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June 15 - August 31, 2020
A body of research is emerging that demonstrates a clear link between our surroundings and our mental health.
The power of the aesthetics of joy is that they speak directly to our unconscious minds, bringing out the best in us without our even being aware of it.
At the heart of this book lies the idea that joy isn’t just something we find. It’s also something we can make, for ourselves and for those around us.
Too often, we move through the physical world as if it were a stage set, a mute backdrop for our daily activities. Yet in reality it is alive with opportunities for inspiration, wonder, and joy.
when psychologists use the word “joy,” they mean an intense, momentary experience of positive emotion, one that can be recognized by certain telltale signs: smiling, laughing, and a feeling of wanting to jump up and down. While contentment is curled up on the sofa, and bliss is lost in tranquil meditation, joy is skipping, jiving, twirling, giggling. It is a uniquely exuberant emotion, a high-energy form of happiness.
From the moment I first started studying joy, it was clear that the liveliest places and objects all have one thing in common: bright, vivid color.
Though we don’t often think consciously about the connection, it is nearly impossible to separate color and feeling.
Color is energy made visible.
people working in bright, colorful offices were more alert than those working in duller spaces. They were also more joyful, interested, friendly, and confident. The drab tones of most school buildings and offices are understimulating, leading to restlessness and difficulty concentrating. The liveliness of color helps us marshal the energy we need to learn, be productive, and grow.
The lightness of a color has to do with how much white or black is mixed into it. White reflects light, while black absorbs it. So adding white makes a color lighter and more reflective, while adding black makes it darker and more muted.
Matisse’s light, bright palette makes an ideal choice for color inspiration, but other artists I often look at include Helen Frankenthaler, Sonia Delaunay, Pierre Bonnard, and, of course, David Hockney.
it’s clear there’s an equation between color and warmth.
Color pulls joy to the surface. Why do some cultures reserve color only for celebratory moments, while others make it a part of the everyday?
We dismiss color and joy as childish and frivolous, prizing neutral hues as a mark of coolness and mature taste. The color spectrum of the modern home is dictated by a moral compass where self-restraint is true north, and exuberance is an indulgence. The message is clear: to be worthy of society’s approbation, we must outgrow our natural inclinations toward joy or learn to suppress them.
We’ve all been told we should dress for the job we want. But what about dressing for the joy we want?
We might be able to find joy without color, but it would be much harder without light. Every sight we find joyful, from a sunrise to a baby’s face, we owe to light reflected from the environment into our eyes. Light is color’s power supply. But more than that, it’s a pure form of energy that creates joy in its own right.
Light and mood often travel a conjoined orbit: dim the light, and we dim our joy.
The joy we find in a sunlit room is matched by tangible measures of well-being. Research consistently shows that increasing exposure to daylight reduces blood pressure and improves mood, alertness, and productivity. Employees who sit near windows report higher energy levels and tend to be more physically active both in and out of the office. In a study of elementary schools, students in classrooms with the most daylight advanced as much as 26 percent faster in reading and 20 percent faster in math over the course of a year. Hospital patients assigned to sunnier rooms were discharged sooner and
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researchers reached the startling conclusion that light therapy can be as effective at treating depression as antidepressants.
“Put the pale withering plant and human being into the sun,” wrote the famous English nurse Florence Nightingale, “and, if not too far gone, each will recover health and spirit.” In 1860, Nightingale reported that her patients naturally turned toward the light, even as they would complain about the pain of lying on an injured side. “Then why do you lie on that side?” she would ask the patient. “He does not know—but we do. It is because it is the side towards the window.”
As Alexander emphasizes in A Pattern Language, because people are unconsciously attracted to light, the brightest spots will be the ones where people congregate, making these the most lively and joyful hubs of activity in a space. If a space feels dead, a powerful remedy is to create focal points of light where you want people to be.
We think of color as an attribute, but really it’s a happening: a constantly occurring dance between light and matter.
Choosing bulbs with a CRI close to 100 will keep you and your spaces looking bright and colorful.
My research on this aesthetic liberated me to choose colors based not on what others think but on how the colors make me feel.
In studies, adults exhibit significant activation in the emotional regions of the brain when stimulated by touch, taste, or smell. Studies of touch in particular show that it can lead to reduced stress, improved mood, and enhanced attentiveness.
Research has shown that as few as fifteen minutes of sensory deprivation can cause hallucinations, paranoid thoughts, and negative moods.
Sensation is a big part of how the world makes sense to us. Without information coming into the brain, we slowly go insane.
Light regulates our immune response.
what I realized is that Kondo’s philosophy isn’t really minimalism. It’s sanity. After all, we still have plenty of stuff. And now that we can see the things we have, our place actually feels more abundant, not less. That’s because abundance isn’t about just accumulating things. It’s about surrounding yourself with a rich palette of textures that enliven your senses.
It took me a little while to understand why confetti, polka dots, and stripes have such an outsize effect. The reason is deceptively simple: small things repeated many times create a burst of joy much bigger than each individual piece could.
I love rainbow color for its ability to bring joy just about anywhere, even places we don’t expect to be joyful.
Some of the most joyful moments in life are the ones in which we gain a kind of freedom.
Joy thrives on the alleviation of constraints.
And while teachers sometimes worry that windows in a classroom will be distracting to schoolchildren, it turns out that nature views actually improve students’ attention while also decreasing stress.
Not surprisingly, studies show that employees who sit near a window report better overall health and job satisfaction.
Access to nature has been shown to improve sleep quality, decrease blood pressure, and even lengthen lifespan.
joy is wild and free, but sometimes it’s also very organized.
When I thought about it this way, I realized that the joy of order comes in large measure from what it opposes: chaos and disorder. Order isn’t dull and staid. It is a tangible manifestation of a vibrant harmony, of disparate parts working in concert to sustain the graceful balance of life.
Harmony offers visible evidence that someone cares enough about a place to invest energy in it. Disorder has the opposite effect. Disorderly environments have been linked to feelings of powerlessness, fear, anxiety, and depression, and they exert a subtle, negative influence on people’s behavior.
Repeating colors, shapes, or textures in different parts of a room helps our eyes view the room as a whole, rather than a mishmash of disconnected things. This is important because research shows that we’re attracted to environments with a moderately high degree of complexity, but only if the complexity is well structured.
One reason we love symmetry may be that it is an outward symbol of inner harmony.
But what I left Gee’s Bend with is a reminder that harmony lies not just in the perfect, but also in the perfectly imperfect.
Round objects offer unique potential for discovery and delight.
“Why to be serious do things have to look serious?” I believe we unconsciously abide by this principle because our notion of work is rooted in an industrial economy that values efficiency and structure at the expense of joy and creativity.
“The opposite of play is not work,” he often says. “It’s depression.”
