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Your Home’s Lighting Affects Your family’s Wellbeing

Everyone wants to live in a happy home. The quality of life at home affects every aspect of existence. For example, a dull or depressing home will make it difficult for people to have a positive outlook towards their work, social interactions, personal growth and other issues. No one family member can create a truly happy home – it requires an effort from everyone. However, there are situations where no matter how much effort is made, the atmosphere at home is negative and this prevents the home and the people in it from being as happy as they could be. There are several reasons why this could be so. One of the most common, and yet most often overlooked, is the way the home is lit.



Lighting And Mood

Ask people what they think of a dull dark rainy day and almost all of them will tell you that it is depressing. Ask them about a bright, clear sunny day and the answer is the opposite. Lighting affects mood and there is a huge volume of established scientific research to prove this. The term “mood lighting” is an accurate one that refers to how lighting affects our moods. Light has a massive impact on both our physical as well as psychological wellbeing. All creatures have natural active and sleep cycles. For some, like bats and other nocturnal animals, the active period is at night in the dark. For others, including human beings, it is daytime, with its natural sunlight, that is the active period.

Unfortunately, the modern world conspires to keep most of us indoors for a large part, if not all, of the day. That means we spend our time with limited amounts of exposure to the positive influence of sunlight. A large amount of the lighting we live with indoors is artificial. Artificial light does not have the natural power to give us the physical and mental stimulus we need to perform at a high level. In fact, overexposure to artificial lighting, as reputed studies show, can be injurious to health. Research proves that excess exposure to LED, CFL, neon or even old incandescent or halogen lighting can make people nervous and irritable. It can also cause insomnia. Most people when asked if they feel more positive and creative when working on their laptops outdoors, in sunlight, as compared to being indoors in artificial light, said yes.

Bring Natural Light Indoors

We need to live and work, for the most part, indoors. However, that does not mean that our exposure to sunlight and its natural benefits should be curtailed. Maximizing the use of sunlight indoors during the daytime will help to counter the negative effects of long exposure to artificial light. The problem with this is that often windows do not permit as much light as possible to enter. The reasons range from the size of the windows, the direction they face, exterior obstructions that block light or other geographical or climatic factors.

The installing of daylighting systems that capture sunlight from the roof and carry it through walls to even the most interior parts of a home offers the best, and most cost-effective way of maximizing the use of sunlight indoors. Contact a daylighting systems dealer to learn more about these systems, how they work, how effective they are, how simple installation is and why they are right for your home.

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