Dopamine décor is the trend that’s currently making waves in interior design. Ensuring spaces not only look beautiful and function well, this is design that proactively helps boost your mood by activating dopamine production. So, how does our environment impact our dopamine levels, and what do you need to do to tap into the benefits of dopamine décor? Let us explain.
Dopamine and its impact on our wellbeing
Dopamine is often referred to colloquially as the ‘happy hormone’ because it produces feelings of pleasure and happiness. The Cleveland Clinic describes the neurotransmitter and hormone as: “a key part of the brain’s reward system, which is triggered by pleasurable activities.”
Its purpose is rooted in survival. For example, amongst its purposes listed by HealthDirect, it helps us to feel motivated, supporting memory, learning, and concentration levels, as well as sleep quality and overall feelings of happiness and satisfaction. On the other hand, having low levels of dopamine is linked to a variety of potential health challenges, from trouble sleeping to depression.
How does our environment impact dopamine production?
There’s a bit of a nature/nurture debate when it comes to our innate dopamine levels as individuals, but one thing that seems to be reported quite consistently is that our environment does have an impact on dopamine production. Some of the environmental elements that affect dopamine production include the following, all of which can be supported by the way spaces are designed:
Environmental enrichment
Studies into dopamine talk about the value of an “enriched environment”, and its association with increased motivation. In the context of research with rodents, an enriched environment is one with plenty of toys, spaces to run around, socialise, and inspiration. However, we can take those learnings and apply them to our own home environments, creating a world of our own that inspires and delights on a daily basis.
Physical activity
Linked to environmental enrichment, exercise is known to help boost dopamine levels. While exercise isn’t necessarily connected to the way you design your kitchen, creating spaces that encourage movement or more meditative practices can have a powerful impact on our mood and how we feel at home.
Social interaction
As inherently social creatures, connectivity with other people through positive social interactions is another dopamine trigger. Our homes can be really rich environments for social interactions with family and friends, especially when it comes to the kitchen, which can be designed to be a real hub of the home.
A sense of accomplishment
As it’s also known as the ‘reward chemical’, it’s not surprising that feeling a sense of achievement when we accomplish something is another way to boost dopamine levels. The Modern Medical Laboratory Journal writes: “Dopamine also plays a crucial role in motivation. It encourages you to pursue and achieve goals, whether they are small tasks like completing a to-do list or larger life aspirations. The anticipation of the reward associated with accomplishing these goals triggers dopamine release, providing a sense of satisfaction and motivation to keep going.” Creating spaces that help to facilitate a sense of achievement through the utterly pleasing experience of seamless functionality can therefore have an impact about how we feel.
Conversely, there are also things about our spaces that can inhibit feel-good-factor. For example, stress, toxins, a sense of isolation, and poor nutrition. These are things we can seek to counter to some extent through design as well.
Dopamine décor and how to achieve it
With those elements in mind, our homes are places in which we not only spend so much of our time, but where we should feel our most safe, supported, and cocooned as well. How we design it can have a profound impact on how we feel. Crucially, we can proactively design our spaces to help improve dopamine production and with so many stressors in the world around us, it’s more important than ever that we take control of our environment when we can.
As Nicholas Anthony’s Design Director, Niko Rasides told Good Housekeeping: “Dopamine decor focuses on creating joyful, stimulating spaces through the use of colours, patterns and tactile elements. Its name is inspired by dopamine, the ‘feel-good’ neurotransmitter, focusing on visual and sensory cues that uplift your mood.”
Examples of areas we can focus on in design to help create positive environments include:
Quality of light and natural light exposure
The quality of light in our environment has such a profound impact on how we feel. Whether it’s light that motivates, calms, soothes, wakes us up or helps us go to sleep, light can transform our spaces and our lifestyle. Natural light is the most coveted of all, and mimicking it has become the challenge for many lighting manufacturers. For example, we supply Occhio, which is amongst the leading designers, producing a CRI (Colour Rendering Index) certification of 97%, which is to say their products emulate sunlight to an almost perfect degree (no one has yet produced a 100% certification).
Organisation for optimum experiences
Home organisation is a specialist skill that goes far beyond having good storage and into a world of seamless usability, where spaces are intuitive to move through and where form and function come together. It’s that level of careful consideration that’s not only aesthetically pleasing, but creates a sense of calm and pleasure when everything has its place and works in harmony.
Enhanced nutrition through technology
It seems unusual to equate the design of your kitchen with the nutrition levels of your diet, but with the rise of high-tech homes it’s becoming easier to make health an inherent part of our busy lives. In the initial instance, spaces which are enjoyable to use because they’re beautiful to be in, encourage us to pay more attention to what we eat and prepare. On a more technical level however, appliances that prevent waste, store pre-prepared food, and preserve vitamin levels in the cooking process are making their way into the most modern homes. For example, innovations such as Gaggenau’s vacuum drawer and BORA’s built-in QVac vacuum sealer, both seal food and enable it to be frozen and cooked later while maintaining its quality and vitamin content. There are also fridges with intelligent air filters to remove bacteria, and that can detect expiry dates and alert you so that you use products efficiently.
Social spaces
Homes are places in which we seek to spend our time and get away from the world outside. This is where our parasympathetic nervous system should feel most at peace, and in part because this is where we can come together with our loved ones in safe and nurturing social spaces. In many houses, the kitchen really is the heart of the home, whether you’re a couple or a family with young children, or you like to entertain friends. Creating spaces that facilitate those social interactions is an enormous joy. For example, at a family home on the prestigious Crown Estate in Oxshott, the kitchen island became an informal dining area to gather for meals or while food was being prepared, with a convivial feel and the chance to fill it with the sound of laughter and conversation.
Connectivity with nature
Nature is our most powerful ally when it comes to health and wellbeing. From imbuing our spaces with the deep-rooted calm of Mother Earth through the use of organic materials like natural stone and wood, to letting natural light flood in, and creating a seamlessness with outside spaces. Indoor herb ‘gardens’ and biophilic details such as living walls or carefully selected plants are also powerful features.
Positive stimuli
Stimuli are also an important part of our environment. We talk a lot about calm, but it’s also essential to exist in spaces that inspire us. Colour is one essential way to do that, with each hue having a different effect on our mood and psyche. However, art is also one of our favourite ways to create a rich home environment – one in which we can create meaning, a sense of self, aspiration, personality and emotion, all of which contributes to our personal wellbeing.
A joyful way to create a happier home
With increased knowledge about the impact of mobile phones, social media, and our connected world on our individual and collective wellbeing, more and more of us are becoming invested in our health and how we can positively impact it in our own environments. While we all delight in the feelings of euphoria caused by ‘likes’ on social channels, we’re more aware of the importance of holistic wellness and our homes are both a joyful and powerful way in which we can influence the way we feel. The dopamine décor trend is a beautiful example of how we can create a better quality of life for ourselves, and have fun in the process.
Contact us or book a consultation at one of our studios to talk to us about creating a personalised space in your home with our award-winning team.