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’.