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This article was originally published in Sherborne Times, December 2023
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I’ve worked as a lighting designer for the best part of 40 years, lighting clients’ homes and businesses. But in all that time we’ve only ever talked about the visual effect of lighting on the way that we live and work. That changed for me recently, when I was asked to investigate the re-lighting of a care home from the point of view of resident’s physiological and psychological health. Can we do that?
Lighting for health and wellbeing has been a serious topic in the lighting industry for the past decade, following research coming out of universities around the world. We now understand more – though certainly not all – about the ways that the body responds to light. Light isn’t the simple bright thing that we thought; there are processes going on in our bodies, driven by our exposure to Light.
There is a thing called circadian rhythm, and we all have one. ‘Circadian’ simply means ‘daily’. We have a daily pattern that is based on our relationship with light. To understand that we need to divide our day into three active phases:
Daytime: coming into the day after, hopefully, a good night’s sleep, the brain is ready to receive visual indicators that it’s time to wake up. You’re probably reading this at the darkest time of the year and we all know how difficult it can be to get out of bed while it’s still dark outside. Unlike the summer, when there’s no need to switch a light on to get up, wintertime calls for all the stimulation that we can get. While the alarm clock wakes us up, it doesn’t send vital information from eye to brain. We need artificial illumination to help provide that stimulation.
And if we’re indoors during the day, like so many of us at work or home, we need to find ways to introduce good quality artificial daylight into our rooms. It needs to be brighter than we’d normally expect from our home lighting, which might sound odd but, as I said at the start, we’re trying to do far more than just illuminate the room.
Frist action note: We need to introduce blue-rich white light into our rooms. ‘Cool’ LED bulbs can be used in table lamps and floor lamps. As I say, we need at least twice as much brightness than we’re used to, and what I’m suggesting are a number of dedicated ‘daylight’ lamps placed around the main daytime rooms. This sounds like a trip to B&Q (other retailers are available!)
Evening: evening time is a transition period for most of us. The working day is done and we’re ready for that soft descent into a relaxing evening. That bright lighting needs to fall away and the cool colour of daylight needs to shift towards warm, candle-like tones.
In a care home environment, this will all happens over a three – four hour period. It’s not the flick of a switch, in the same way that sunset doesn’t happen immediately (unless you’re somewhere around the Equator – where different circumstances apply). We want our internal systems to recognise that there’s a steady change taking place that will eventually lead us to our duvets.
Second action note: because we don’t all live in care homes our own domestic lighting DOES function at the flick of a switch. And that’s the way that we do it. We turn off the daylight lamps and shift to our familiar home lighting.
Home lighting needs to be warm in tone, making our living spaces feel cosy. We’re starting to see LED bulbs come along that are warmer than the old filament lamps that we grew up with – making for an even cosier ambience.
But there is something else going on in our lives that needs to be thought about . . .
One contentious issue is the role that social media and electronic devices play in our lives. Research is suggesting that looking at e-books and phones doesn’t have that much of an impact on sleep patterns – we may take ten minutes more to fall asleep, which we think is OK, but research suggests a significant difference when those devices are put away an hour before bedtime; while there is an argument that the real cause of disturbance is the content that we’re accessing. That’s the contentious bit – especially among habitual surfers.
Nighttime: the ideal bedtime condition is a dark room – and a room that’s a bit cooler than our living spaces. Black-out conditions provide the best way for the body to relax and to allow our internal systems to ‘repair’ themselves. We may think that there’s nothing going on, but the internal workings of the body’s systems are as busy while we’re asleep as when we’re awake.
Third action note: If you can’t make the room dark, then invest in sleep masks And if you need to have light around, maybe for that 3am trip to the loo, then invest in a plug-in light for the landing, tuned to amber, mimicking candlelight.
A good night’s sleep sets us up for the early morning indicators that it’s daytime again – and time to get up and go through the whole processes again.
That 24-hour process is called the sleep-wake cycle – and, to be honest, we’ve not been very good at managing it for ourselves. But then again, we probably didn’t know how important it was – until now.
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