April 20, 2026 • 37 mins
Our surroundings affect our happiness in ways we often don’t notice. The layout of a room, the amount of clutter in our home, and even small changes to lighting can shape our mood, focus, and relationships.
As The Happiness Lab continues its spring cleaning series, Dr. Laurie sits down with University of Virginia Professor Leidy Klotz, author of In a Good Place, to explore the hidden ways our spaces shape our inner lives. Why do certain places make us feel calm, connected, and grounded, while others leave us distracted or drained?
From creating more connection at home to using our surroundings to remember loved ones we’ve lost, these practical ideas will refresh your space and your wellbeing.
Experts Mentioned:
- Leidy Klotz, professor of engineering and architecture at the University of Virginia
- Nelson Mandela, anti-apartheid activist and former president of South Africa
- Jane Jacobs, writer and urban activist
Resources Mentioned:
- In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive, by Leidy Klotz (2026)
- Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less by Leidy Klotz (2021)
- “Spatial Patterns of Solar Photovoltaic System Adoption: The Influence of Neighbors and the Built Environment” by Marcello Graziano and Kenneth Gillingham (Journal of Economic Geography, 2015).
- “Fire Drill: Inattentional Blindness and Amnesia for the Location of Fire Extinguishers” by Alan D Castel, Michael Vendetti, and Keith J Holyoak. (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2012)
- “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being” by Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci (American Psychologist, 2000).
- “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy” by Robert J. Sampson, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls (Science, 1997).
- “When Choice Is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?” by Sheena S. Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000).
Related Episodes:
- "Choice Overload" by The Happiness Lab (2019).
- "How to Make Better Choices (with Barry Schwartz)" by The Happiness Lab (2025).
- "How to Design a More Meaningful Life (with Dave Evans and Bill Burnett)" by The Happiness Lab (2026).
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. When we think about spring cleaning, we usually focus
on stuff, what to toss, what to organize, what to
tidy up. But what if we zoomed out for a
second and thought about the nature of space itself, how
(00:36):
we're using it, and how it might be shaping our
well being in ways that we don't even notice.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
There's a whole realm of opportunities kind of in this
relationship between our inner and outer worlds, and I think
we don't recognize that our outer world shape our inner
world in how people feel and think and behave and
how spaces relate to that.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
This is University of Virginia Professor Lighti Klotz. Lighti is
the author of a new book entitled In a Good Place,
How the spaces where we live, work and play can
help us thrive.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Scholarship bridges between engineering and architecture and psychology and behavioral science.
Even if you're just talking about, oh, should I add
a new light to my office? That's going to change
all sorts of dynamics in unpredictable ways.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Before we go further, because we're talking about space, I'm
curious about the space you're in right now. If you
put on your sort of space psychologists, hat, what would
you notice about that room? How's it affecting your mind?
Speaker 2 (01:32):
My space right now is very minimalistic so that I
can focus on the conversation with you and your listeners.
But your space, on the other hand.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Well, it's actually a fake. It's a green screen.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Oh, it's a green screen. Okay.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
My green screen image is an actual photo of my
real office at Yale, which was apparently giving much more
away about my identity than I realized.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
I love seeing books behind you, and to me like
one of my favorite things about a space. So I
love seeing people's books and then you're like sitting there
as you're talking to them, trying to analyze, like, okay,
what is this person because they have like a Beastie
Boys book and a you know, Catch twenty two and
then like Victor Frankel, and you know, it's.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Like okay, Like, can I just say that I love
how Lighty noticed my Beastie Boys book. But I also
love the general idea that our spaces tell a story
about who we are, because if our outer worlds shape
our inner worlds, that means we can design our spaces
to take authorship over our stories. We can become more
intentional about the places we spend time in and how
(02:29):
they shape our mental health and our happiness. So stay
tuned because in this episode of our Spring cleaning series,
we'll be showing you how to do just that. Lighty
will be back with all his helpful tips right after
these quick ads. When you think about spaces in your
(02:54):
own life that have made you happiest, what are the
kinds of spaces that come to mind? I, to this
day like bedrooms that have weird angles because I grew
up in like an old farmhouse.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
In my bedroom was full high ceiling where my bed was,
but then quickly went down at an angle, and any
angle sealing hearkens back to my childhood. And I actually
do this in my class. I will ask students at
the beginning of the semester as an icebreaker, like what's
your favorite space that you've ever been in? And most
of the spaces that they talk about are some pretty
regular space that's been imbued with meaning in some other way,
(03:27):
So like the diner where my high school friends used
to hang out, or even just like the kitchen island
where I did my homework with mom listening to podcasts,
or something like that.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
These kinds of spaces, the ones that make us feel safe, relaxed,
and happy, are actually pretty rare. We also fail to
prioritize well being boosting space is like these. Because we're
often not fully aware of what's going on around us,
we fall prey to a bias that psychologists call habituation.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Habituation is just getting used to the way things are.
There's a famous psychological study about fire extinguishers that people
in offices ask where the nearest fire extinguisher is can
identify it right, And of course, fire extinguishers are designed
to be noticeable. They're read, they're placed in prominent locations,
they're literally life saving, and yet the more you walk
(04:13):
by them, the less you kind of notice them, just
because they're always there. We get in habits with how
we interact with our spaces, and a lot of the
time that's really good, right. I don't want to have
to analyze the design of my baseboard every time I
walk out of my house in the morning. I want
to be able to think about other things. But it
also causes us to miss really beautiful and meaningful things
(04:35):
in the world, or just opportunities for spaces that we
never considered and would want to use if we actually
looked at them.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
And so let's walk through some of the evolutionary logic
to the importance of spaces. A lot of the book
uses this idea of self determination theory. What's that and
why is it so important when we're thinking about spaces.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
If you think about our hunter gatherer ancestors, the ones
that survived were the ones that controlled their surroundings in
some way figured out how to create shelter. You figured
out how to you know, have protection from the elements,
protection from predators. So what would make you do that
is some kind of psychological pull to want to interact
(05:14):
with your surroundings. Right, this feels good? And so self
determination theory is the idea that we have these kind
of three fundamental psychological or emotional needs that if we
meet we do well, and if we don't meet them,
we struggle. And this is not my research. This is
a whole body of research confirmed over and over in
all kinds of different populations. And these are agency, competence
(05:36):
or growth, and kind of connection or belonging. I think
about them as like a kid playing on the beach
with a sand castle. Right, So if you go to
the beach and you've got kids with you, Like when
I took my daughter Josephine, she would go and immediately
they have agency. The rest of their world they're being
told what to do by parents and teachers, and they
go to the beach and they can decide where to build,
They can decide how big to make the castle, they
(05:58):
can decide what kind of architecture it is, and they
like it. So if agency is like the ability to
do it, competence and growth is the actual doing. And
so the things the kid learns just building a sand
castle are quite amazing if you think about Okay, they're
learning pretty high level like fluid mechanics, just how the
water erodes. They are learning material properties of sand, but
(06:21):
they're also learning about themselves and their relationship with the world.
When the tower collapses and they get frustrated, they realize
that if they build it back, that also feels pretty
good that they have some kind of control over it.
So that's the growth piece that we get from interacting
with our surroundings. And then the connection. Every one of
these projects that I've ever seen starts with like one kid,
(06:43):
and then they realize that if they can recruit the cousins,
it's going to get bigger and they can do more.
And then I, inevitably, as the parent, end up schlepping
down to the ocean to like grab buckets of water
and come back up and dump them in their pond.
That then goes away by the time I walk down
to the ocean and come back again. But the connection
then is like, Okay, by building together, we're not just
(07:04):
building the structure, but also building relationships between the people,
and you just think about human connection at the societal level.
The leading theory now is that the reason the hunter
gatherer bands came together in the first place was to
be able to build and maintain big structures. This act
(07:24):
of building together is like the genesis of civilization. So
you know, these core needs that we have for agency,
growth and connection kind of originated in our relationship with
our surroundings. And now, of course our relationship with our
surroundings is different. You and I aren't having to go
around thankfully manipulating our surroundings just to be able to survive.
(07:45):
But we can still meet our psychological needs by manipulating
our surroundings.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
And so you've used this example with children, but as
adults we'd be happier in our spaces if we embrace
these three things too. Thinking specifically about agency, your book
share some lovely examples of people finding agency over their space,
especially in situations where this is seemingly impossible. You wrote
about an example of Nelson Mandela. Can you share that
example here?
Speaker 2 (08:09):
So, Nelson Mandela famously imprisoned for a really long time,
and I guess one of the things that he did
when he was imprisoned was on the rooftop of the prison.
There is a space that he found. I think he wrote,
bathed all day in sunlight, and then he lobbied the
guards to be able to have a garden up there
and then was able to use it. And obviously Mendela
(08:29):
is like an exemplar of taking obstacles and persisting regardless.
It's an incredibly extreme example, but we all have access
to spaces that we're not necessarily taking advantage of, and
we're all going to have our spaces constrained in some way.
Hopefully we're not going to be incarcerated. But there are
(08:49):
spaces that we can't change, and when we face the
space that we can't change, we can get agency by
looking at something about it that we.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Can, So that's agency the second need growth. I love
this idea of the kids building the sand castle and
learning all these new things, both in terms of their
own emotion regulation and like fluid dynamics and so on.
But you point out that there's simple ways that we
can grow and get creative even in our own spaces.
You use an example from a family that you knew
that even just switched up where they eat dinner. Tell
me about that.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
The Lee family. They're my friends, and there was a
time in their life where they had four kids under
the age of six. And I was talking to the
dad at that time and I said, Hey, how's it going,
And he's like, things are pretty good. We've taken to
eating outside And I was like, what do you mean,
like once a week. He's like, no, wet every meal
outside And I was like, wow, that sounds like a lot.
He's like, no, actually, So we go out there and
(09:40):
it doesn't matter if the kids spill. It just like
goes into the ecosystem. And then when they're done eating,
they can run around outside and it doesn't bother Katie
and I as much. And when they're making loud noises,
it doesn't reverberate around the kitchen wall. So it had
made their life better, and I think it illustrates this
principle similar to what Mandela did. But it's also like
here's a space that they had access to that they
(10:02):
had never thought of using that way. One way to
kind of break through from that is to not necessarily
put labels on your space. This is according to like
this is a dining room, this is a kitchen, this
is a patio. It's like this is a ten foot
by twenty foot space that is pleasant in the spring
in the fall and has some breezes and grass and
(10:23):
a jungle gym near it or whatever. And then you
can start to kind of line up your activities with
the spaces and break away from functional fixedness that we
get related to how these spaces are supposed to work.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
And so this is this idea of growth. We can
get competent in our spaces, we can get super creative.
The last need you mentioned when you were talking about
the Sanchalxil example was the one that I think we
talk about the most on the Happiness Lab, which is
this idea of connection. Usually when we're talking about on
the Happiness Lab, we're thinking about individual strategies you can
do to boost your social connection, so like text a
friend or talk to the stranger in the coffee shop.
(10:57):
But your point is that spaces are an incredible vehicle
for building these really basic social connections. Why is that
the case? Why can space be so powerful for that?
Speaker 2 (11:06):
This also ties into our modern world, these opportunities that
we have to not have to commute into work just
to meet with somebody if we can talk on Zoom
or I get my groceries delivered and I don't miss
the grocery store, but I do miss the random person
who smiles at you and reminds you that there's like
good humanity out there. So part of it is just proximity, right,
(11:28):
how do you want to be able to have interactions?
Who do you want to be able to have interactions with?
I mean, I think about this a lot because I'm
naturally an introvert. I'm not going to go out and
seek interactions, but I need other people around and so
it's really important for me to live in a place
where there's just going to be people happening by if
I'm sitting out on the porch on the weekend.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
So self determination theory suggest that we're wired to shape
our surroundings in ways that support three basic needs, agency, growth,
and connection. But how do we actually build those kinds
of spaces into our everyday life. After the break, we'll
walk through ten actionable ways we can do just this.
The Happiness Lab will be right back. University of Virginia
(12:23):
professor Ldi Klotz studies how the spaces around us quietly
shape our moods, our thoughts, and even our behavior. His
note book In a Good Place breaks down how simple
design choices can lead to big improvements in our well being.
I picked out ten of my favorite ideas from the
book and ask Lydy to walk us through them, starting
with number one. Something we can all use a little
(12:44):
more of better connection with other people. And for that,
Lighty says we need more of what he calls campfires.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
A campfire, if you think about it, is just set
up for people to connect. It's a circle. There's not
a screen in the middle, there's just warmth in the middle.
If you think about a campfire, it invites people in.
There's an extreme example that I use in the book
of a event planning company that set up campfires to
try to make it so that people would bond at
the event. But you don't need to have glowing orbs
(13:14):
in the middle of a circle, but you do need
to think about, well, if I have a seventy two
inch screen above my fireplace that's on and people come
into the room, that's what they're going to be focused on.
Whereas if I have a seating area that's arranged in
a circle and then invite them to sit down and
it's comfortable, there's more likely to be connection. So that's
a campfire. I mean, here's an example that I would
(13:34):
use at a conference is like thinking strategically about where
I sit. It's uncomfortable for me to come up to
a group of eight people sitting in a circle unless
we all come at the same time. But I could
also like sit somewhere where there's an open seat next
to me, and it's inviting for somebody else to come
and have like a random connection in that way.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
So it's kind of like creating these focal points where
social connection becomes.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Easy, exactly exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
So another tip that you have that's related to this
idea of social connection, which actually comes from your earlier
book subtract, is this idea that to engage in social
connection in our spaces, we need to clean up. This
feels especially salient to me right now because right now
I'm upstairs in my podcast studio and a friend of
mine who just happened to be in town was like, Oh,
I'll just come over to your house and wait till
(14:18):
you've done the podcast and then we can have time
to hang out. And my instant reaction when she said
this was like, Oh, my god, there's the stuff in
the kitchen, there's the stuff on the floor. It almost
made me tell her like, no, no, no, don't come to
my house. We'll meet at some coffee shop or something.
We can get really weirded out if our spaces don't
feel clean enough for other people to connect. But you've
pointed out that there's other reasons that cleaning up can
help us connect better. What are some of those reasons?
Speaker 2 (14:40):
I mean, connecting is hard. Connecting takes a lot of
cognitive effort. Connecting takes a lot of attention. That's how
we're wired. And if the space is taking away from
that attention. You know, an example of my house, maybe
there's shin guards and boxer briefs on the floor, and
the person's thinking like what's going on here versus connecting
with me. It's the cognitive load of all the things
that people have to pay attention to in your space
(15:02):
is cognitive load that they're not devoting to connecting with you.
And this person's already a friend of yours, so you're okay, right,
But if you think of a new person coming into
your house, you want not a lot of distractions in
the space to take away from them connecting with you
and feeling comfortable with you. Or even it could be
like something that's a super fancy centerpiece that just the
person can't take their eye off it and then focus
(15:24):
on you. Those are things that are distracting from the
human connection that might happen in the space. Also, just
simply coming into your house and taking an outside view
saying Okay, if I didn't live here, what would this
look like to me? I think is probably a good exercise.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
I love this point about the distraction specifically, too, because
that gets to tip number three that you've talked about,
which is to find ways to use your spaces to
fight choice paralysis, which is another way that we can
kind of get cognitively overloaded. How do you define choice
paralysis and how can we use our spaces to fight it.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Too many choices causes us to not only make bad decisions,
but also feel bad about the decisions that we do make.
For example, with chocolates, if people have thirty chocolates to
choose from, they are more disappointed with their choice then
if they only have some subset of six to choose from. Right,
because you're thinking about what you missed out on and
you felt cognitively overloaded. Now that's just thirty and six,
(16:19):
and now think about all the degrees of freedom and
all the endless options in our spaces, and so I
think narrowing down those options. So we want to have choice,
but we don't want to be like overloaded with the
amount of choice that we have. And one thing that
architects have learned to do was in the design process,
if they're doing a new building or even like renovating,
there's a stage where they present three different options. So
(16:41):
one option might be like, okay, this is centered on
a view out the window, and this one's centered on
a gathering area in the living room, and this one's
some other principle. So if we're thinking about setting up
your home office, for example, starting with like, what are
the three basic options that I want to explore before
you get into any kind of furnishings, and you know,
(17:02):
paint colors and all these other details that just make
endless choice.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Your book also has some tips that we can use
to avoid choice paralysis, and one of them is that
we need to avoid our tendency towards bike shedding. What
is bike shedding?
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Basically, it's that left to our own devices, we often
focus on the small and inconsequential things at the expense
of big important things. And the bike shedding example, it's
a built environment example that's been applied to all kinds
of decision making, but the original example is like a
committee convened to discuss the construction of a nuclear power plant.
(17:36):
Everybody's there, engineers, owners, architects, plant operators, maybe some community members,
and the plans get presented. Everybody's like, looks good. They
ask some softball questions about the nuclear power plant, and
they're like, oh, you want to talk about the bike
shed that's going to go next to the nuclear power plant,
And like the meeting springs to life, right, everybody has opinions.
(17:57):
They're like, what's the new racking system? Going to be,
what color are we going to paint it, where's it
going to be located. It's an illustration of like the
bike shed is more understandable, people get the bike shed
and therefore feel okay chiming in on it. There's also
the decisions related to the bike shed, while small, are
much more certain like, Okay, if we paint the bike
(18:17):
shed blue, everybody knows what that is going to look like,
whereas if you say, oh, we should have a different
kind of nuclear reactor, nobody even knows what that would
would mean. So we focus on these small and inconsequential
decisions because they're understandable, but also because there's more kind
of certainty and what the ultimate decision outcome would look like.
So it becomes really important to get over bike shedding,
(18:41):
to go back to basic principles about what we want
from the space. And that's one reason why it's important
to think about agency growth and connection. That's one way
to avoid bike shedding is to say, Okay, how is
this going to contribute to these fundamental psychological needs? But
what it's doing is helping people think through the big
things before you move on to these small, granular decisions.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
So that's tip number three. Avoid the choice paralysis, fight
the bike shedding. Tip number four swhich is gears a
little bit. It's this idea that we need to fight
the habituation we would normally experience in spaces.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Yeah, a way to overcome it is to consciously tune
in to what's going on. One interesting way to pay
attention is to close your eyes. Close your eyes. All
of a sudden you'll start hearing things and smelling things
and maybe feeling things, maybe the breeze or whatever you
wouldn't have otherwise about the space. And this is an
(19:36):
opportunity to notice pleasant things, but it's also an opportunity
to notice negative things that even if you've habituated them
away or still having a toll. So there's studies of
workplaces where there's like a lot of ambient noise, and
even if workers don't say that it's a noisy workspace,
they still report being more stressed out at the end
of the day. The same with unpleasant smells, like the
(19:59):
new car smell that comes in cars but also off
gasing carpets, right, And people sit into space like that
all day and don't even notice the smell and then
go home with a headache because they've been inhaling the VOCs.
So breaking free fromt habituation is a matter of paying
closer attention. But like one way to do it is
to tap into all your senses.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Another tip that you've given for fighting habituation, which I
love so much, it's going to get its on tip
number Tip number five is what you've called space before screen.
Oh yeah, what's that?
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Obviously our screens are taking our attention. I use my screen.
It does amazing things. It's allowing us to talk right now,
me to talk to your audience. That's freaking amazing. But
no matter what it can do, it's not tapping into
my other senses.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Right.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
It is basically just visual and sound here, but there's
no smell, there's no touch. It's two dimensional. And again
this isn't bad, but it is like kind of inadvertently
taking out of our life something that really provides meaning
and happiness and fulfillment. And so space before screen doesn't
even try to fight that and just use your screen
(21:04):
as a queue to take in the space around you.
So if I walk into this space and I start
looking at my screen to see like, okay, did I
get a text? From anybody. When you start doing that,
say oh wait, I just looked at my screen. I'm
in a new space. Can I take in the space
And now all of a sudden you're looking and you're smelling,
and you're noticing things and you're seeing opportunities. So using
that thing that we're naturally drawn to and instead turning
(21:27):
it around as a reminder to analyze the space that
we're in. You can do that in spaces that you're
in all the time, and I guarantee you will notice
new things about the space.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Since reading your book, I've tried doing this just using
my own phoe that I'm looking at as a queue,
and I can tell you this helped me in a
lot of spaces, but especially in the morning. Interesting, when
I first wake up and I'm looking at my phone
to check my email, it's like no space war screen
and I stop and I'm like, oh my my cozy bed,
the light is coming in, what's the weather outside the window,
And it's just so much more embodied and grounding, when
(21:58):
before I'd just be like halfway through my inbox before
I would even notice I was awake and alive and
I had a body at all.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Yeah, well, that makes me really happy that it was helpful.
I do the same thing and resist the same way
that you do now.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
So tip number six is one that's helpful whenever we're
in spaces that involve learning, and it's to harness what
you've called memory anchors. What are memory anchors?
Speaker 2 (22:19):
So when we learn something, the information about where we
learned it is filed right alongside the thing that we learned.
Now we can engineer that, and if we want to
learn something and really remember it, then we can also
do it in a spot that we're more likely to remember.
So it's maybe a different spot and a really simple
example that I use in my teaching. I'll figure out
a reason to just get out of the classroom, then
(22:41):
go to some random spot on campus, and then I'll
guide them through an experience that helps them learn some
important lesson. And then they're like, why are we at
the Amphitheater for this? We didn't actually need to come here, Like,
I just wanted you to be more likely to remember this.
Like think back to your own school, right, If you
remember something, it's very often happens outside of the classroom.
(23:02):
Maybe it's on a field trip. I mean, my dad,
I don't know if he knew he was doing this,
but when he would help us with our biology, he
would take us on walks outside. So you're just like
getting people outside of the routine environment. And then you've
got this memory anchor where it's the new space and
the new idea working together to be remembered.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Seems like it's just another way we've going to harness
our spatial memory system, right, is that we're using space
to kind of do what we actually want to do,
which is to be learning new stuff.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Right, And you know, one of the ways that you
might hear about this idea is memory champions will if
they need to memorize a bunch of facts, we'll actually
take the facts and associate them with spaces. That's super interesting,
but it's pretty much useless for everybody else. And so
we're basically just turning that around, right, It's like, Okay,
we want to actually learn, so let's align our spaces
(23:52):
to do that.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
So far, we've looked at how our spaces can shape
our daily habits, how we connect, how we focus, and
how we learn. After the break, we'll go deeper into
how our surroundings can reflect our values, tap into our
instincts and even help us stay connected to the people
we've lost Happiness Lab We'll be right back. We've been
(24:23):
walking through my top ten favorite ideas from Lightiklatz's new
book In a Good Place about how we can use
our spaces to boost well being. Tip number seven takes
us back to our evolutionary roots and the kinds of
environments that were naturally wired to feel good in.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Obviously, there's a lot of advice out there about what
you're going to like, and I think the ones that
really hold up scientifically are things that are aligned with
the laws of nature. And so one great example is
prospect and refuge. We talked earlier about spaces being critical
for our survival, So what kind of space would be
good for survival well refuge first, right, So if the
(24:59):
space is going to protect you from the elements and
from predators, but also prospect and being able to see
like food or water sources or other opportunities from the space.
In that prospect and refuge, I mean that's sitting under
an umbrella at the beach. You're getting prospect and refuge,
washing dishes in your kitchen while looking out the window.
That's prospect and refuge. So that's something that we tend
(25:21):
to like when it comes to design aesthetics. It's kind
of a balance of organization and complexity, and so this
is how nature just takes shape. Right, If you think
about a pine tree, for example, I mean, super complex,
impressive thing that's doing all this amazing stuff, but there
are also some very basic rules in the appearance of
(25:43):
this tree. You know, there's small patterns in the tip
of the branch that are identical to the patterns in
a larger branch, and you don't necessarily notice them unless
you're really trying to pay attention to it. But that's
the world that we've been surrounded with and that feels pleasing.
And going into a built environment example of that. If
you think about like a facade of bricks, super plane, right,
(26:06):
seemingly very straightforward, but if you look at how how
bricks are organized, which now you're going to be cursed
to do for the eternity, but there are all kinds
of different patterns. I mean, there's like a pattern where
the bricks are just staggered offset by a half a
brick each row, and that creates this balance of order
and complexity. But there are other patterns where you might
(26:27):
have a brick with the long side facing out than
a brick with the short side facing out, then longside,
then short side, and then that alternates each row, and
it creates this esthetic of like, Okay, there's complexity, but
there's also this underlying order, and that's stuff that we
tend to have been surrounded by for a long time,
and that kind of helps our brains feel comfortable and
then we can go about our lives doing other things.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
Any tips for how to build more of that into
our own spaces.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
The classic interior design advice about you know, varying the
materials so you don't want to get things too matchyat
but also have like a clear organizing principle to them.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
So tip number seven was this evolutionary idea of go
for these moments of prospect and refuge, maybe find order
and complexity. Tip number eight is about aligning our space
with our beliefs. What are some beliefs that we might
be unknowingly propagating in our spaces.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
I'll give you one eye, unknowably propagated. So we bought
an old cape cod post World War two house, and
the way those homes were designed classic design was that
the kitchen's kind of in the back, and of course
that was based on post World War two gender roles
where it was seen as the woman's jobs to be
there cooking but also cooking like out of sight from
(27:41):
everywhere else, and what was supposed to be bring out
the food and then return to the kitchen and people
don't have to see the mess, and people don't have
to interact with the mess. But like if you opened
up your kitchen to make it a more open plan
and you're like taking down those gender roles, and.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
This kind of thing comes up at work too when
it comes to hierarchies that we might not intend as well.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Yeah, I mean, if you're thinking about the quality of
the offices, where the offices are, who uses what space.
I was talking to somebody recently and they're like, we
have this idea that our office is open plan and
everybody can use any space, but the big boss always
comes in and just sits in this conference room all day,
and it's like nobody's going to go take the big
bosses space, right, And so really thinking about what message
(28:23):
are you sending with the spaces and does it align
with what your company or yourself actually values, and what
I think is really important about like sharing our ideas
through spaces. I mean, people do all this work with
social norms because social norms is one of the most
powerful ways that behaviors spread. So when you see a
sticker that says I voted, that's like, okay, we're trying
(28:44):
to spread voting by making a behavior visible. And what's
hard about a lot of behaviors is that they're not
super visible, so you need a sticker. But a space
doesn't need a sticker, It's already there. And there's this
classic example, I think it's actually Connecticut suburbs of how
solar panels spread. And basically the gist of the study
is that people who can see solar panels from their
house are more likely to have solar panels on their house,
(29:06):
and they control for everything else. And so it's a
classic social norm right, It's just by seeing this space,
it's spreading this value. And so I just think of
that as it's a huge opportunity we have to actually
enhance our influence in the world and make change for
the things that we think are important.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
And one of the things we might think is important
is a sense of community kind of egalitarianism. And that
gets to tip number nine, which is that if you
want to use spaces to enhance what you value, you
might want to consider promoting what's called collective efficacy.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
What's collective efficacy building together? Basically? I remember when I
first started teaching my class on sustainability in the built environment.
Students in the class were like, Oh, there's this project
that's going to happen in New York City where they're
going to redo this old, abandoned rail line and make
a walkway on it that allows people to walk through
the city and experience it in a totally different way.
And this has turned into the high Line. And when
(29:58):
they first started talking about it, I'm like, yeah, great,
I hear about these projects all the time, and this
is just two people's dream. The people who started the
Highline literally just met at a community meeting and had
this idea for this, and then it grew from there
and it's just a really pleasant place that has been
incredibly popular. It's a success by any measure, except for
maybe gentrification, but that's a different book. And even if
(30:20):
you think you know Jane Jacob's another New York story
where she was really famous for her activism stopping a
highway from bisecting, And it started with people in rooms
talking about not wanting this to happen, and they protest
against it, and their group gets bigger from the protesting
and then they're able to take on bigger space change projects.
(30:42):
So that's collective efficacy. It feels good. It's one great
way to get things done in the world. And if
you track how these examples happen over time, it very
often starts with groups taking on a relatively small project,
and by taking on the relatively small project, they build
their capacity to do things. But they also build the
capacity of their group that makes their communities stronger. And
(31:06):
so this collective efficacy is not just making this nicer,
it's bringing the community together.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
So that gets us to our final tip, tip number ten,
And I've saved the best for a last because this
is the idea that we can feel happier in our
spaces if we use them to promote healthy forms of
grief and nostalgia. And this is a theme that's really
woven through your book and part because of an awful tragedy
that your family suffered, and so if you're comfortable with it,
tell me about Josie.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
Yeah, I love talking about Josie. So Josie's my daughter,
and there's stories of her throughout the book. They were
in there before she died, and I didn't want to
take them out after she died. She just died suddenly,
unexpectedly from a quick illness in twenty twenty three, and
losing a four year old as awful as it sounds,
but I love talking about Josie. I love talking about
(31:56):
her stories, you know, building sand castles on the beach,
or another story of Josie that's in the book is
we talked about this idea of functional fixedness. And one
of the things I'll never forget about her was she
had to have been like two or three, and I
walked into the kitchen and there's my daughter sitting at
the pantry. So it was just like two full height cabinets.
(32:17):
She had just opened both doors at the pantry, moved
her highchair over there, and was just sitting at the
pantry eating. So instead of like having to carry all
the food over to the table, He's like, I was
going to bring my chair to where the food is,
and then I've got all this food at my disposal.
It's amazing. So I love being able to share our stories.
(32:38):
I think that's one of the ways that the awesome
things that she gave to the world keep going. And also,
you know, thinking about how do we remember her in space,
because obviously this is a big thing that we try
to use our spaces for. I mean, from the Egyptian
pyramids right there to try to make somebody immortal. And
a lot of donations to university buildings are you know,
(33:00):
it's worth fifty million dollars for me to have my
name on this thing that's gonna still be up after
I'm not here. So I was thinking about that for Josie,
and we used to walk between my house and a
pond on campus where we would go fishing and mainly
just like throw rocks in, and she'd run around and
she would always take different paths there because she liked exploring.
(33:21):
And so one day we took a path that went
through an old house that the university now owns, So
basically she walked up their yard and then through some
English ivy and then hit a paved path that went
to the street. And on that path the homeowner had
like put a marble block and inscribed their name in it.
So Josie one benefit of being four is that let
hers say whatever the heck you want them to say.
(33:42):
So if she looks at it and she says that
says Josie's Way, I think she kind of knew the
double meaning too, right, where it's like this is now,
I've just named this path after myself. And also, Josie's
Way is like my way of being in the world.
So we wanted to do something for her in the
world that kind of remembered her, remembered her spirit, and
the idea of a Josie's Way. We made one next
(34:04):
to the best playground in town that just goes parallel
to it and over some creeks, and it's just a
place where kids can go down ride their bikes but
also get into the woods and explore. And it spreads
things that she cared about and would have liked. It
makes me happy, and that's you know, agency right.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
I love these stories so much. And one of the
things I love kind of knowing about neuroscience is that
what you're doing is really using the part of our
brain that encodes space to kind of make these memories thicker.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Yeah, And I learned this after she died the neuroscience
and as our brains you know, adapted to relationships being
more important and human connections, they didn't like develop new networks,
they adapted the networks that were used to code space. Right,
So when we talk about being close and distant from somebody,
(34:52):
those are spatial terms, and we're having boundaries. That's a
spatial thing that has taken on kind of relationship meaning.
And you know, so again like trying to reverse engineer
that and create spaces that help us remember the person
and help spread the spirit of that person.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
It's almost like we're developing these physical experiences that we
can go back to to feel of the same emotions. Yeah,
and so has recognizing this connection between our inner and
outer lives affected your happiness positively?
Speaker 2 (35:20):
I think so. I think I've always paid a lot
of attention to it because I care about the physical
world and that's like kind of the area that I
work in. But I think what's really helped me is
homing in on agency, competence and connection because there's just
so much there and I think we can go a
really long way to start with these core big three
(35:40):
and that's been what's really helpful for me in kind
of just filtering decisions through that.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
It's almost like the next time you're facing a space question,
ask yourself, how can this boost my agency? Where am
I going to get some competence and growth from this?
And how can I promote connection?
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Yeah, we need to come up with the Zillow orrealitor
dot com profile that like the agency growth and connection
scores for the house. But of course they depend right,
so they depend on the person.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
I hope this episode has so is a reminder that
the spaces around you matter. They're actively shaping your mood,
your habits, and even the way you hold on to
the people you love. The good news is that you
don't need to redesign your entire home to feel those benefits.
Even small changes like creating a campfire style seating area
for guests, noticing your space a bit more, or using
(36:28):
your surroundings to reflect what you value can make a
big difference in your happiness and in the happiness of
the people around you. And if you want even more
ideas about how to design your space to boost your
well being, be sure to check out Lydie's new book
In a Good Place, How the spaces where we live,
work and play can help us thrive, which is out now.
If you have thoughts about today's episode, we'd love to
(36:49):
hear them. You can email us at Happiness Lab at
Pushkin dot fm and leave us a review to tell
us what resonated. You can also sign up to learn
more about the science of happiness and join my free
newsletter on my website, Doctor Laurie Santos dot com. That's
d R l A U RI E S A n
t O s dot com. In our next installment on
(37:11):
Spring Cleaning Your Happiness, we'll go back to the Happiness
Lab archives to share an episode about downsizing your stuff.
We'll hear about the joy of letting go and learn
why material possessions don't boost our happiness as much as
we assume.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
I mean, there are more storage units than the her McDonald's.
It's just ridiculously a symptom of a culture which has
become obsessed with possessions. So it's like this demon that
it is, this little inp in our mind telling us
to buy things and don't throw it away because it
might be valuable one day.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
That's all Next time on the Happiness Lab with me,
Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin. When we think about spring cleaning, we usually focus
on stuff, what to toss, what to organize, what to
tidy up. But what if we zoomed out for a
second and thought about the nature of space itself, how
(00:36):
we're using it, and how it might be shaping our
well being in ways that we don't even notice.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
There's a whole realm of opportunities kind of in this
relationship between our inner and outer worlds, and I think
we don't recognize that our outer world shape our inner
world in how people feel and think and behave and
how spaces relate to that.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
This is University of Virginia Professor Lighti Klotz. Lighti is
the author of a new book entitled In a Good Place,
How the spaces where we live, work and play can
help us thrive.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Scholarship bridges between engineering and architecture and psychology and behavioral science.
Even if you're just talking about, oh, should I add
a new light to my office? That's going to change
all sorts of dynamics in unpredictable ways.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Before we go further, because we're talking about space, I'm
curious about the space you're in right now. If you
put on your sort of space psychologists, hat, what would
you notice about that room? How's it affecting your mind?
Speaker 2 (01:32):
My space right now is very minimalistic so that I
can focus on the conversation with you and your listeners.
But your space, on the other hand.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Well, it's actually a fake. It's a green screen.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Oh, it's a green screen. Okay.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
My green screen image is an actual photo of my
real office at Yale, which was apparently giving much more
away about my identity than I realized.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
I love seeing books behind you, and to me like
one of my favorite things about a space. So I
love seeing people's books and then you're like sitting there
as you're talking to them, trying to analyze, like, okay,
what is this person because they have like a Beastie
Boys book and a you know, Catch twenty two and
then like Victor Frankel, and you know, it's.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Like okay, Like, can I just say that I love
how Lighty noticed my Beastie Boys book. But I also
love the general idea that our spaces tell a story
about who we are, because if our outer worlds shape
our inner worlds, that means we can design our spaces
to take authorship over our stories. We can become more
intentional about the places we spend time in and how
(02:29):
they shape our mental health and our happiness. So stay
tuned because in this episode of our Spring cleaning series,
we'll be showing you how to do just that. Lighty
will be back with all his helpful tips right after
these quick ads. When you think about spaces in your
(02:54):
own life that have made you happiest, what are the
kinds of spaces that come to mind? I, to this
day like bedrooms that have weird angles because I grew
up in like an old farmhouse.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
In my bedroom was full high ceiling where my bed was,
but then quickly went down at an angle, and any
angle sealing hearkens back to my childhood. And I actually
do this in my class. I will ask students at
the beginning of the semester as an icebreaker, like what's
your favorite space that you've ever been in? And most
of the spaces that they talk about are some pretty
regular space that's been imbued with meaning in some other way,
(03:27):
So like the diner where my high school friends used
to hang out, or even just like the kitchen island
where I did my homework with mom listening to podcasts,
or something like that.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
These kinds of spaces, the ones that make us feel safe, relaxed,
and happy, are actually pretty rare. We also fail to
prioritize well being boosting space is like these. Because we're
often not fully aware of what's going on around us,
we fall prey to a bias that psychologists call habituation.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Habituation is just getting used to the way things are.
There's a famous psychological study about fire extinguishers that people
in offices ask where the nearest fire extinguisher is can
identify it right, And of course, fire extinguishers are designed
to be noticeable. They're read, they're placed in prominent locations,
they're literally life saving, and yet the more you walk
(04:13):
by them, the less you kind of notice them, just
because they're always there. We get in habits with how
we interact with our spaces, and a lot of the
time that's really good, right. I don't want to have
to analyze the design of my baseboard every time I
walk out of my house in the morning. I want
to be able to think about other things. But it
also causes us to miss really beautiful and meaningful things
(04:35):
in the world, or just opportunities for spaces that we
never considered and would want to use if we actually
looked at them.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
And so let's walk through some of the evolutionary logic
to the importance of spaces. A lot of the book
uses this idea of self determination theory. What's that and
why is it so important when we're thinking about spaces.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
If you think about our hunter gatherer ancestors, the ones
that survived were the ones that controlled their surroundings in
some way figured out how to create shelter. You figured
out how to you know, have protection from the elements,
protection from predators. So what would make you do that
is some kind of psychological pull to want to interact
(05:14):
with your surroundings. Right, this feels good? And so self
determination theory is the idea that we have these kind
of three fundamental psychological or emotional needs that if we
meet we do well, and if we don't meet them,
we struggle. And this is not my research. This is
a whole body of research confirmed over and over in
all kinds of different populations. And these are agency, competence
(05:36):
or growth, and kind of connection or belonging. I think
about them as like a kid playing on the beach
with a sand castle. Right, So if you go to
the beach and you've got kids with you, Like when
I took my daughter Josephine, she would go and immediately
they have agency. The rest of their world they're being
told what to do by parents and teachers, and they
go to the beach and they can decide where to build,
They can decide how big to make the castle, they
(05:58):
can decide what kind of architecture it is, and they
like it. So if agency is like the ability to
do it, competence and growth is the actual doing. And
so the things the kid learns just building a sand
castle are quite amazing if you think about Okay, they're
learning pretty high level like fluid mechanics, just how the
water erodes. They are learning material properties of sand, but
(06:21):
they're also learning about themselves and their relationship with the world.
When the tower collapses and they get frustrated, they realize
that if they build it back, that also feels pretty
good that they have some kind of control over it.
So that's the growth piece that we get from interacting
with our surroundings. And then the connection. Every one of
these projects that I've ever seen starts with like one kid,
(06:43):
and then they realize that if they can recruit the cousins,
it's going to get bigger and they can do more.
And then I, inevitably, as the parent, end up schlepping
down to the ocean to like grab buckets of water
and come back up and dump them in their pond.
That then goes away by the time I walk down
to the ocean and come back again. But the connection
then is like, Okay, by building together, we're not just
(07:04):
building the structure, but also building relationships between the people,
and you just think about human connection at the societal level.
The leading theory now is that the reason the hunter
gatherer bands came together in the first place was to
be able to build and maintain big structures. This act
(07:24):
of building together is like the genesis of civilization. So
you know, these core needs that we have for agency,
growth and connection kind of originated in our relationship with
our surroundings. And now, of course our relationship with our
surroundings is different. You and I aren't having to go
around thankfully manipulating our surroundings just to be able to survive.
(07:45):
But we can still meet our psychological needs by manipulating
our surroundings.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
And so you've used this example with children, but as
adults we'd be happier in our spaces if we embrace
these three things too. Thinking specifically about agency, your book
share some lovely examples of people finding agency over their space,
especially in situations where this is seemingly impossible. You wrote
about an example of Nelson Mandela. Can you share that
example here?
Speaker 2 (08:09):
So, Nelson Mandela famously imprisoned for a really long time,
and I guess one of the things that he did
when he was imprisoned was on the rooftop of the prison.
There is a space that he found. I think he wrote,
bathed all day in sunlight, and then he lobbied the
guards to be able to have a garden up there
and then was able to use it. And obviously Mendela
(08:29):
is like an exemplar of taking obstacles and persisting regardless.
It's an incredibly extreme example, but we all have access
to spaces that we're not necessarily taking advantage of, and
we're all going to have our spaces constrained in some way.
Hopefully we're not going to be incarcerated. But there are
(08:49):
spaces that we can't change, and when we face the
space that we can't change, we can get agency by
looking at something about it that we.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Can, So that's agency the second need growth. I love
this idea of the kids building the sand castle and
learning all these new things, both in terms of their
own emotion regulation and like fluid dynamics and so on.
But you point out that there's simple ways that we
can grow and get creative even in our own spaces.
You use an example from a family that you knew
that even just switched up where they eat dinner. Tell
me about that.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
The Lee family. They're my friends, and there was a
time in their life where they had four kids under
the age of six. And I was talking to the
dad at that time and I said, Hey, how's it going,
And he's like, things are pretty good. We've taken to
eating outside And I was like, what do you mean,
like once a week. He's like, no, wet every meal
outside And I was like, wow, that sounds like a lot.
He's like, no, actually, So we go out there and
(09:40):
it doesn't matter if the kids spill. It just like
goes into the ecosystem. And then when they're done eating,
they can run around outside and it doesn't bother Katie
and I as much. And when they're making loud noises,
it doesn't reverberate around the kitchen wall. So it had
made their life better, and I think it illustrates this
principle similar to what Mandela did. But it's also like
here's a space that they had access to that they
(10:02):
had never thought of using that way. One way to
kind of break through from that is to not necessarily
put labels on your space. This is according to like
this is a dining room, this is a kitchen, this
is a patio. It's like this is a ten foot
by twenty foot space that is pleasant in the spring
in the fall and has some breezes and grass and
(10:23):
a jungle gym near it or whatever. And then you
can start to kind of line up your activities with
the spaces and break away from functional fixedness that we
get related to how these spaces are supposed to work.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
And so this is this idea of growth. We can
get competent in our spaces, we can get super creative.
The last need you mentioned when you were talking about
the Sanchalxil example was the one that I think we
talk about the most on the Happiness Lab, which is
this idea of connection. Usually when we're talking about on
the Happiness Lab, we're thinking about individual strategies you can
do to boost your social connection, so like text a
friend or talk to the stranger in the coffee shop.
(10:57):
But your point is that spaces are an incredible vehicle
for building these really basic social connections. Why is that
the case? Why can space be so powerful for that?
Speaker 2 (11:06):
This also ties into our modern world, these opportunities that
we have to not have to commute into work just
to meet with somebody if we can talk on Zoom
or I get my groceries delivered and I don't miss
the grocery store, but I do miss the random person
who smiles at you and reminds you that there's like
good humanity out there. So part of it is just proximity, right,
(11:28):
how do you want to be able to have interactions?
Who do you want to be able to have interactions with?
I mean, I think about this a lot because I'm
naturally an introvert. I'm not going to go out and
seek interactions, but I need other people around and so
it's really important for me to live in a place
where there's just going to be people happening by if
I'm sitting out on the porch on the weekend.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
So self determination theory suggest that we're wired to shape
our surroundings in ways that support three basic needs, agency, growth,
and connection. But how do we actually build those kinds
of spaces into our everyday life. After the break, we'll
walk through ten actionable ways we can do just this.
The Happiness Lab will be right back. University of Virginia
(12:23):
professor Ldi Klotz studies how the spaces around us quietly
shape our moods, our thoughts, and even our behavior. His
note book In a Good Place breaks down how simple
design choices can lead to big improvements in our well being.
I picked out ten of my favorite ideas from the
book and ask Lydy to walk us through them, starting
with number one. Something we can all use a little
(12:44):
more of better connection with other people. And for that,
Lighty says we need more of what he calls campfires.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
A campfire, if you think about it, is just set
up for people to connect. It's a circle. There's not
a screen in the middle, there's just warmth in the middle.
If you think about a campfire, it invites people in.
There's an extreme example that I use in the book
of a event planning company that set up campfires to
try to make it so that people would bond at
the event. But you don't need to have glowing orbs
(13:14):
in the middle of a circle, but you do need
to think about, well, if I have a seventy two
inch screen above my fireplace that's on and people come
into the room, that's what they're going to be focused on.
Whereas if I have a seating area that's arranged in
a circle and then invite them to sit down and
it's comfortable, there's more likely to be connection. So that's
a campfire. I mean, here's an example that I would
(13:34):
use at a conference is like thinking strategically about where
I sit. It's uncomfortable for me to come up to
a group of eight people sitting in a circle unless
we all come at the same time. But I could
also like sit somewhere where there's an open seat next
to me, and it's inviting for somebody else to come
and have like a random connection in that way.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
So it's kind of like creating these focal points where
social connection becomes.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Easy, exactly exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
So another tip that you have that's related to this
idea of social connection, which actually comes from your earlier
book subtract, is this idea that to engage in social
connection in our spaces, we need to clean up. This
feels especially salient to me right now because right now
I'm upstairs in my podcast studio and a friend of
mine who just happened to be in town was like, Oh,
I'll just come over to your house and wait till
(14:18):
you've done the podcast and then we can have time
to hang out. And my instant reaction when she said
this was like, Oh, my god, there's the stuff in
the kitchen, there's the stuff on the floor. It almost
made me tell her like, no, no, no, don't come to
my house. We'll meet at some coffee shop or something.
We can get really weirded out if our spaces don't
feel clean enough for other people to connect. But you've
pointed out that there's other reasons that cleaning up can
help us connect better. What are some of those reasons?
Speaker 2 (14:40):
I mean, connecting is hard. Connecting takes a lot of
cognitive effort. Connecting takes a lot of attention. That's how
we're wired. And if the space is taking away from
that attention. You know, an example of my house, maybe
there's shin guards and boxer briefs on the floor, and
the person's thinking like what's going on here versus connecting
with me. It's the cognitive load of all the things
that people have to pay attention to in your space
(15:02):
is cognitive load that they're not devoting to connecting with you.
And this person's already a friend of yours, so you're okay, right,
But if you think of a new person coming into
your house, you want not a lot of distractions in
the space to take away from them connecting with you
and feeling comfortable with you. Or even it could be
like something that's a super fancy centerpiece that just the
person can't take their eye off it and then focus
(15:24):
on you. Those are things that are distracting from the
human connection that might happen in the space. Also, just
simply coming into your house and taking an outside view
saying Okay, if I didn't live here, what would this
look like to me? I think is probably a good exercise.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
I love this point about the distraction specifically, too, because
that gets to tip number three that you've talked about,
which is to find ways to use your spaces to
fight choice paralysis, which is another way that we can
kind of get cognitively overloaded. How do you define choice
paralysis and how can we use our spaces to fight it.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Too many choices causes us to not only make bad decisions,
but also feel bad about the decisions that we do make.
For example, with chocolates, if people have thirty chocolates to
choose from, they are more disappointed with their choice then
if they only have some subset of six to choose from. Right,
because you're thinking about what you missed out on and
you felt cognitively overloaded. Now that's just thirty and six,
(16:19):
and now think about all the degrees of freedom and
all the endless options in our spaces, and so I
think narrowing down those options. So we want to have choice,
but we don't want to be like overloaded with the
amount of choice that we have. And one thing that
architects have learned to do was in the design process,
if they're doing a new building or even like renovating,
there's a stage where they present three different options. So
(16:41):
one option might be like, okay, this is centered on
a view out the window, and this one's centered on
a gathering area in the living room, and this one's
some other principle. So if we're thinking about setting up
your home office, for example, starting with like, what are
the three basic options that I want to explore before
you get into any kind of furnishings, and you know,
(17:02):
paint colors and all these other details that just make
endless choice.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Your book also has some tips that we can use
to avoid choice paralysis, and one of them is that
we need to avoid our tendency towards bike shedding. What
is bike shedding?
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Basically, it's that left to our own devices, we often
focus on the small and inconsequential things at the expense
of big important things. And the bike shedding example, it's
a built environment example that's been applied to all kinds
of decision making, but the original example is like a
committee convened to discuss the construction of a nuclear power plant.
(17:36):
Everybody's there, engineers, owners, architects, plant operators, maybe some community members,
and the plans get presented. Everybody's like, looks good. They
ask some softball questions about the nuclear power plant, and
they're like, oh, you want to talk about the bike
shed that's going to go next to the nuclear power plant,
And like the meeting springs to life, right, everybody has opinions.
(17:57):
They're like, what's the new racking system? Going to be,
what color are we going to paint it, where's it
going to be located. It's an illustration of like the
bike shed is more understandable, people get the bike shed
and therefore feel okay chiming in on it. There's also
the decisions related to the bike shed, while small, are
much more certain like, Okay, if we paint the bike
(18:17):
shed blue, everybody knows what that is going to look like,
whereas if you say, oh, we should have a different
kind of nuclear reactor, nobody even knows what that would
would mean. So we focus on these small and inconsequential
decisions because they're understandable, but also because there's more kind
of certainty and what the ultimate decision outcome would look like.
So it becomes really important to get over bike shedding,
(18:41):
to go back to basic principles about what we want
from the space. And that's one reason why it's important
to think about agency growth and connection. That's one way
to avoid bike shedding is to say, Okay, how is
this going to contribute to these fundamental psychological needs? But
what it's doing is helping people think through the big
things before you move on to these small, granular decisions.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
So that's tip number three. Avoid the choice paralysis, fight
the bike shedding. Tip number four swhich is gears a
little bit. It's this idea that we need to fight
the habituation we would normally experience in spaces.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Yeah, a way to overcome it is to consciously tune
in to what's going on. One interesting way to pay
attention is to close your eyes. Close your eyes. All
of a sudden you'll start hearing things and smelling things
and maybe feeling things, maybe the breeze or whatever you
wouldn't have otherwise about the space. And this is an
(19:36):
opportunity to notice pleasant things, but it's also an opportunity
to notice negative things that even if you've habituated them
away or still having a toll. So there's studies of
workplaces where there's like a lot of ambient noise, and
even if workers don't say that it's a noisy workspace,
they still report being more stressed out at the end
of the day. The same with unpleasant smells, like the
(19:59):
new car smell that comes in cars but also off
gasing carpets, right, And people sit into space like that
all day and don't even notice the smell and then
go home with a headache because they've been inhaling the VOCs.
So breaking free fromt habituation is a matter of paying
closer attention. But like one way to do it is
to tap into all your senses.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Another tip that you've given for fighting habituation, which I
love so much, it's going to get its on tip
number Tip number five is what you've called space before screen.
Oh yeah, what's that?
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Obviously our screens are taking our attention. I use my screen.
It does amazing things. It's allowing us to talk right now,
me to talk to your audience. That's freaking amazing. But
no matter what it can do, it's not tapping into
my other senses.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Right.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
It is basically just visual and sound here, but there's
no smell, there's no touch. It's two dimensional. And again
this isn't bad, but it is like kind of inadvertently
taking out of our life something that really provides meaning
and happiness and fulfillment. And so space before screen doesn't
even try to fight that and just use your screen
(21:04):
as a queue to take in the space around you.
So if I walk into this space and I start
looking at my screen to see like, okay, did I
get a text? From anybody. When you start doing that,
say oh wait, I just looked at my screen. I'm
in a new space. Can I take in the space
And now all of a sudden you're looking and you're smelling,
and you're noticing things and you're seeing opportunities. So using
that thing that we're naturally drawn to and instead turning
(21:27):
it around as a reminder to analyze the space that
we're in. You can do that in spaces that you're
in all the time, and I guarantee you will notice
new things about the space.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Since reading your book, I've tried doing this just using
my own phoe that I'm looking at as a queue,
and I can tell you this helped me in a
lot of spaces, but especially in the morning. Interesting, when
I first wake up and I'm looking at my phone
to check my email, it's like no space war screen
and I stop and I'm like, oh my my cozy bed,
the light is coming in, what's the weather outside the window,
And it's just so much more embodied and grounding, when
(21:58):
before I'd just be like halfway through my inbox before
I would even notice I was awake and alive and
I had a body at all.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Yeah, well, that makes me really happy that it was helpful.
I do the same thing and resist the same way
that you do now.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
So tip number six is one that's helpful whenever we're
in spaces that involve learning, and it's to harness what
you've called memory anchors. What are memory anchors?
Speaker 2 (22:19):
So when we learn something, the information about where we
learned it is filed right alongside the thing that we learned.
Now we can engineer that, and if we want to
learn something and really remember it, then we can also
do it in a spot that we're more likely to remember.
So it's maybe a different spot and a really simple
example that I use in my teaching. I'll figure out
a reason to just get out of the classroom, then
(22:41):
go to some random spot on campus, and then I'll
guide them through an experience that helps them learn some
important lesson. And then they're like, why are we at
the Amphitheater for this? We didn't actually need to come here, Like,
I just wanted you to be more likely to remember this.
Like think back to your own school, right, If you
remember something, it's very often happens outside of the classroom.
(23:02):
Maybe it's on a field trip. I mean, my dad,
I don't know if he knew he was doing this,
but when he would help us with our biology, he
would take us on walks outside. So you're just like
getting people outside of the routine environment. And then you've
got this memory anchor where it's the new space and
the new idea working together to be remembered.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Seems like it's just another way we've going to harness
our spatial memory system, right, is that we're using space
to kind of do what we actually want to do,
which is to be learning new stuff.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Right, And you know, one of the ways that you
might hear about this idea is memory champions will if
they need to memorize a bunch of facts, we'll actually
take the facts and associate them with spaces. That's super interesting,
but it's pretty much useless for everybody else. And so
we're basically just turning that around, right, It's like, Okay,
we want to actually learn, so let's align our spaces
(23:52):
to do that.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
So far, we've looked at how our spaces can shape
our daily habits, how we connect, how we focus, and
how we learn. After the break, we'll go deeper into
how our surroundings can reflect our values, tap into our
instincts and even help us stay connected to the people
we've lost Happiness Lab We'll be right back. We've been
(24:23):
walking through my top ten favorite ideas from Lightiklatz's new
book In a Good Place about how we can use
our spaces to boost well being. Tip number seven takes
us back to our evolutionary roots and the kinds of
environments that were naturally wired to feel good in.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Obviously, there's a lot of advice out there about what
you're going to like, and I think the ones that
really hold up scientifically are things that are aligned with
the laws of nature. And so one great example is
prospect and refuge. We talked earlier about spaces being critical
for our survival, So what kind of space would be
good for survival well refuge first, right, So if the
(24:59):
space is going to protect you from the elements and
from predators, but also prospect and being able to see
like food or water sources or other opportunities from the space.
In that prospect and refuge, I mean that's sitting under
an umbrella at the beach. You're getting prospect and refuge,
washing dishes in your kitchen while looking out the window.
That's prospect and refuge. So that's something that we tend
(25:21):
to like when it comes to design aesthetics. It's kind
of a balance of organization and complexity, and so this
is how nature just takes shape. Right, If you think
about a pine tree, for example, I mean, super complex,
impressive thing that's doing all this amazing stuff, but there
are also some very basic rules in the appearance of
(25:43):
this tree. You know, there's small patterns in the tip
of the branch that are identical to the patterns in
a larger branch, and you don't necessarily notice them unless
you're really trying to pay attention to it. But that's
the world that we've been surrounded with and that feels pleasing.
And going into a built environment example of that. If
you think about like a facade of bricks, super plane, right,
(26:06):
seemingly very straightforward, but if you look at how how
bricks are organized, which now you're going to be cursed
to do for the eternity, but there are all kinds
of different patterns. I mean, there's like a pattern where
the bricks are just staggered offset by a half a
brick each row, and that creates this balance of order
and complexity. But there are other patterns where you might
(26:27):
have a brick with the long side facing out than
a brick with the short side facing out, then longside,
then short side, and then that alternates each row, and
it creates this esthetic of like, Okay, there's complexity, but
there's also this underlying order, and that's stuff that we
tend to have been surrounded by for a long time,
and that kind of helps our brains feel comfortable and
then we can go about our lives doing other things.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
Any tips for how to build more of that into
our own spaces.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
The classic interior design advice about you know, varying the
materials so you don't want to get things too matchyat
but also have like a clear organizing principle to them.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
So tip number seven was this evolutionary idea of go
for these moments of prospect and refuge, maybe find order
and complexity. Tip number eight is about aligning our space
with our beliefs. What are some beliefs that we might
be unknowingly propagating in our spaces.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
I'll give you one eye, unknowably propagated. So we bought
an old cape cod post World War two house, and
the way those homes were designed classic design was that
the kitchen's kind of in the back, and of course
that was based on post World War two gender roles
where it was seen as the woman's jobs to be
there cooking but also cooking like out of sight from
(27:41):
everywhere else, and what was supposed to be bring out
the food and then return to the kitchen and people
don't have to see the mess, and people don't have
to interact with the mess. But like if you opened
up your kitchen to make it a more open plan
and you're like taking down those gender roles, and.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
This kind of thing comes up at work too when
it comes to hierarchies that we might not intend as well.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Yeah, I mean, if you're thinking about the quality of
the offices, where the offices are, who uses what space.
I was talking to somebody recently and they're like, we
have this idea that our office is open plan and
everybody can use any space, but the big boss always
comes in and just sits in this conference room all day,
and it's like nobody's going to go take the big
bosses space, right, And so really thinking about what message
(28:23):
are you sending with the spaces and does it align
with what your company or yourself actually values, and what
I think is really important about like sharing our ideas
through spaces. I mean, people do all this work with
social norms because social norms is one of the most
powerful ways that behaviors spread. So when you see a
sticker that says I voted, that's like, okay, we're trying
(28:44):
to spread voting by making a behavior visible. And what's
hard about a lot of behaviors is that they're not
super visible, so you need a sticker. But a space
doesn't need a sticker, It's already there. And there's this
classic example, I think it's actually Connecticut suburbs of how
solar panels spread. And basically the gist of the study
is that people who can see solar panels from their
house are more likely to have solar panels on their house,
(29:06):
and they control for everything else. And so it's a
classic social norm right, It's just by seeing this space,
it's spreading this value. And so I just think of
that as it's a huge opportunity we have to actually
enhance our influence in the world and make change for
the things that we think are important.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
And one of the things we might think is important
is a sense of community kind of egalitarianism. And that
gets to tip number nine, which is that if you
want to use spaces to enhance what you value, you
might want to consider promoting what's called collective efficacy.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
What's collective efficacy building together? Basically? I remember when I
first started teaching my class on sustainability in the built environment.
Students in the class were like, Oh, there's this project
that's going to happen in New York City where they're
going to redo this old, abandoned rail line and make
a walkway on it that allows people to walk through
the city and experience it in a totally different way.
And this has turned into the high Line. And when
(29:58):
they first started talking about it, I'm like, yeah, great,
I hear about these projects all the time, and this
is just two people's dream. The people who started the
Highline literally just met at a community meeting and had
this idea for this, and then it grew from there
and it's just a really pleasant place that has been
incredibly popular. It's a success by any measure, except for
maybe gentrification, but that's a different book. And even if
(30:20):
you think you know Jane Jacob's another New York story
where she was really famous for her activism stopping a
highway from bisecting, And it started with people in rooms
talking about not wanting this to happen, and they protest
against it, and their group gets bigger from the protesting
and then they're able to take on bigger space change projects.
(30:42):
So that's collective efficacy. It feels good. It's one great
way to get things done in the world. And if
you track how these examples happen over time, it very
often starts with groups taking on a relatively small project,
and by taking on the relatively small project, they build
their capacity to do things. But they also build the
capacity of their group that makes their communities stronger. And
(31:06):
so this collective efficacy is not just making this nicer,
it's bringing the community together.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
So that gets us to our final tip, tip number ten,
And I've saved the best for a last because this
is the idea that we can feel happier in our
spaces if we use them to promote healthy forms of
grief and nostalgia. And this is a theme that's really
woven through your book and part because of an awful tragedy
that your family suffered, and so if you're comfortable with it,
tell me about Josie.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
Yeah, I love talking about Josie. So Josie's my daughter,
and there's stories of her throughout the book. They were
in there before she died, and I didn't want to
take them out after she died. She just died suddenly,
unexpectedly from a quick illness in twenty twenty three, and
losing a four year old as awful as it sounds,
but I love talking about Josie. I love talking about
(31:56):
her stories, you know, building sand castles on the beach,
or another story of Josie that's in the book is
we talked about this idea of functional fixedness. And one
of the things I'll never forget about her was she
had to have been like two or three, and I
walked into the kitchen and there's my daughter sitting at
the pantry. So it was just like two full height cabinets.
(32:17):
She had just opened both doors at the pantry, moved
her highchair over there, and was just sitting at the
pantry eating. So instead of like having to carry all
the food over to the table, He's like, I was
going to bring my chair to where the food is,
and then I've got all this food at my disposal.
It's amazing. So I love being able to share our stories.
(32:38):
I think that's one of the ways that the awesome
things that she gave to the world keep going. And also,
you know, thinking about how do we remember her in space,
because obviously this is a big thing that we try
to use our spaces for. I mean, from the Egyptian
pyramids right there to try to make somebody immortal. And
a lot of donations to university buildings are you know,
(33:00):
it's worth fifty million dollars for me to have my
name on this thing that's gonna still be up after
I'm not here. So I was thinking about that for Josie,
and we used to walk between my house and a
pond on campus where we would go fishing and mainly
just like throw rocks in, and she'd run around and
she would always take different paths there because she liked exploring.
(33:21):
And so one day we took a path that went
through an old house that the university now owns, So
basically she walked up their yard and then through some
English ivy and then hit a paved path that went
to the street. And on that path the homeowner had
like put a marble block and inscribed their name in it.
So Josie one benefit of being four is that let
hers say whatever the heck you want them to say.
(33:42):
So if she looks at it and she says that
says Josie's Way, I think she kind of knew the
double meaning too, right, where it's like this is now,
I've just named this path after myself. And also, Josie's
Way is like my way of being in the world.
So we wanted to do something for her in the
world that kind of remembered her, remembered her spirit, and
the idea of a Josie's Way. We made one next
(34:04):
to the best playground in town that just goes parallel
to it and over some creeks, and it's just a
place where kids can go down ride their bikes but
also get into the woods and explore. And it spreads
things that she cared about and would have liked. It
makes me happy, and that's you know, agency right.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
I love these stories so much. And one of the
things I love kind of knowing about neuroscience is that
what you're doing is really using the part of our
brain that encodes space to kind of make these memories thicker.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Yeah, And I learned this after she died the neuroscience
and as our brains you know, adapted to relationships being
more important and human connections, they didn't like develop new networks,
they adapted the networks that were used to code space. Right,
So when we talk about being close and distant from somebody,
(34:52):
those are spatial terms, and we're having boundaries. That's a
spatial thing that has taken on kind of relationship meaning.
And you know, so again like trying to reverse engineer
that and create spaces that help us remember the person
and help spread the spirit of that person.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
It's almost like we're developing these physical experiences that we
can go back to to feel of the same emotions. Yeah,
and so has recognizing this connection between our inner and
outer lives affected your happiness positively?
Speaker 2 (35:20):
I think so. I think I've always paid a lot
of attention to it because I care about the physical
world and that's like kind of the area that I
work in. But I think what's really helped me is
homing in on agency, competence and connection because there's just
so much there and I think we can go a
really long way to start with these core big three
(35:40):
and that's been what's really helpful for me in kind
of just filtering decisions through that.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
It's almost like the next time you're facing a space question,
ask yourself, how can this boost my agency? Where am
I going to get some competence and growth from this?
And how can I promote connection?
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Yeah, we need to come up with the Zillow orrealitor
dot com profile that like the agency growth and connection
scores for the house. But of course they depend right,
so they depend on the person.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
I hope this episode has so is a reminder that
the spaces around you matter. They're actively shaping your mood,
your habits, and even the way you hold on to
the people you love. The good news is that you
don't need to redesign your entire home to feel those benefits.
Even small changes like creating a campfire style seating area
for guests, noticing your space a bit more, or using
(36:28):
your surroundings to reflect what you value can make a
big difference in your happiness and in the happiness of
the people around you. And if you want even more
ideas about how to design your space to boost your
well being, be sure to check out Lydie's new book
In a Good Place, How the spaces where we live,
work and play can help us thrive, which is out now.
If you have thoughts about today's episode, we'd love to
(36:49):
hear them. You can email us at Happiness Lab at
Pushkin dot fm and leave us a review to tell
us what resonated. You can also sign up to learn
more about the science of happiness and join my free
newsletter on my website, Doctor Laurie Santos dot com. That's
d R l A U RI E S A n
t O s dot com. In our next installment on
(37:11):
Spring Cleaning Your Happiness, we'll go back to the Happiness
Lab archives to share an episode about downsizing your stuff.
We'll hear about the joy of letting go and learn
why material possessions don't boost our happiness as much as
we assume.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
I mean, there are more storage units than the her McDonald's.
It's just ridiculously a symptom of a culture which has
become obsessed with possessions. So it's like this demon that
it is, this little inp in our mind telling us
to buy things and don't throw it away because it
might be valuable one day.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
That's all Next time on the Happiness Lab with me,
Doctor Laurie Santos
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