My Hygge Home: How to Make Home Your Happy Place

by Meik Wiking

According to his findings, hygge is a situational sense of ease and pleasure—enjoying the here and now—an atmosphere brought about by the way you are with people, the mood of the encounter, and the feel of the physical space.

Can we design for happiness?

We may not always have control over the events affecting us, but we always have control over how we approach things.

But how our homes impact our well-being remains relatively unexplored.

One large study of European housing and health status by the World Health Organization suggested that inadequate daylight or unattractive window views increased the likelihood of depression in inhabitants by 60 percent and 40 percent, respectively.

“Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

What if we, through having more nurturing and happy homes, could foster more meaningful conversations and stronger relationships?

We need to embrace the idea that spaces and places definitely can have a positive impact on our well-being.

That we can improve our quality of life through changing the spaces around us—and, therefore, that we can design for happiness.

How can we design cities that would make people happier simply by living out their daily lives in them?

It turns out there are similarities across places and spaces where people enjoy spending time.

We seek places where we feel protected, not just from crime and traffic but also from the wind and weather. We seek places that offer comfort and connection, where we can sit comfortably and have conversations. We seek places where we find enjoyment in a beautiful view and the caress of the sun or the shade.

“We need to sit closer together—we need to be able to hear each other and look each other in the eye. That is the foundation for reaching a consensus today.”

Plants add life. Books offer exploration and contemplation.

“If more

song above hoarded gold,

Making summer last until Christmas is a pretty good recipe for happiness.

Hygge is about enjoying the process. About taking things slowly. And looking forward to the delicious results you will enjoy tucked up at home on a quiet wintry evening. It’s about enriching this time at home by knowing that you’ve got plenty of delights in store, ready for the perfect hygge moment. It’s about making your nights in special, and never feeling that you are missing out.

understanding and respecting the ebb and flow of seasonality in nature.

We have found that people whose homes score 7 or above on a scale from 0 to 10 in terms of light are 11.7 percent more likely to report high levels of happiness—for the previous day.

This makes it easy to forget that every living organism on this planet responds to the sun.

Today, light therapy is sometimes applied as a treatment for SAD. The recommendation is thirty minutes of artificial light daily, with an intensity of 10,000 lux, for one or two weeks.

looked into the connection between daylight and depression among three thousand employees in Aarhus. It found that people who are outside in daylight two hours a day have a 40 percent lower risk of becoming depressed.

It found that people who are outside in daylight two hours a day have a 40 percent lower risk of becoming depressed. And it is not just in Denmark where lack of sunlight is linked with depression.

The study found that people who report inadequate natural light in their homes are at greater risk of depression.

What we found was that the more crowded the space, the less satisfied people were with life.

People who lived alone reported being less happy the bigger the space they had.

We found that lack of space is the most important factor explaining why some people are less happy with their homes than others.

Mess causes stress.

When we analyzed the data from the 13,480 homes in the study, we discovered a myth that a lot of us might be carrying around: that we are happier if we live in a larger home.

Most importantly, we found that the perception of space is three times more important than actual size when it comes to being happy with your home.

Interestingly, the perception of space and actual space are not very correlated.

so the question becomes not how we get a bigger home but how we can use design to make us feel happier about our home by designing for spaciousness.

Go by the principle that if something has to come into your home, something else has to go.

you will only replace things that are broken and that you loved. That way you will never end up with drawers full of old, broken, meaningless objects and instead fill your drawers with useful items.

“The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”

The Diderot Effect means that when you buy a new thing, it can create a spiral of consumption that leads you to desire and acquire more new things your former self didn’t need in order to feel happy.

Often we buy something because of a fantasy attached to it.

love

Get recognition from people because of the life you live, not because of the things you have. Remember, it is better to have stories to tell than stuff to show.

So when considering whether to buy an item, think about whether you would like to wrap it up, put it in a box, carry it to the moving van, then take it out of the van and into your new place. Six times.

THINK OF THE COST IN TERMS OF TIME

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

The greatest threat to capitalism is everyone feeling happy enough that they no longer need to buy anything to make them so. Which means that staying at home and finding comfort and joy in what you already have is an act of rebellion. This is what hygge is truly all about—living the good life on a tight budget. It is the enjoyment of simple pleasures. It is the art of creating a nice, warm, comforting atmosphere.

the researchers found that patients who could look at the green trees healed on average one day faster, had fewer post-surgical complications and needed significantly less pain medicine than their wall-facing counterparts.

A large photograph of a tree-lined stream, a large photograph of a shadowy forest, a blank wall, a white panel, or one of two different abstract paintings. The study found that the patients with the large photograph of the stream and trees were less anxious and needed fewer doses of strong pain medicine than those with the darker forest photograph, the abstract art, or the blank wall or white panel.

powerful

But there are convincing studies that show that looking at scenes of greenery and nature can reduce pain and stress, and since stress has a negative effect on your immune system, there are health and well-being benefits

There is research that shows that a large number of plants can purify the air we breathe, particularly Spider Plants, Boston Ferns, and Ficus Trees. Caring for plants has also been shown to reduce stress and boost your mood, because it allows you to focus on something natural away from a screen, and also experience the rewards of caring for something that you can watch flourish.

happiness does not have to come with a price tag.

Hygge is about living the good life on a low budget and using your space for living rather than for storage of your stuff. Hygge

What we found was a significant increase in social connectivity among the participants in the role-playing games.