Your Environment Affects Your Happiness More Than You Think with Dr. Leidy Klotz

1. Filter Decisions by Core Needs

When making decisions about your space, ask how it boosts your agency, competence/growth, and connection. This framework helps filter choices and align spaces with fundamental psychological needs.

2. Find Agency in Constrained Spaces

Even in spaces you cannot change, seek out something within them that you can control or modify. This act of finding agency can improve your psychological well-being, as exemplified by Nelson Mandela’s prison garden.

3. Redefine Space Functions

Avoid labeling spaces by their traditional function (e.g., ‘dining room’). Instead, view them as flexible areas and align activities with their inherent qualities (e.g., pleasant breezes, grass) to foster creativity and growth.

4. Design for Social Connection

Arrange seating in a circle and remove distractions like large screens to create ‘campfire’ style focal points that invite people to connect and feel comfortable, making social interaction easier.

5. Reduce Cognitive Load for Connection

Clean up your space to minimize distractions and cognitive load for guests, allowing them to focus their attention on connecting with you rather than on clutter or overwhelming decor.

6. Limit Design Options

When designing or renovating a space, start by exploring only three basic options before delving into details like furnishings or paint colors. This prevents choice overload and leads to better decisions.

7. Prioritize Big Decisions First

Avoid focusing on small, inconsequential details (‘bike shedding’) at the expense of major decisions. Instead, anchor your choices in fundamental principles like agency, growth, and connection to ensure important things are addressed.

8. Engage All Senses in Spaces

To overcome habituation, consciously tune into your surroundings by closing your eyes and noticing sounds, smells, and tactile sensations. This helps you identify both pleasant and negative unnoticed aspects of a space.

9. Prioritize Space Over Screen

Use the act of looking at your phone or screen as a cue to pause and intentionally take in the physical space around you, engaging all your senses before diving into digital content. This promotes a more embodied and grounded experience.

10. Anchor Memories in New Spaces

To better remember new information, learn it in a novel or different physical location. This leverages your spatial memory system, associating the new idea with a unique ‘memory anchor’ outside of routine environments.

11. Design with Nature’s Principles

Incorporate ‘prospect and refuge’ (e.g., a protected spot with a view) and a balance of order and complexity (e.g., varied materials with an organizing principle) to create naturally pleasing and comfortable environments.

12. Reflect Values in Your Space

Intentionally design your spaces to reflect your personal or organizational values, as visible spatial arrangements can powerfully propagate social norms and beliefs without needing explicit communication.

13. Engage in Community Building

Start or join small community projects to improve shared spaces. This builds collective capacity, strengthens group bonds, and can lead to larger, positive changes in the built environment and community well-being.

14. Design Spaces for Remembrance

Create physical spaces or experiences that help you remember loved ones and spread their spirit, leveraging the brain’s spatial memory networks to process grief and foster ongoing connection.