Can Your Home Make You Healthier? – With Dr. Esther Sternberg

0:00If you're exposed in the evening to 30 minutes of blue light, that's as alerting, as awakening, as a cup of coffee. I think that people nowadays really are seeking safe places to escape all of the many fears and troubles of the world. We have no control over whatsoever. And your home can be your sanctuary if you pay attention to these features and to intentionally include them all around you.

0:39Esther Sternberg:Hi there, welcome back to Homing. Today's episode is part of our foundation series and I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Esther Sternberg. She's a physician and researcher whose work focuses on the relationship between mind, body and environment. Esther's the author of the books Healing Spaces and Well at Work, which both explore the growing science around how the spaces we inhabit affect our health. Esther argues that our homes are constantly sending signals to the nervous system. She believes that architects should think of themselves not just as designers, but almost as health professionals. In this conversation, we discuss how our environments shape the body and the brain, the role of light, sound and nature in well-being, and how small changes to our homes can help create a sense of sanctuary in an increasingly anxious world.

1:39Esther Sternberg:I think there are some really interesting ideas in here, and they might just encourage you to look at your home in a slightly different light. That's the idea anyway. So here it is, and I hope you enjoy it. So the first question I ask most of my guests, and I want to ask you as well because I'm curious, how would you define the word home? You know, I think, Matt, it's a really interesting question. And your second question that you sent on your pre-recording notes of whether it's a physical place or a psychological place, and I think it's both. There's no question that it is both. And, you know, you can think about it when you're looking for a place to live.

2:23You walk into a space and right away you feel at home or you don't feel at home. And there are subtle cues that I think most of us aren't consciously aware of. I certainly wasn't consciously aware of these kinds of cues before I started working with architects and building experts. so for example if I can give you an example from my own life I moved into a new house in Washington DC and I redid the deck in the back overlooking the garden and I didn't realize until the deck was finished that I had exactly reproduced my mother's deck in my mother's home in Montreal all. And to the extent that she had a beautiful lilac tree outside the old deck.

3:20And when they redid the deck, the contractor said, we can widen this by cutting down that lilac tree. And she said, no, no, no, you can't cut down the lilac tree. So she ended up with a much narrower deck. Well, I had a holly bush in the Washington, D.C. home, and I did the same thing without even realizing it. And when it was finished, it just reminded me of my mother's deck. And I think that's what happens. You walk into a space and it brings back certain memories of childhood, positive memories of vacation, for example. So the elevation of the house, the way the sun comes in, the windows, the sounds, even how close it is to traffic or far away from traffic or country sounds, All these things feed into your memory bank and your emotions, and you react to a space without even realizing it in a positive or a negative way.

4:22And that actually goes back to animal studies, animal behavioral research, where we know that in conditioning animals like rats, for example, or even if people have cats and dogs, you know, people will, researchers will put a rat into a cage with very specific physical features, even the lighting, the texture on the floor, the patterns on the wall around the cage. and the animal will become accustomed and conditioned, just like Pablo's dogs, to that space. And they will either react positively or negatively to that space, depending upon their experience in it. So if they've received a negative experience, like a shock, a mild shock, they'll have a negative reaction to that space, even if they're not shocked.

5:15If they have a positive reaction, like they get food, they have a positive reaction to the physical space.

5:23Esther Sternberg:I see what you mean. It puts me in mind of I've been reading a bit about place attachment and obviously John Bowlby and his ideas around interpersonal attachment and how when we're infants, you know, we attach to our primary caregiver, usually our mother. But of course, in parallel, we also attach to the physical surroundings we're brought up in. And I think it's really interesting what you're saying. You know, a home is kind of a vessel of memory, isn't it? It's a sort of, it's a tactile, multisensory form of memory, I think. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, given that then, do you think that a home can make you happier?

6:03Oh, for sure. There's no question a home can make you happier. And you can do things on purpose to make you happier in the home. So, for example, we were talking to your producer who's in Athens, and my parents were from Romania and came before World War II. My father came after World War II to Montreal. And I grew up on essentially what is identical to a Greek Mediterranean diet. And when my Greek neighbors saw me writing on my computer on my deck in Washington, D.C., they rang the doorbell and they brought me this wonderful Greek food, tzatziki, dolmades, moussaka. And right away, we connected.

6:51And I didn't realize until afterwards that it was the familiarity of the smells of the fragrance of that food that made me immediately connect positively to them. And that's how I ended up going to Greece with them and spending time in their cottage in Lentas. But that's another story. But yes, so everything about your home, if it reminds you of positive experiences through what you see and hear and smell and touch and do in the space and eat in the space can make you feel happy. You can consciously do things to bring back those positive memories. So, for example, when I came back from Greece, I on purpose planted a jasmine tree in a pot on my deck so that I could smell the fragrance in the evening that reminded me of the lemon and orange trees that I smelled in Greece.

7:52You know, you can do things consciously to enhance your home wherever you are. Even if you're in an apartment, you can do this. and to enhance those positive feelings. If you dig into your memory and try to remember what it is that made you feel happy in those places, it's kind of like Proust and the Madeleine. He finally remembers that the reason he feels such warmth and comfort eating the Madeleine dipped in tea is because it reminds him of his aunt's embrace when he was sick as a child.

8:31Esther Sternberg:Okay. It sounds very nostalgic, and it puts me in mind of I was reading about a study that they took a vote in America about what style of house most Americans felt that they would like to live in, and most of them chose what's called a Cape Cod house, right? I'm sure you'll know what that means um a lot of our english listeners but i guess it's a kind of you know timber clad um you know building with sash windows and a pitch roof yes yes and they sort of admitted when they thought about it practically probably didn't work for them that well but they just loved the idea of it somehow so there's there i think what you're saying is and actually i think it's quite an interesting take on this idea of home is that it's really so linked to this form of memory and emotion that you have going back many years throughout your life and what you've experienced personally it sounds like well it's it's that but when you talk about the shaker the salt shake it's called like salt shaker house salt shake um uh that i think has more to do with with cultural memory because a lot of the and it's generational also a lot of the television programs that my generation grew up in showed that kind of house.

9:50So even if you lived in a cramped apartment in a busy city and noisy and no green around and certainly no pitched roofs and anything like that, then that's your ideal image of a home. I think the current generation actually prefers mid-century modern. That's their idea of, you know, of what's ideal. I grew up in a, what was really a home that was built in Montreal in 1910. So it was a very old house and it had these, in retrospect, beautiful oak moldings and stained glass windows and la leak sliding glass doors. And my sister and I used to tell my mother in the 60s, why don't you get rid of all this horrible stuff?

10:46You know, get rid of it and paint over it and take out all that. Thankfully, my mother did not do that. But, you know, every generation has a different ideal. Maybe watching Downton Abbey here, people are going to go back to that kind of, you know, turn of the 20th century aesthetic.

11:07Esther Sternberg:Totally. Well, exactly. It comes in waves, doesn't it? And also, I mean, the other thing is that during times of sort of political upheaval, people tend to gravitate more towards minimalism because they need that kind of order. So, you know, there's a reason why I think the clean lines of Le Corbusier and modernist architecture emerged out of the Great Wars is for that reason. So it's, you know, I think it's so interesting, all that. But I suppose there's also, I wanted to ask you about the kind of health aspect of living, clearly. So, you know, second big question of the day, but do you think a home can make you healthier as well?

11:45It can make you healthier and it can make you sicker. You know, we spend, certainly in America, I think probably in Europe as well, or at least in Northern Europe, over 90 % of our time indoors. And there's, since COVID, not before COVID, but since COVID, there is a much greater public realization of the importance of clean indoor air, because you saw during COVID all those animations around the internet of the virus being spread through the ventilation systems. And that's absolutely true. And in fact, In fact, knowing that germs are spread, allergens, germs, and so on are spread through ventilation systems has been known for decades.

12:32In fact, after I wrote my book, Well at Work, Creating Wellbeing in Any Workspace, which applies to creating well-being in any home space, I learned that Richard Lord Riley, a British person of, I guess, aristocracy descent, in the 1950s, I think it was, or earlier, had discovered that tuberculosis could be spread through the ventilation system. by putting rats in a cave in a different room, but near the ventilation from a patient with tuberculosis in the other room. And that was sort of one of the clearest, earliest definitions that showed that you could spread germs through ventilation. And then every 20 or 30 years or so, the public becomes more aware of this with, for example, Legionnaire's disease and sick building syndrome, and certainly with COVID, that these kinds of bacteria and certainly allergens and others can be spread through the ventilation.

13:38So it's essential that you start with excellent fresh air, frequent fresh air turnover, excellent filtration. And, you know, people, I think, again, during COVID, people became aware of the importance of keeping your filters clean. If you have forced air, I think actually in Britain and certainly in Montreal, we didn't have forced air. We had like radiator heat. But here, a lot of the heating and cooling goes through forced air. And you can have the best ventilation system. But if you don't keep your filters clean, you're going to get exposed to all those things that get stuck in the filters. So that's the baseline.

14:22That's just keeping your home healthy from a physical point of view. But it is also, and this is what I talk about in Well at Work, essential to create environments that enhance emotional well-being. And there's many ways that you can do this. You can do it through what you see and hear and smell and touch and think about what reminds you of home and positive experiences. The other framework that I use in Well at Work is the seven domains of integrative health. And in that framework, that was a framework devised by Dr. Andrew Weil and the Center for Integrative Medicine, where I was research director from about 2012 until 2025.

15:14And those seven domains are sleep, resilience. What is resilience? It's how quickly you bounce back from any challenge. So it's the stress and relaxation response. It's the environment. So that includes clean air, but also the green environment, relationships, movement, spirituality, and nutrition. And you can design any space to enhance each of these behaviors, each of these domains of integrative health. and you can then maintain your health and your emotional well-being without even realizing it when you're in these spaces.

15:55Esther Sternberg:How interesting. That's a great framework. So how would one start then in terms of looking at those buckets that you've just listed there? I mean, what would be the most important things you could do practically? One of the things is each of those are important and they each overlap. So let's say start with sleep. A lot of people are concerned about sleeping well. Well, in order to sleep well, it's counterintuitive, but what you do during the day and in the morning affects how you sleep at night. So in order to sleep well, you need to be exposed to at least 30 minutes in the morning of full spectrum circadian sunlight.

16:33So that means that, you know, if you're working, I'm working here, I'm facing a window, put your desk in front of a window. You know, I've had people who've read the book tell me, wow, I used to have my work desk in the basement when I was working from home. I moved it upstairs to be in front of a window, and it made all the difference. So, or be outside. If you don't have a window, or, well, everybody has a window, but if you don't have a window that really has sunlight coming in, take a little walk outside. Sit outside and have your breakfast outside if you can, depending on the weather. Movement is really important.

17:09We discovered, so I worked for 25 years with the U.S. General Services Administration. When I was at the National Institutes of Health, I was a senior scientist and physician and research scientist. And I worked from the year 2000 to about 2023 with the U.S. General Services Administration, which is the agency of the U.S. federal government that builds and operates all non-military federal buildings. And we used wearable devices to measure the impacts of the built environment on health, well-being, and performance. And so we could measure people's stress responses, even if they didn't feel stressed, from their wearable devices.

17:53And we could also measure movement and measure sleep. We found that the people who moved more during the day were less stressed, physiologically less stressed at night, even though they weren't aware of it. And they slept better. They fell asleep faster. And they woke up the next morning less fatigued and in a better mood. So the kinds of things that you can do to shape your environment, to encourage you to move more, can also help you sleep better. What are the other things that influence stress? Relationships are very important, positive relationships. So you want places to gather so that you can be with people in a positive way.

18:41You also want to take away things that stress, like noise. Noise is one of the biggest stressors in an environment. So you can, ideally, you should have materials in an environment that absorb sound, that absorb noise. If you don't have that, you can wear headphones if you're working from home. You can have white noise that blocks out or sort of masks negative sounds or startling sounds. There's all kinds of ways to address reducing noise. Green environments are really important. It's tremendous literature that shows that looking at beautiful views, being in nature, reduces stress. We're doing studies in virtual nature environments, recharge rooms started by Studio Elsewhere in New York City.

19:39We find that 15 minutes a day in those virtual nature environments reduces stress, reduces anxiety, helps people sleep better, reduces burnout, and even reduces your stress hormone cortisol. But there's a dose effect of 15 minutes a day. So if you don't have, you can put plants around your home, that will enhance. The more plants, the better, as long as you're not allergic to, you know, molds and things, you have to be careful about that. But if you don't have that, you can make sure you take a walk and be in a park, a local park, and so on. So going around the circle of each of these domains, there's healthy food, of course, that I mentioned.

20:28And spirituality is sometimes, it's a word that triggers positive and negative reactions in people. But really, spirituality is staying in the moment, having places and spaces to just be in the moment. So, for example, I told you about the jasmine tree I put on my deck in D.C., and I also just bought a jasmine bush here for Tucson. Even just a few seconds, deeply inhaling the fragrance of that jasmine. Or I have rosemary and oregano herbs in pots on my deck here. And when I water them, I get that little hit of the fragrance of these plants. And that allows you to be in the moment to reduce your stress, just even for a short time.

21:21That will reduce the total load of your stress of all the other stressors that we're exposed to every day, especially now.

21:30Esther Sternberg:Yeah, absolutely fantastic. I really enjoyed that. There's such a great list of things to help there, I think. I was really interested by this. When I was reading a bit more about you, Esther, you said that, you know, architects or designers should think about themselves almost as health professionals, right? Yeah. That's quite radical, actually. So just tell me about that. Why do you think that? And what do you mean by that? Well, so as I said, I first started working with building experts, designers, when I started working with the General Services Administration. I wrote my previous book, Healing Spaces, The Science of Place and Wellbeing, published in 2009.

22:13And I was invited by graduating architecture students back in 2009 to speak at the American Institute of Architecture Students National Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on December 29th, 2009. Now, for anybody who's been in Minneapolis or Minnesota in late December, you know that the temperatures are minus 30 Fahrenheit, which is, I think, about the same as minus 30 centigrade.

22:52So I went and it was the beginning of the downturn here. I think you had a downturn back in 2008, 2009. Did you have that there? We did. Yeah. Yeah, especially in the home, in the building industry. And I was the second keynote speaker. The first keynote speaker was, and I actually tell this story in Well at Work. The first speaker was a business person from the field of design architecture buildings. And he spent the whole time saying, you fifth year graduating architects are really out of luck. There are no jobs. The Gary studio has shed 30 percent. All the major studios have shed 30 percent, 50 percent of their their workforce.

23:43And most of them are the junior people. So just forget about it. So I had to stand up and talk to this audience. It was like talking at a funeral. And I decided at the beginning of my talk to ditch my planned presentation. And I said, you, the design professionals of the future are our health professionals, partners in the health of this nation. We cannot do it without you. I cannot tell a patient to go home and exercise more if there's no place to move, if there's no place to exercise. I can't tell somebody to feel less stressed if there's a lot of noise going on or if they're living in a cramped situation with multi-generational family and no place to have a tiny little space to be alone for a moment to contemplate.

24:40You know, you are our partners in the health of the nation. And so after the talk, I didn't know, but there were two presidents of the American Institute of Architects in the audience. And they came up to me at the book signing and said, you've given us an idea. we want to establish a design and health leadership group to bring health front and center across all the knowledge communities of the American Institute of Architects. And it was front and center for health care design, which is obvious. You want to design a hospital for health, although I have to say a lot of hospitals were not designed for the health of people in them.

25:24But that's another story. But it was part of the mandate of architects to design for health, but it wasn't really front and center. And also to design for physical health was definitely part of the mandate, like I said, with ventilation, clean ventilation and no toxins and so on. but designing for emotional well-being was not front and center it began to be more recognized back and after that downturn um but really became front and center after covid yeah with that in

25:58Esther Sternberg:mind what do you think should be the starting point for someone designing a space like let's say they've got a small apartment you know because i think the the temptation always is to concentrate on how something looks, right? You know, you choose some furniture you found on Instagram, you like the look of, and so on. But how would you, what would be the starting point if you wanted to do it more from a health perspective, would you say? I think lighting is very important. So if you don't have the luxury of having the circadian light coming in, think about the smart lighting that is available.

26:36There's a tremendous amount of smart lighting now that gives you full-spectrum sunlight. You know, there's huge literature back at least 40 years showing that full-spectrum sunlight, that's the kind of white light that you see from bright sunlight, reduces seasonal affective disorder, the kind of depression that comes from being exposed in northern climates like where you are, actually, to long periods of low light. And that's why we have snowbirds coming to Arizona in the winter from Chicago and from Canada. That's why you have your folks in the UK going down to Greece and Italy and so on. But full spectrum sunlight is really important.

27:27And you can mimic that now with smart, all kinds of smart lighting. I actually am working with my full disclosure daughter and son-in-law who are professors at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. And their expertise in design is lighting. and we work together to create or to help advise on creating an ambiance that is healthy and improves your mood. And there is a lot of information about that. I have some of it in my book. You can look up a smart lighting. I can certainly, if people want to reach out to me through my website, I can connect them to these experts. So we have a lot of technology now that can really help.

28:20And as I said, lighting is important not only for positive moods, even if you don't have depression, it's important for sleep. It's important for healthy cognition. And so that's a start. There's also noise. If the apartment is in a noisy space, you want to think about ways to dampen that noise, drapery, carpets, things like that. Again, technology can help in your bedroom. You can have white noise. There's also what we call pink noise, which is not really colored noise, but the sound, but it's more sort of nature sounds. So, you know, in the field of defining different kinds of sound and noise.

29:09White noise is kind of like white light. It's made up of the full spectrum of all the wavelengths. So white noise, white light is all the colors, white noise is all the wavelengths. If you just have a few of those wavelengths, it's called pink noise, not because it's pink, but because they're selected sounds. They can be sounds of nature, which in some cases just mask the other noises and in other cases give you that positive memory of sounds that are calming rain on the roof breeze a breeze the seashore birds chirping again it taps into your memory and what is positive and what about red light

29:59Esther Sternberg:because we hear a lot about red light, especially in the evening being beneficial. Oh, red light is really, yeah, really, really important. So what you want to do is you want to mimic the sunrise and sunset. So in the morning, there's a lot of blue light. Then as the afternoon comes on, it becomes redder. And if you're exposed in the evening to 30 minutes of blue light, that's as alerting as awakening as a cup of coffee so you don't want blue light so there are several things you can do to reduce blue light exposure in the evening one of them is to have glasses that where the the lenses absorb blue light the other is there are settings on your computer on your smartphone to have less of the blue light in the evening but the other thing is actual red light.