Your mind. Your body. Your environment. All connected.

Mind-Body-Environment Connection 0:00

Everyone knows about the mind body connection, but the mine body environment connection is less understood, But it's very real. And I want to help empower people to sort of sharpen their focus and fix their lens so that they can see the way things impact them so we can shape things a little bit more in our favor. Even if someone's renting a property, there's little things you can do. Those little 2% shifts add up over time, over years. It can be very powerful, like the butterfly effect. And of course, for people that do build a home from scratch, that's like a quantum leap into creating your future.

How Small Environmental Changes Add Up 0:31

Cause to the degree that you can shape your environment and shape, your space, you could shape destiny, right? And so that, That's a two-way street of communication. The mind-body environment connection is subtle in some ways, but it's also quite plain in others. There's so many different ways we can look at it. And there's many examples we could talk about. We can start with just a very basic one. And I think it's probably surprising for some people to hear an architect say this, but buildings are not our natural habitat.

Buildings as a Foreign Habitat 0:58

You know, no matter how beautiful your space is, you could live in a palace, But from the perspective of the human organism, it is a foreign environment. and therefore it going to elicit at some level, a subtle or a dramatic stress response. Interesting. We're simply in a foreign environment. A picture of an example of the most beautiful architecture, you know, some cathedral somewhere or something, and show it to a thousand people from all

Architecture vs. Natureu2019s Physiological Effects 1:35

over the planet. You know different cultures, different ages, tastes and perspectives. And they might all agree, wow, that certainly is good architecture. Maybe it's not my style or my preference, but I can appreciate it for the beauty, the work of art that it is. But if you hook up physiological sensing equipment to them, they're not all going to have the same response. They may all agree that that's beautiful architecture, Whereas if you take a scene of green growing things, a meadow or a forest or some nature scene, those same thousand people, they may say, oh, I prefer a beach or I preferred mountains.

They may have individual preferences for the type of landscapes that they like and gravitate to. Nevertheless, all thousand of them, assuming they're healthy, well-adjusted people, are going to have a similar physiological response, which is the alpha waves in the brain slow, not as much spike as there's a calming of the mind. Our breath rate will become more deep. You know, we typically breathe fairly shallow.

Bringing Nature Into the Home 2:34

We don't take full deep breaths, but we will breathe more deeply upon seeing the nature scene. And we achieve a resting heart rate. more quickly and easily. And that's going to slow the heart rate and reduce blood pressure and lower a stress response. So I encourage people, and this happens automatically, it's subconscious, It just happens. It's your environment playing an influence on you, whether you're aware of it or not. What I say is, look, let's try to bring nature into the home.