62 brilliant stress management
environment will help stimulate and refresh your senses and
your mind, on top of the obvious benet to your brain of the
fresh air and exercise.
‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to
be useful, or believe to be beautiful.’
William Morris
What William Morris is saying, simply, is ll your life with nice
stuff. You may or may not be able to do this at work, but even in
the most austere workplaces there is a tiny scope for some per-
sonalisation. If possible, create some sort of stimulus to prompt
your best thinking and create the most conducive environment
for yourself that you can.
When you can’t, you need to create somewhere lovely and
comforting and stimulating for yourself somewhere where you
do have control: your home. For some people this is family
photos, hand-me-down ornaments and comfy slippers. For
others, it is natural objects, beautiful artwork and treasured
books, or maybe a music system and some favourite record-
ings, or a cupboard full of cookery ingredients and measuring
jugs. Whatever it is, make this your escape hatch to your own
private world where you can do your own thing and gradually
discharge your stress.
Your sensory environment: smells, noise, light and
colour
Other aspects of your environment are equally important. In
fact, one could argue that, as smell is our most primitive sense,
plugged into the most fundamental part of our brains, this is
more important to our wellbeing than almost anything. Yet how
many of us give it more than a passing thought?
Control your environment 63
Smells
It is unlikely that you will be able to do much to control the smells
in your workplace, but your home is yours to manage. There is
a vast array of fragrance products on the market, but for real
mastery of how scent affects mood, wellbeing and stress, we need
to turn to the art of aromatherapy. Aromatherapists use essential
oils derived from plant extracts to treat a range of ailments, using
massage, baths or simply letting the scent infuse a room.
The last of these approaches is safe with most oils, but it is worth
seeking expert advice, as many of the oils have potent effects
and can be dangerous to some medical conditions. An example
is clary sage which can cause problems for pregnant women and
people with epilepsy.
brilliant
list
Some essential oils widely recommended to help with aspects of stress
Clary sage
Geranium
Lavender
Mandarin
Neroli
Rose
Sandalwood
Ylang Ylang
Do consult an expert source for advice on which to use and how to use them.
Noise
The levels and types of noises in your environment can be either
a stressor, or can help relieve your stress, so, once again, consider
64 brilliant stress management
what you can do to adjust your sound environment. Here are
three suggestions.
Do as you would be done by
Set the tone by adjusting your phone so that you don’t have to
shout to be heard, and keep desk or workstation conversations
at a subdued level.
Block it out
In an industrial, construction or workshop setting, ear defenders may
be a mandatory feature of health and safety precautions, but you may
be able to request them (or buy your own) if they are not – as long as
an inability to hear does not cause a safety risk. In an ofce environ-
ment, earplugs are a cheap and unobtrusive option – as long as you
don’t need to be able to hear a ringing phone. If you do, a visual cue
extension, as used by people with hearing difculties, is an option.
Many workplaces may frown on music headsets, but, if it is
appropriate, you can design your sound-scape to meet your own
preferences.
Cover it up
Some people have trouble sleeping or concentrating because of
unwanted ambient noise, and radio or music will not help them.
A solution is white noise – the hiss you get from a de-tuned
FM radio. You can buy white noise generators, but why bother
when you can just de-tune an FM radio! With the switch-over
to digital radio in many countries, old FM radios will be easy to
nd and come ready de-tuned!
Classical music
Researchers from the University of California and Mount Sinai
Medical Centre have shown that music can improve heart-rate
recovery from stress. However, not all music selections are effec-
tive: it was classical music that caused blood pressure to drop
faster in their research subjects. Of course, they only tried a
Control your environment 65
limited number of selections (Pachelbel’s ‘Canon’, and ‘Spring’
from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons), and some classical music is unlikely
to be relaxing, like large chunks of Wagner, but it does point you
towards another resource.
Light
The brightness and quality (mixture of colours) of light can
affect our moods, but there is one type of light that seems
to have the greatest positive effect on our mood: natural
daylight. There is even a mental health syndrome linked to
wintertime, when there is less of it: seasonal affective dis-
order, sometimes known as SAD, or the winter blues. You
cannot always get more daylight into your work space or
home, but you can pop out at breaks to get some fresh air
and daylight.
Colour
There is limited research on the effects of colour on our emo-
tions, and most of it focuses on trying to understand how colour
affects buying decisions. So we have to be careful about inter-
preting how colour in your environment will affect your stress
levels and acknowledge that the one person who knows best is
you.
That said, there is some interesting research by Naz Kaya and
Helen Epps at the University of Georgia, where they asked
people to rate the extent to which 13 different colours evoke
each of 23 emotions (including ‘no emotion’). Whilst these
self-ratings did not measure actual emotions, the results are con-
sistent with a lot of un-researched assertions and fragmentary
research results on the effects of colour on mood. For us, the
particularly relevant ndings are:
Green was most strongly associated with the emotions of
‘condent’ and ‘peaceful’.
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