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Your environment has more of an impact on your behavior than you might think. You are what you regularly consume. Whether it’s food, books, shows, ideas, points of views, or social media, your environment is constantly influencing you. Which brings me to my next questions: what are you regularly consuming around you that is making you feel like you do; is it a specific mindset, specific environmental cues, or foods? And: what can you consume more of to have things like an improved mood, increased alertness, increased energy, and improved decision-making? You can start with having a new perspective about your environment.
According to Kurt Lewin, an American social psychologist born in Germany, behavior is a function of the individual and their environment (Kurt Lewin, 2022; Saxe, 2010). That is to say that how you behave is not only due to your personal qualities, knowledge, and traits inside of you, but also, for example, how your environment is designed. Your environment’s odours, noise, and temperature have the power to impact your emotions, life quality, and well-being regardless of your awareness of these subtleties or not (Norwood, M., Lakhani, A., Maujean, A., Zeeman, H., Creux, O., & Kendall, E., 2019). The environment has been noted to influence your: mood, memory, attention, alertness, energy, decision making, and stress level. Here I will give you ways how to do that.
Improve mood: Being in a good mood influences cognitive performance, eating behaviors, decision-making behaviors, and even helping behaviors. If you wish to improve your mood through your environment, your space should capture familiar elements of nature, pleasant odours, a comfortable temperature that mimics that of a warm spring day, and predictable and familiar natural sounds with very limited anthropogenic noise.
Improve memory: To improve your chances of remembering something, stay well hydrated in an enriched environment with pleasant scents, a reduced noise level, and neutral temperatures.
Increase attention: This space captures elements of nature such as wood, pleasant scents, and is fairly quiet in a cool and bright environment.
Increase alertness: Picture a space that captures a melodic alarm sound first thing in the morning, elements of nature such as wood and greens, high illuminance, a pleasant peppermint scent, and both intermittent and bright lights.
Increase your energy: If you’d like to be in an environment that increases your energy, it should be a sensory enriched space full of saturated colors and exposure to bright lighting which naturally means lots of windows.
Improve decision-making: If you’d like to make a good decision, stay well hydrated in a neutral mood, with a neutral amount of extrinsic acute stress, avoid a peppermint scent or a highly scented environment, and be in a, both, neutral as well as a comfortable temperature.
Decrease stress: To decrease stress, try things like a blue light to accelerate the process of de-stressing , be in a sensory-rich environment with pleasant scents such as the smell of plants -especially pelargonium-, and your pick between lavender scents or instrumental music.
Did any of these surprise you? Which piece of advice are you most excited to try out? Feel free to leave a comment down below.
How to Improve Your Life Using Aromachology
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