The effect of light on mental health
The importance of light on people’s lives has been considerable that primitives thought about different ways of lighting in the absence of sun many years before civilization. Later, if you notice to each ear of the history, you will see different types of lights for that era which supplied their energy in different ways. Finally, the invention of electricity revolutionized everything. It is not a big claim to say that when human could use light easily in every time of the day and night, s/he entered a new stage of his/her life on the earth. Indeed light is one of the most important needs of human. If you want to know more about effect of life on mental health, follow this article to the end.
Seasonal Depression
The fact is that the importance of light in the way of functioning our minds as human is huge. Have you ever heard about seasonal depression? This is a real disorder in peoples’ health. Most people experience some symptoms such as depression, lack of energy and motivation and other negative feelings in cold seasons that sun rarely appears in the sky and it not possible to use light and sun without any external reason. Researchers believe that these people suffer from seasonal depression in the absence of sun. It is interesting to know that their temper comes back to normal after the weather getting warmer and sunny days come back. The impact of light on mind health is not limited to this point. This type of depression may happen many times without prior background. Vitamin D deficiency that is made by sunlight is the main reason of seasonal depression. That’s why it is popular to consistently use vitamin D in the form of tablets and nutrients in cold countries. If we don’t live in a cold country, we still might face vitamin D deficiency because industrial life may not allow us to use sunlight properly.
Light: A Natural Life Simulator
The impact of light on mental health has a direct relationship with quality of peoples’ lives. According to the researches of mental health physicians, individuals who are living in houses with many windows which are full of light, will be more patient by the time when facing problems and difficulties and they will show more reasonable reactions. In addition to that, natural sunlight at home helps natural physically and mentally grow-up of children.
These days, keeping houseplants and flowers at homes are popular and suitable amount of light guarantees their survival. In this way, you can simulate an environment like real nature just by using natural light, flowers and green house plants.
Therefore, please keep in mind that spending time in dark places, will be the reason of anxiety, confusion, anger and negative impact on vision through time.
The Importance of Environmental Light Design
So far we have become more familiar with the effect of light on mind health in this article. The question is that how lighting can help us in this matter? The fact is that most people that suffer from mental problems due to lack of light, will change the lighting conditions in their life and work places so that they can take care of their body and mind more than before.
The place of studying, reception, serving food, working and sleeping require a special design. Architects usually work on each space for hours and you as a shopper will choose a house which is compatible with your mental criteria. However, how much have you noticed to light design in a house?
The amount of light in the house, having a glass wall or large windows and direction of the house are important factors in in analyzing design of an environment lighting. However, because of many reasons such as plan, space limitation, and ordered designs and so on, it is common that many houses doesn’t have proper lighting. What is the solution here?
Because light deficient especially natural light, can make some mental and physical diseases, there should be a light designer to enter and find a way for making better in the space. Using different lights that consume less energy, in the form of collection in some points, division and decomposition of the light source to smaller and wider sources in the space and using LED lamps are the solutions that can be effective at this stage. Using LED lamps are recommended many times and the reason is more than their reasonable price. LEDs are less dangerous among other available lightings in the market and because of that they are popular.
The important of light effect on mental health is so obvious for every one however, we sometimes forget that how much depriving enough light could be troublesome. In sum, providing suitable conditions for using natural light during the day and being in suitable lighting conditions in other hours of the day, are important factors for out mental and physical health.
Edited by Behnaz Mahdavi