The Impact of Natural Light on the Mental Health of the People

"The impact architecture has on a person's mood is huge. Arguably the fundamentals of architecture are not how it looks, but how we feel it, through the way it allows us to act, behave, think and reflect,” says Dr. Melanie Dodd, program director of spatial practices at the Central St. Martins Art School.

Would you really like to work in this place for nearly half a day?

This kind of working space would be perceived by our minds as the picture given below.

Natural light has a great physiological impact on our mental health. We can never imagine ourselves working in such conditions. We can never imagine ourselves spending 90% of our time in an office which has no exposure to natural light through windows. Visible light helps the human body to regulate the production of the hormone called Melatonin, which in turn helps to regulate our body clock, affecting sleep patterns and digestion. The work-efficiency of the workers, their alertness, and their mental concentration is directly and strongly related to the amount of exposure of the natural light. If we are told to work in offices like these, we will never be able to work. In fact, it will lead to increased error rates and risks of injury.

Visible Light helps in the production of a neurotransmitter, serotonin (happy hormone) which further helps in reducing the symptoms of depression. If people are asked to work here, they will take stress which will lead to fear and the activation of the Amygdala—detects fears and prepares for emergency events—which is certainly not good. After knowing all the physiological facts, one would want to work in place A and not in place B. It’s not really the “beauty” or the “attractive part of that place” that your brain perceives, before putting itself to work. It sees its positivity, proportionality, the space provided for the movements, and whether it has a connection to the nature.

Place A 

Place B

An architect has to keep such physiological facts in his/her head since her building or the ‘Space’ that he/she has to work on, has to be user-friendly. It has to have that structure, that freedom of movement, and an access to the nature. His/her client or the users of that place will definitely like a place which helps their minds to work faster and makes them more efficient, better than a place where they’ll just be overworked and stressed out all the time. An architect can really control how a person would feel inside the space that he/she has created. Thus, it is totally in the hands of an architect and his/her conceptual designs, to make a person feel that, that place is the right place to be in!