Headspace

when the room temperature was lower (20˚ Celsius), employees made 44 per cent more mistakes than when the temperature was five degrees higher. They speculated that under colder conditions employees were using up a lot of their energy keeping warm, rather than maintaining focus on their work. They also found that when individuals had warmer hands they had greater job satisfaction and felt more generous towards their colleagues.

The lesson here may be that we must be allowed to take control – moving from workspaces with stimulating colours to areas with natural, restorative colours when we feel overloaded

compared to traditional fluorescent lighting, warmer LED appears to support positive mood, extended wakefulness and better performance on cognitive tasks.

So, the Sydney survey revealed that workspaces with no or limited partitions registered higher satisfaction for ‘sound privacy’ and ‘noise level’ than did cubicles with high or low partitions.

children sleep better with the background noise of human voices than they do in an atmosphere of total silence.

Noise from traffic, railways or industry can harm a community, but it can adversely affect our mental and physical health if it also invades the buildings we inhabit. As well as making us tense and irritable, it can affect our decision-making, working memory and the regulation of emotions – collectively known as executive functioning (EF).

Bystander apathy and aloofness is a way of coping with both a particularly urban form of sensory overload (which increases fatigue and irritability) and the stress of other people getting in the way of our progress and thwarting some goal or other (getting to the theatre, shopping or simply getting home in time to be with the children). When there is competition for a place on a train or some other shared goal, this can quite rapidly lead to irritation, conflict and even aggression.

Bystander apathy and aloofness is a way of coping with both a particularly urban form of sensory overload (which increases fatigue and irritability) and the stress of other people getting in the way of our progress and thwarting some goal or other (getting to the theatre, shopping or simply getting home in time to be with the children)

Large cities suffer from ‘bystander apathy’. Residents are less likely to rush to the assistance of others who are in trouble, although this is complicated by the effect of tensions between different peer groups or different ethnic groups

Researchers compared large student dormitories with smaller ones over a number of weeks. In the first three weeks, residents in the bigger dorm became ‘more competitive and reactive’, but by Week Seven they had mostly stopped interacting and had withdrawn in to their own rooms. In contrast, residents of the smaller dorms socialised in communal areas and were not competitive.
We retreat to private spaces when sharing with a large number of people because social encounters are hard to predict, more likely to be unwanted, and are difficult to avoid. In other words, there is less personal control over whom you have contact with and when. Ultimately, this feels threatening and uncomfortable. Over time it can cause stress-related physical and mental health problems