that's as alerting as awakening as a cup of coffee. So you don't want blue light. So there are several things you can do to reduce blue light exposure in the evening. One of them is to have glasses where the lenses absorb blue light. The other is there are settings on your computer, on your smartphone to have less of the blue light in the evening. But the other thing is actual red light. So I typically wake up in the middle of the night thinking of all the things I have to do the next day. And I have a pad next to my bed where I jot down those things and once I jot it down, it's out of my head and I can go back to sleep. So I'm not anxious, like I've done the task just by writing it down. However, when I used to jot it down and not turn on the light, I couldn't read my handwriting the next morning. So I didn't know what it was I was supposed to do. So but if I turned on the light, then I'd be wide awake. My sister in law sent me this wonderful little device which is a red light that you can clip onto your nightstand next to your bed. It's a red LED light and you turn it on and you can read by it, you can write, you can do whatever you want, but with the red light. And it sends you right to sleep. It's really quite amazing because it doesn't wake you up. So again, technology is really fantastic because it can help overcome these things, even if you don't have the luxury in your own space of having a window and so on.
- [32:15]
B
So interesting. So that's colored light. Then what about the colors that we paint on the walls? Should we just choose what we like or are there well being benefits?
- [32:25]
A
This is so interesting. I'm advising a school here and they asked about that, about the colors on the walls. So when your eye absorbs light from light that's shone on you, it has a different effect than when you're looking at a colored wall or a painting. Those are two different ways that the eye and the brain react to color. It's much easier to study the effect of different wavelengths of light on all aspects of health. As I mentioned, sleep, cognition, mood. I mean, that's been done for, as I said, decades and decades. And there's a tremendous amount of research also in the animal literature showing how different colors of light that are shone on the eye have different effects on all of these aspects of health and well being. Looking at paintings, looking at different colored walls is a completely different situation. So it is a combination of, again, memory, so certain associations. Just like as I said, Pavlov's dogs, people have done this with rats in cages. They learn to associate certain colored patterns on the wall with either positive or negative reactions. And so somebody can have this wonderful positive memory of a purple wall, but other people can have a negative association with it. I think that's why realtors here in the States tend to, when you're selling a house and you're staging the house, they tend to paint it in very muted colors, you know, like dove white or dove gray or something like that, because they don't want to trigger negative reactions. I'll actually tell you a story about Sean McCann, Professor Sean McCann. He ran the bone marrow transplant unit in Trinity College Dublin in what used to be a Dickensian workhouse. So it took 200 year old sort of building where in order to have the right negative, sort of positive pressure ventilation in the rooms to keep the bone marrow transplants people sterile and not have germs come in. He had to put the ventilation system, the H Vac equipment, right outside the windows. So the patients had terrible views, just views of H Vac equipment. So he didn't have much money to do to renovate. So he started by working with an artist to paint the walls in the unit. And they interviewed all of the patients and the staff and they said, what do you want to see? And when I visited, they came up with these very bright patterns. Some of them were checkerboard and some of them were striped and they were very, very bright patterns. This is what the staff and the patients wanted to see. It didn't do anything for me. In fact, I found it very jarring. But it turned out that they were the patterns of the football leagues across Ireland. It gave the patients and the staff something to talk about, to distract them from their pain or their negative mood and so on. So what is a positive experience in paint on the walls for some people, may be a negative experience for others. So you have to be very careful about that and again, dig into your memory. Typically, people say that colors of nature, pale green, sort of, those kinds of things are calming. There's a. I describe in my books a paint company that set up in the exhibition space on a convention floor, three bars with serving drinks and so on. They were all white, but one of them was bathed in blue, one of them was bathed in yellow, and one of them was bathed in red light. And they found that the people in the blue light were calmer, were less noisy, drank less. The people in the red light and yellow light drank more. They were more noisy. There's these kinds of studies. There's also a very large literature now that's developing called neuro aesthetics, of how the brain reacts to art. It's really very, very interesting. Again, triggering memories. Looking at, I find I have a painting here from a Western artist who painted some chickens in like just walking around in an abandoned space. And there's. The lighting on those chickens is just so beautiful. I look at it and I find it calming, probably also because I find chickens calming, but other people may not find chickens calming. So it's all quite individual. But there is a neuroscience to how the brain reacts to art and that you can look up neuro aesthetics on the web and it can help you to choose your colors and the kinds of paintings you have on the wall and so on. The other thing that's really important for making a house a space, a home is pictures of your loved ones. Even if you have a small cubicle in an office, pictures of your loved ones can make it feel at home. A small plant plants around can make it feel at home. And those are the kinds of things that you can do in your home spaces.
- [38:49]
B
Yeah. As you're talking, I was thinking I grew up with a father who was an architect, and of course that meant the walls had to be white. Right. That's just the rule. So when I was a teenager, I decided I'd had enough of this puritanical restraint and I took myself down to the DIY store and I got this particularly foul mauve paint and I painted my bedroom purple.
- [39:17]
A
Oh, there I gave the example. I didn't know that you liked, like, purple.
- [39:21]
B
Well, I Don't. But it seems I did when I was 15. But I think it's interesting, of course, because as an adult, you know, I love white walls or off white walls. And I think it's because I grew up with them and they. They reflect the light clearly. But, you know, you. We all, of course, sometimes have to compromise on those things if we cohabit with other people. So do you have any views on that? I mean, if you, you know, if you cohabit with someone that has very different ideals around these things, what do you do? Do you think,
- [39:53]
A
wow, that's a really good question. You have a conversation. I think you have to have a conversation. If you have multiple rooms, like you had your bedroom that you painted purple. Well, if you have your home, if you have the luxury of having a home office for each of the cohabitants, or an individual bedroom, you know, absolutely. They should paint it or color it the way they want. I think that that is. That's really important. There's also, in terms of that temperature wars, you know, typically people have. Are more comfortable with certain temperatures, and, you know, there's always a happy medium between, you know, split the difference.
- [40:37]
B
Yeah, exactly. So just to pivot slightly from where we're at. I mean, I was thinking about this. For most of history, the home has been a place where we were born and where we died and everything in between. Right. And actually we've shifted it all into institutions in more recent years. Have we lost something with that shift? I mean, what's your feeling around that?
- [40:59]
A
That's a really interesting question. I think it's also generational. I think my generation is really looking to age in place. And there is a whole field of design for aging in place. You can design homes to help people who are having reduced mobility, reduced hearing, reduced cognition, to help them stay in their homes longer. I think the problem, certainly here is the nuclear family. In Victorian England, you had large extended families, and you could stay in the home with many people taking care of you. And now that's not the case. There comes a point, certainly here in the United States, where if you really can't take care of yourself, either for physical or mental reasons, it is important to move into a senior living community where there's help, where there are nurses, where there's nursing staff. If you're, you know, as you decline. The other thing that's important is that being alone in a home, it's lonely. And the previous Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy here said that there is an epidemic of Loneliness here in the United States, especially amongst the elderly, and that can shorten lives, can lead to depression. Certainly if you have a fall and you break your hip, that shortens lifespans, increased mortality. Moving into a senior living community for that reason alone, if your choice is to be alone in an apartment and not really have help, to move into a senior living community where there are other people that you can connect with, is very important for emotional well being. Dying at home, there's also a movement of hospice where people do choose to come back home and not die in hospital. Birthing at home, I think there is some movement towards that. But having gone through premature labor for my daughter myself, it's a very scary thing. And I myself would not choose to give birth at home just because I know even in the small chance of a risk, you're better off being in the hospital. But healthcare designers have created spaces for birthing in hospitals that mimic home spaces that make women feel at home when they're going through labor and delivery. There's two sides to it. You can make homes feel more welcoming and you can make institutions feel more homelike. And I think there is a movement towards that.
- [44:19]
B
Yeah. My wife and I attempted a home birth with our first daughter. And I say attempted because we ended up in hospital, and it was, in the end, quite a conventional hospital birth. But I have lots of friends who have very successfully given birth at home and they wouldn't do it any other way. And I think I find that really interesting because I just think when you're going through something like that, the massive upside clearly, is that sort of familiarity on a sensory level that you get from being in our environment that seems to keep people calm.
- [44:57]
A
Yeah. No, there's no question. It's wonderful. And what we just talked about in our own personal experience tells you again how your personal experience really feeds into these kinds of choices. You know, it's wonderful if you have a natural birth and you've had no problems with delivery. It's absolutely wonderful to do it at home with the right, you know, midwives and support system around. So it's a personal choice that again, once again, depends on your own experience.
- [45:31]
B
Exactly. And it's a personal choice that does terrify your parents and extended family. I mean, I have evidence of that as well. In fact, a lot of people I know just don't tell their parents they're doing it for that reason. But, yeah, in terms of your own home, Esther, I mean, has your research changed the way that you think about your own home? How much of this do you bring into your own place?
- [45:57]
A
I do. As I said, I'm sitting here with the desk facing a window. I have windows on either side. I have a smart light to my left. And as I said, I have plants on my patio that remind me that have fragrances that remind me of Greece. But I think that the reason that the fragrances of Greece went so deep was it also reminded me of my mother's garden where she had mock orange bushes which were also that kind of citrusy smell. And so it goes very deep. And fragrances is really an important piece. False sort of synthetic fragrances are not good because they can be allergens. Some of them are. You know, if they're not natural oils, this gets into aromatherapy. So you can have natural oils that are fragrances that are positive and that are healthy. So there's a movement across the United States and Canada, and I don't know if it's in Britain as well, called forest bathing. That started in Korea and Japan. And when I first heard the term, I thought it's people taking a bath in a forest. But it's not. It's that you walk in a forest and you breathe deeply and you let go of all your worries and your cares. And it's really like a walking meditation. And you're inhaling those wonderful biogenic volatility, organic compounds that are released from plants just before a rain. It's also called petrichor. And there's that wonderful smell of rain. Right. That is calming. Well, it's calming not only because it reminds you of a positive experience, but also because many of those volatile organic compounds are anxiety reducers. They're anxiolytics, they're chemicals that you're inhaling into your system. Lavender, for example. Lavender will put an anesthetized rat into slow wave sleep. So it's not that the rat remembers its grandmother putting lavender around the cage, it's that it really is a chemical that puts you to sleep. So there's that aspect that's important. So, yes, I absolutely do things around the home to enhance my own sense of. Of comfort and sanctuary. I want to bring this word up because I also write a blog for Psychology Today, and one of my most popular blogs was on sanctuary and creating sanctuaries at work. But it applies to creating sanctuaries at home. And I think that people nowadays really are seeking safe places to escape all of the many fears and troubles of the world we have no control over whatsoever. And your home can be your sanctuary if you pay attention to these features and to intentionally include them all around you so that you can escape all the pressures and concerns and anxieties that we're facing today.
- [49:31]
B
Yeah, so you're right. I couldn't agree more with that. I've got a final question for you, Esther. If someone listening hasn't particularly thought about their home from a health perspective before, but maybe they've thought about it purely visually, which I think a lot of people do, what would be the kind of first thing that you would ask them to look at, to think about, to do, or even two or three things? What do you think's the most important place to start?
- [49:59]
A
Lighting is very important. Sound is very important. And layout. Layout is important. You can have. If we talk about sanctuary, even if you have a small space, you can have your own little comfortable chair in the corner of a room and put some plants around it, put some pictures that remind you of your loved ones or of. Of a happy time, a vacation, some beautiful paintings that you like. And that tiny little space can be your sanctuary to escape even for a few moments during the day or just before you're going to sleep, to have some downtime to shift into that quiet time for sleep. I think it's also important in terms of sleep, and there's a whole lot of literature on this, for sleep hygiene, to not use your bedroom and your bed as a workspace. You know, if you're using your bed as a workspace, you're like the cat or the dog that associates that carrier to the vet with a negative experience. You're associating. You know, it's hard to get a cat into a carrier. Right. Because they associate that space with the vet. Well, in order to get the cat into the carrier, you put a blanket over their head and put them in the carrier so they don't see the space. Right. Until they're in it. Well, if you work in your bed, then you are associating your bed with being alert, with working, and it's harder to get to sleep again. You don't want blue light in the bedroom. You want redder light in the bedroom and so on. The bed should be used only for two things. For sleep and for sex, but mostly for sleep. So those kinds of things are really important for creating safe places and places that you want to be in to get that sense of calm and safety.
- [52:10]
B
Thank you so much, Esther. It's been really interesting to meet with you and hear your ideas. And so much of what you said today resonates with me as someone who is sensitive to their surroundings, who cares deeply about their home environment. I would fully endorse everything you've said and thoroughly agree with it. So thank you so much.
- [52:33]
A
Well, thank you so much. It's been really a great pleasure. I've enjoyed this conversation so much and I hope it helps your listeners. Thank you.
- [52:41]
B
Yeah, me too. Thank you. Thank you very much for listening along today. And thank you of course to Esther for giving up her time. A reminder that you can sign up to be a Homing member on Patreon, which gets you access to all of our lovely behind the scenes home tours with lots of our guests if you can spare the time. We'd also really appreciate a quick review or a rating on Apple or Spotify or even a friendly comment comment on our YouTube channel if you feel so inclined. You'll find us on all of those at Homing with Matt. This episode was produced by Pod Shop with music by Simeon Walker. Thanks again folks and talk to you next time. Bye bye.