The Impact of Environment on Mental Health: Creating Supportive Spaces
Our Environment’s Impact On Our Mental Health
Environments that are supportive, free of clutter, have access to greenery and natural light and help regulate our emotions are great for our mental health. Conversely, unsupportive, crowded, dark and dreary, and dysregulating environments can negatively impact our mental health. These conditions, negative or positive, influence our mood, behavior and thoughts. Consider your home, community, work and school environments for example, there are likely positive and negative influences on your mental wellbeing. Given the high impact our environments have on our mental health, our work must extend to influence the design and practices in these environments to reduce stress and negative health and lifestyle outcomes.
The Influences Of Common Environments
Workplaces and schools are significant places to make organization change. Both public and private institutions from early childhood to college can benefit from both designing school spaces that support students’ mental health, and creating a healthy and supportive school environment for the purpose of strengthening mental health. Similarly, fostering a positive workplace environment for mental health such as establishing “organizational norms to reflect an inclusive culture” and integrating green wellness spaces are powerful ways to support employees' mental health.
The Benefit of Strengthening Your Environment
Many people find themselves in unhealthy work environments where the culture and climate negatively impacts employee wellbeing and people feel devalued. Psychological safety at work, strongly tied to mental health, is higher when workers feel valued by leadership and experience fewer microaggressions related to their identity.
Prioritizing mental health in the workplace and education settings is both ethically sound and economically beneficial. A supportive environment leads to increased productivity, reduced absenteeism, and improved morale, ultimately contributing to a thriving workforce or student body and a stronger bottom line. By fostering a culture of open communication, providing access to resources, and actively addressing workplace stressors, employers can create a workplace where employees feel valued, supported, and resilient.
To accomplish this, teams can conduct a strengths-based needs assessment to pinpoint areas of strength and need and strategically address these goals. Involving stakeholders at multiple levels enhances the quality of these assessments and resulting interventions. Solutions can be implemented as environmental design strategies that shape climate, policies that shape daily culture, practices that are infused into routines and evidence-based programs that benefit wellbeing.