Did you know that the buildings we inhabit throughout our lives actually have an impact on our mental health and wellbeing? One of the primary ways this can occur in our homes is through their impact on our quality of sleep.
Sleep quality has long been linked to psychological well-being and cognitive function. This has been shown in multiple studies, including The Role of Sleep Quality in the Psychological Well-Being of Final Year Undergraduate Students in China and The Impact of Optimized Daylight and Views on the Sleep Duration and Cognitive Performance of Office Workers, which are both provided by the National Library of Medicine. It is safe to say that the getting quality sleep is essential for maintaining good mental health.
This is true for humans at least. Apparently, elephants are content with only two hours of sleep per day!
So how can we design our homes in a way that facilitates quality sleep? The first method we’ll consider is by improving access to natural daylight. In 2014, the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine conducted a study in which they analyzed the “Impact of Windows and Daylight Exposure on Overall Health and Sleep Quality of Office Workers.” Their study showed that participants in environments with more exposure to natural light experienced much better sleep than their counterparts. In their conclusion, they wrote, “We suggest that architectural design of office environments should place more emphasis on sufficient daylight exposure of the workers in order to promote office workers’ health and well-being.”
Many of us spend most of our time in our homes, especially as more and more people are working remotely these days. Designing our homes with windows that minimize glare while offering plentiful natural light will help us maintain a healthy circadian rhythm and, consequently, improve our sleep.
The second method to consider is the acoustic comfort in our bedrooms. As shown in this 2014 study titled the “Effect of nocturnal road traffic noise exposure and annoyance on objective and subjective sleep quality,“ sound levels and noise exposure can also have a significant impact on our quality of sleep. One of the things that is striking about this study is that sleep efficiency was decreased more significantly for participants who were not annoyed with traffic noise!
Knowing that noise can negatively affect sleep quality, we should also design our homes in ways that provide good acoustic comfort in our bedrooms. Some simple design strategies we can incorporate to accomplish this include:
1) Locating our bedrooms further away from the public areas of the house,
2) Providing barriers between sleeping rooms and high traffic areas, and
3) Constructing the bedrooms walls with additional mass or decoupling components to improve their sound transmission class (STC) rating.
It is exciting to consider that incorporating some simple design strategies shown to help improve sleep quality can positively affect our mental health and wellbeing! Designing houses that care for us as much as we care for them is part of what transforms these simple structures into places we can call our homes.
