How Can Your Home Look After Your Wellbeing?

The phrase “got out the wrong side of bed” really hits home, especially in lockdown. If you’ve had insufficient or disturbed sleep, it instantly sets your mood for the day: a bad one!

We can improve our sleep cycles by working to “circadian rhythms”. These are our bodies’ natural sleep and waking times, which are often governed by natural light. As the sun goes down, we begin to feel sleepier, and vice versa. This is why artificial or ‘blue light’ is so damaging.

To encourage a better sleep cycle, we can use home tech like automated blinds. These will naturally wind down as the sun begins to set, and open again gently in rhythm with your sleep cycle. You can customise them based on the season, and enjoy better sleep.

Not only does staying indoors limit our access to the healing powers of the sun; it also exposes us to potential harm. Our homes are full of impurities, from paint fumes to cleaning products. Living in Britain, it’s unreasonable to expect us to have our windows open all year – so what’s the alternative?

Technology such as the Darwin air quality monitor can detect impurities in our household air and filter them out. By improving our indoor air quality, we can reduce respiratory irritation, lower our blood pressure and even enjoy better productivity.

Natural light does more than just wake us up in the morning. It can also have myriad effects on our productivity and wellbeing! Sunlight naturally increases our productivity because:

• It boosts our mood
• It wakes us up
• It increases Vitamin D, which is vital for cognitive function

We can maximise our natural light with clever placement of windows and blinds. But we can also use artificial, automated lights to work to our natural rhythms. For example, in home office environments, we might program artificial lights to be brighter during working hours, while winding down in the evening, or even changing colour for relaxed settings.

With gyms still closed or operating on a restricted basis, more of us are turning to workouts in the home. We can improve our home gym environments with home speaker systems – helping us work harder to songs with up-tempo beats, or wind down for stretching sessions.

Exercise offers a whole host of benefits for both our physical and mental health. For example:

• Better blood flow encourages oxygen to reach the brain, boosting productivity
• Exercise releases endorphins – ‘feel good’ chemicals
• Stronger bodies have better immune systems
• Managing our weight helps ward off health conditions later in life.

Having access to this in the home environment may also allay the concerns of hitting the gym. While hygiene worries remain in the time of the pandemic, there are also confidence issues. Not all of us are happy working out in view of others, while some prefer not to be bound by class timetables.

If there’s one thing that lockdown has taught us, it’s that we all need to take better care of ourselves. For more information on how home enhancements can help, speak to the SONA team today.