Light and Wellbeing
DID YOU KNOW?
(Harvard Business Review)
Light affects your health
Most of us live in a man-made environment, often without enough access to daylight. Yet studies have shown that light exposure has an impact on our mood and reduces symptoms of depression. Exposure to light has also been directly linked with health and can affect how we recover and heal. This makes sense when you go back to basics. Circadian rhythms are internal processes naturally occurring in our body.
They are tied to our body clock and therefore they repeat roughly every 24 hours. These natural processes affect most living things and mainly respond to light and dark.
Why Natural Light is Important
A 2014 study showed that office workers with more light exposure in the workplace tended to have longer sleep duration, better sleep quality, more physical activity, and better quality of life compared to office workers with less light exposure at the workplace. So it follows that employee’s physical and mental wellbeing can be improved via enhanced indoor lighting for those with insufficient daylight as well as increased emphasis on light exposure in the design of future offices.
It is not always possible to give natural daylight to all employees in all buildings. Those working in the centre of a building and those in basements will see little or no natural daylight whilst indoors, which could have a detrimental effect on health and wellbeing. Lighting products which emulate windows and skylights provide the right type of light at different times of the day. This specialist lighting has different types of LEDs combined to create a light spectrum which is very similar to that found in nature. The light resembles a view of the sky or a horizon, with continuously shifting, infinite colours and infinite resolution, to help restore circadian rhythms and improve sleep quality and overall wellbeing.