Improve Your Sleep Environment Part 2: Color In Your Sleep Space
To improve your sleep environment, organization and cleanliness are your first priorities. After that, it’s all about taste. If you’re planning a bedroom revamp and want to improve your sleep environment while you’re at it, pay special attention to color. In the first installment of my newest blog series we reviewed the reasons why the quality of your sleep hygiene is linked to your sleep environment. Today, I want to have a look at how colors can affect our emotional experiences.
Color and Emotion
Colors “have a strong impact on our emotions and feelings,” according to a 2004 literature review and research paper by Naz Kaya and Helen H. Epps:
- Principle hues (blue, green, yellow, red, and purple) tend to create positive emotional responses. Green tends to evoke relaxation and comfort as a reminder of “nature”
- Cool colors like blue, green, and even purple tend to encourage feelings of peace and calm while making an area feel more spacious
- Red is often associated with anger, fire, or powerful emotion and can be stimulating rather than relaxing, as well as making an area feel smaller and more constrictive
- Clean white can evoke positive feelings, while black and gray more often elicit negative connotations
- Yellow can be stimulating but often evokes positive emotions as a reminder of sunlight
The colors you choose for the walls, bedding, window treatments, and decoration in your bedroom can affect your state of mind and thus your ability to sleep well. Use these basic human responses to color as a guideline for choosing your bedroom color palette.
Next time, I’ll go a little more in-depth into the color issue. We’ll explore how humans uniquely associate symbolic meaning to color, and why it’s important for you to choose colors that are right for you, not just colors that usually make people feel peaceful.
Author Bio: +Michelle Gordon is a sleep expert who researches and writes about sleep and health, and is an online publisher for the latex mattress specialist Latexmattress.org.