🎪 Spaces Designed for Better Breathing, Scratch and Sniff Photo Albums, & Caffeinated Corridors

Mind your step as you enter the worlds of wide-eyed wonder, better breathing, and green medicine.

Welcome back fellow space travellers! Mind Your Step as you enter the Solar System of Issue 11!

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At the intersection of psychology and environment design, Mind Your Step is the weekly newsletter to read if you want to learn how to design spaces that influence the way people think.

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🕳️ Enter the World of Tunnels

A Cenotaph’s Corridor: The Light at the End of the Tunnel

There’s something so visceral to me about this image of a person walking into the depths of a seemingly endless corridor, to then be greeted with an overwhelming amount of awe-inspiring magnificence.

“In order for you to reach the inside you need to walk into this long tunnel. You're walking for almost 150 meters in the darkness. The more you walk you feel yourself getting farther and farther and farther from reality.

Once you reach the end you're in this grand concrete sphere. You feel this sense of release. And you're inspired by the magnitude of the space.”

You ever notice how some places have the ability to make us more alert to the world around us. Like how after spending time in a movie theatre, the outside looks so much brighter and we seem to become painfully more attune to the details in our surroundings.

We have the phrase “tunnel vision” to describe the state of extreme focus on one thing. But what do we have to describe the “post tunnel vision” experience? The one where after an extended period of peripheral deprivation, our focus expands into an immersive blast of sensory overload.

The world is often brighter at the end of the tunnel and if it’s true that we’re more vigilant after periods of sensory deprivation, then I wonder if we can use that concept as a tool for creating more wonder-filled experiences.

What if there was a scientific study that successfully proved a connection between temporary sensory deprivation and subsequent increased openness to wonder. Since, I don’t know of any such research off the top of my head, for now, we can call it the post-tunnel vision hypothesis.

Post-tunnel vision hypothesis: If a person engages in temporary sensory deprivation, then they will become more alert when re-exposed to sensory stimuli.

If we accept the post-tunnel vision hypothesis, then questions we might consider are:

• Where could our world benefit from “tunnels”? For example, let’s say we have two amusement parks: one where we have to walk through a dark tunnel in order to reach the park and the other without a tunnel. Would our initial reaction of the park with a tunnel feel more awe-inspired?

• Could simply closing our eyes more often increase how vigilant we are afterward? Have you ever gone into a room that seemed so dark that you weren’t able to see your own hand right in front of your face. And then noticed that if you close your eyes really hard for several seconds and open them again, you could see details through the darkness? I wonder if we could take advantage of that process in daylight in order to increase our vigilance.

• Are we under-designing our bedrooms? If we were to look up bedroom design inspiration for different ages, we’d notice that the older we get, the more simpler the design becomes. As adults, we hear advice about sleep hygiene and how we should design our bedroom for the purpose of effective sleep. If sleep is our longest everyday version of sensory deprivation, then I wonder if we should instead be asking how we can design our bedroom for the purpose of waking up more effectively. Just like how re-entering a seemingly brighter reality after leaving a movie theatre gives our system a healthy jolt, I wonder if we can jumpstart our days more effectively if we were to wake up in a more wonder-filled environment.

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🌬️ Enter the World of Aromatherapy

Bottled Biographies

Scent has a special power to teleport us back into the spaces of our past. What if we could use the art of parfumerie to bottle our biographies?

Imagine a scratch and sniff photo album, for example. Where we could take scented snapshots of the smells that define our life in the same way we take pictures. Where we could flip through an album of our life, land on a picture of us baking gingerbread cookies with our Nonna on a Christmas when we were kids. And where we could scratch the photo, take a sniff, and smell the freshly baked cookies and the faint smell of Chanel No. 5.

Augmented Air: How to Use Air & Aroma to Augment Our Mind

You ever notice how our bodies seem to forget how to breathe when we're afraid?

• We gasp in shock and inadvertently hold our breath.

• We scream when terrified and forget to inhale for a couple seconds.

• We wake up from our nightmares in quick shallow hyperventilation.

• We pass a paper bag for a person to breathe into when they’re panicking.

• We grasp for our inhalers when fear triggers our asthma.

• And when we're feeling anxious, we remind ourselves to focus on our breathing and we recite instructions on how to do it. Take slow deep breaths. Inhale on four. Hold on four. Exhale on four. Hold on four.

For us fans of fear-fuelled horror, forgetting how to breath is a favourite past time. But in these days where it seems like a lot of us are experiencing some degree of anxiety, breathing experts seem to agree that 8 in 10 people have forgotten how to breath correctly (effectively and beneficially).

I had a stressful week last week. And when it comes to coping with stress, I've tried using breathing techniques in the past, but I’ve never felt them to be a big help. But something happened recently that re-convinced me to their potential benefits.

Two magnolia trees bloomed outside my window.

The smell of their flowers has been wafting in with the wind. Plus, it's been a rainy week here in Toronto, so the smell of petrichor along with the smell of these magnolia trees have been fully saturating the air in my place.

In spite of feeling stressed, I noticed myself taking in deeper breaths to savour the scented air. And in those moments, I clearly noticed myself feeling calmer. And it got me wondering about how aroma might be used to augment air and motivate more intentional breathing.

Even more specifically, I started to question:

• how different scents influence our neurology? For instance, there are fragrances and odours that actually change brain function. Ex. lavender is a chemical. Not only does it smell sweet and make us feel calm, it's a chemical that has been shown to induce slow wave sleep in animals.

• whether nice smelling spaces truly result in us breathing better? I wonder if we truly are more likely to breathe more deeply and potentially more effectively in places with certain scents.

• whether fortified air is a thing and how we can use it to influence our health? In the same way that some people squeeze lemon into their water for the health boost, I wonder if there’s anything we can add to our air to make it nutritious or beneficial.

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🚽 Enter the World of Marked Territories

Pee Shields

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🧭 Enter the World of People Who Know Where to Go

Comfort & Wonder

Comfort and wonder are two of my favourite feelings and I love trying to emulate those in the design of my home.

Few things make me happier than when someone walks into my place and says something like:

• “it’s so cozy in here”,

• or “there’s literally something interesting to look at in every corner”.

There are some people we call up because they know all the tastiest restaurants or all the coolest clubs. They’re known by their friends as the person who knows where to find all the best { insert environment here }.

I think it would be so cool to be able to fill in that blank with qualities like comfort or wonder for myself.

Any idea how you’d want to fill in that blank for yourself?

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🌿 Enter the World of Natural Medicine

The Psychological Benefits of Nature

I sometimes entertain the daydream that someday I’ll feel knowledgable and creative enough to start a YouTube channel. And if I ever did, then this video would be in my inspiration board for the type of videos I think I’d really enjoy making. — An aesthetic and thought-provoking exploration of how our surroundings influence our mind and wellbeing.

Here are some of my favourite highlights:

• Despite spending 99% of our evolutionary history outdoors, we now spend 93% of our time either indoors or in vehicles.

• In one study of 400 Londoners, life satisfaction fell by 0.5% for every extra 10 milligrams of pollution in their area.

• In a study of 2000 men, environmental noises like traffic of 50 decibels led to a 20% increase in hypertension or high blood pressure.

• In another study of 5000 adults, a 10 decibel increase of noise at night resulted in a 14% rise in hypertension.

• Studies have found that having a school near an airport leads to lower scores in reading tests.

• Walks in the forest have been found to decrease cortisol levels by 12%, blood pressure by 1.3%, and heart rate by 6%, for days and days after.

• Studies have confirmed that being in nature reduces anxiety and improves mood.

• One experiment showed 120 individuals films of accidents in workshops. The researchers measured things like sweat levels, heart rate, blood and pressure. They were divided into 2 groups and one group was shown scenes of nature and the other was shown urban scenes. Those who were shown the scenes of nature were back to their baseline in 5 minutes. Whereas those watching urban scenes were only partway back 10 minutes later.

• Another studied groups of businessmen hiking in the woods for a few hours each day. It found that immunity boosting white blood cells were 40% higher after their walk and still 15% higher a month later compared with those who did not walk.

• Studies have shown that creativity improves by up to as much as 50% 3 days after hiking.

• Hospital rooms with windows of nature tends to reduce patients’ recovery time.

• Housing estates with views of nature have less crime.

• One study of 40 million people found that people that live in greener areas have lower death rates.

• Some have found that people walking in nature ruminate over negative thoughts less.

• In another study, researchers showed one group of people scenes of nature that were simple, flat, and predictable. While showing another group scenes of nature with winding paths, unpredictable landscape, and obscured scenery — scenes that evoked a sense of adventure and mystery. The latter group remembered the details of the scenes more successfully. In other words, exploration activates memory.

• A study found that people who watched awe-inspiring videos were more likely to help them pick up the pens they pretended to drop.

I’ve been really enjoying studying all things environment design lately. But sometimes I think to myself “okay it’s nice that you’ve found something that interests you so much, but where are you going with all of this.” And long lists like this are a good reminder of the potentially life-altering benefits we can find from thinking critically about how we interact with our spaces. Where environment design meets positive wellbeing is the place where I aspire to make a meaningful impact.

Thanks for accompanying me on these world travels!

Lamar ✌️👽

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