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Hi, welcome back. Good to have you with me again today. We are going to focus today on a situation modifying strategy, which some of you may be using already intuitively. It is the strategy of arranging your physical environment or exercising control over your physical environment, like your living space, your work space in so far as that's permitted, even your car. All of the physical spaces that you are in, but principally your living space, because that's probably the one that you have the most control over. As I said, many of you may be using this tool already intuitively, but it's still useful to talk about it because when you understand why it is working for you, why this strategy that you have been intuitively using is working, then you can use it with more nuance and you can have more leverage in the use of this tool. Understanding what situations to apply it in, and what different ways that you can apply it that perhaps you're not already doing.
So exercising control over your living space, over your physical environment. This is a situation modifying strategy. And as we talked about before, we brought up the process model and how there's these four different points in the emotion generation process. There's your situation? Filtered through your attention. Your appraisal, which your appraisal of that situation. And then the emotional response, which is generated.. So we can interfere any one of these four points. The most important one is the appraisal. That's the central organizing part of this whole process, but there are different ways that we can indirectly influence that appraisal. So exercising control over your physical environment, of course, is manipulating your situation. And so that can indirectly change your appraisal because it changes the situation that is being appraised. And so that's what we're going to be talking about today. How exercising control over your physical living space can make certain types of helpful appraisals easier for you.

So when I'm talking about exercising control over your physical environment, I'm talking about cleaning, organizing, arranging, decorating all of the, all of these different things that we do to mark our territory and exercise control over the space that we're in.

So there are different ways that you can exercise control over your environment. And some of these ways that you can exercise it are going to be what we would call proactive or preventative. They're going to be things that you're going to do before your anxiety is high, that can end up preventing certain types of anxiety appraisals from happening, or making them less likely. These are proactive strategies that you do when you're not upset when you're not anxious. And then there are other ways that you can exercise control over your physical environment that you can do when you are anxious. If you have already had an appraisal and you've already generated an emotional response and your anxiety is high, then you need to focus on a strategy that is going to be physical, that is going to use your body to calm your overall system down so that you can then use your brain. We talked about this a couple of episodes ago, how there's something called a thinking threshold. And when we get really upset we get above that thinking threshold and we can't use our brains anymore. That's when we go into that threat response and we get reduced blood flow to our brains. And so we can't use thinking strategies to fix things when we're already really upset because our thinking is hampered. But in those moments, we need to prioritize physical bodily strategies that don't require a lot of brain power to help us to bring our overall anxiety levels down, back down below our thinking threshold again, so that we can then use cognitive strategies as well. Basically what I'm saying is that you can use the strategy of exercising control over your physical environment both as a high cognitive load activity and a low cognitive load activity, you can use it both as a preventative measure and a reactive measure, when you already have a response, something, something that can calm you down when you're already very upset. So we're going to talk about how you use it as a physical calming response to an emotional reaction that is already in force. So, as I said, some of you may do this already. I certainly did this intuitively before I learned about the reasoning behind it. I like to sweep when I feel upset, that's very calming for me. I like to sweep the floor. Other people have other manual tasks that they prefer, like vacuuming, like washing the dishes, like maybe even ironing clothes. I had one friend that liked that. So any kind of manual task that you've done so much that it's automated, you don't have to think about it, it doesn't require a lot of conscious interference, that can be something that can be very calming for two reasons. One reason is that it's involving your bodily movement. And we'll have another episode on this later about the importance, the effectiveness of bodily movement in calming anxiety, especially movements where you're using your arms and your legs. So if it involves a physical movement, Your physical body moving, that can be calming because of the movement part of the activity, but there's another part of the activity. And that is that you are actually making a change in your environment. You're effecting some kind of control over this environment. In the case of the dirty floor that I'm sweeping, I'm visually seeing that the dust and the dirt and other things on the floor are getting organized into a small pile. And then I can then sweep that up and throw that away. And then my floor is clean. And what that does is, it can make it easier for your brain to start to feel like, Hey, wait a minute, I do have control over my environment. Your body acts out the parable of having control, having influence, being able to have autonomy and power over your physical environment, and that can make it easier for your brain to feel like I do have resources that can act on the demands that are up against me.
So just remembering that when we're talking about stress, any kind of stressful situation, our brains are evaluating the balance between the demands of the situation and our resources. And so what we need is to help our brains feel like our resources are up to the demands. And then we will generate a challenge response rather than a threat response.

Another way that manipulating your environment can be helpful to you is in triggering unconscious appraisals that are to your benefit. So the first important concept for us to be aware of is that we as humans have certain default appraisals. We have certain what you might call factory installed settings in the way that our brains appraise, appraise certain types of environments.

So I'm going to kind of unpack this concept using a, an article from the international journal of environmental research and public health. And then in this article, the authors talk about how humans, like any other species have been shaped by the forces of evolution. And so we had a certain environment that we evolved in, they call this the environment of evolutionary adaptation. So if you think about it for most of our history, for most of our human history, more than 90%, we were hunter gatherers. So this is the environment that we really are adapted toward. This is the environment that we evolved in. Our modern day environment is very different from that environment that we evolved in. They talk about how there's a life that we were genetically designed for. And that's what I just referred to this sort of hunter gatherer lifestyle. And then there's our modern life. And there are different aspects, different deviations from that ancient way of life, from that way that we were genetically designed, and they call those mismatches. So when there's an aspect of the modern environment, which is very different, that deviates from the environment in which we evolved, that is a mismatch. A mismatch can be beneficial or it can be harmful. An example of a beneficial mismatched that they use in this article is sleeping on a mattress. That can help us to sleep better than sleeping on the ground. That is a beneficial mismatch, but there are other mismatches that can be harmful. And that can actually reduce our life quality or create some kind of physiological stress in our bodies in our brains and they call these types of mismatches discords. So a discord is a mismatch, a difference between our modern life, and our ancient life that is harmful for us in some way. And they talk about how zoos or zoological gardens are a good illustration of this. In a zoo, the ideal is to approach as close as possible the animal's natural habitat in the wild. Because if you don't copy that natural habitat, as much as you can, then that can lead to the animals starting to behave strangely. Like they can start hurting themselves or they might refuse to mate or refuse to eat. And so zookeepers try to, obviously they can't replicate exactly the life of the animal in the wild, but they try to avoid the most important discords. They try and identify those mismatches that are most harmful to the animal that are most different in the zoo than in the wild. And they try and minimize those as much as they can for the health and wellbeing of the animal.

And so our modern societies in some ways can be understood as a type of zoo, similar to the zoos in some way, because we have this artificial man-made environment that we are living in that is very different from our environment of evolutionary adaptation. Our modern day environment is really different from that environment in which we evolved. So it's important to be aware of the discords in our modern day life, those aspects of our modern day life which create harmful effects on our wellbeing just like the animals in the zoo. Those sort of factory installed settings that affect us a certain way as a species. So, this is important because in your own home, you have this manmade artificial environment, which is not the same as the environment in which we evolved as a species. But there are different things that you can do to that personal environment to make it more compatible, to minimize the discords in that environment that may be interacting with these factory installed settings in your brain and body that are increasing the amount of default anxiety that you're feeling.

So one aspect of your home environment that you can be aware of, that you can pay attention to is the acoustic comfort in your home. Now evolutionarily, low frequency sounds tend to trigger a threat response in our brains. It tends to make us feel like there's some kind of a predator. When you think of that ancient hunter gatherer environment, uh, low frequency sound would have come from some kind of a danger, some kind of a predator. In our modern day environment we have a lot of machines that produce low frequency sounds. We have a lot of traffic noise, airplane noise, various appliances in our house, our fridge, our dishwasher, our clothes washer, our computers, all of these things often emit some kind of low hum. And although we're not conscious of how it's bothering us, we don't really notice it because it's just part of our environment, but these low frequency sounds are going to be interpreted by part of our brains as threatening. So if you can find ways to minimize those low frequency sounds in your house, of course, we're not going to be able to get rid of them completely, unless we're living somewhere out in the forest with no electricity and there's no cars around, but to the extent that you can minimize them, it's worth experimenting with it. And also you can cover up some of those noises with other sounds of your choice. With music, with different soundscapes. There's different recordings on different apps like the calm app that has a lot of different nature soundscapes of crickets and waves and different natural sounds that tend to be very calming for us. You can put this type of thing on in your home environment that can help create an acoustic space which triggers a sense of calm and control. So just pay attention, pay attention to the type of music, the type of sounds that tend to make you feel relaxed.

Okay, another aspect is light. . Studies have shown the importance of natural light on our overall mood and level of anxiety and sense of wellbeing. The importance of windows, the importance of having natural views through those windows. Now you may not have control over all of those things. Maybe you don't have control over the number of windows that you can have in your house. But you can control whether or not you open the curtains. You can put more mirrors on the wall in your house to reflect the natural light that is coming in from outside. That's one way to maximize the amount of natural light inside is to reflect it from various surfaces. We'll have another episode later on where we talk about the importance of sunlight and being outdoors. But while we're talking about indoor light, just be aware of the impact that natural light has on your stress levels, on your anxiety, on your relaxation. And try and maximize the amount of natural light in any way that you can in your indoor living space.

Now, moving on to indoor light. When we're not talking about the light that's coming in through the window, but just the lighting that is in your, in your indoor space. And the color in your indoor space. These things have been shown to have a big impact on mood. However, they are not the same for everybody. There's not one setting that makes everybody feel good. There's different levels of lighting that different people prefer. There are variations in the color schemes that people like or that trigger different moods in them. So it has been shown to have a really big impact on wellbeing and mood, but it's individual. It varies from person to person, the way that different lighting schemes and color schemes will impact you. So the, the point here, the key here is to start to be curious about your own automatic appraisals in relation to lighting and to color. We know that these things do influence our mood and that they will influence it in a personal way. So be curious about how your brain tends to appraise light and color schemes and try and identify that type of lighting that for you is just right. That's not too much and that's not too little. And the type of color that is just right. So be curious about the colors that tend to trigger a feeling of delight or alertness or relaxation, or the types of feelings that you want to feel in your personal space. Try and identify which colors tend to trigger those types of reactions in you. You can also do this online and on apps like Pinterest and things like that. Where you can look at different room decoration pictures and home pictures. And start to collect the ones that you liked the best and then analyze them. Once you have this collection of the home environments that you tend to gravitate toward, then you can start to look and see what are the patterns here. What are the colors that I'm always choosing? What are the decoration schemes that tend to make me feel the best? Is it a modern style? Is it a, is it a more classical style? What is it? What is the style that tends to trigger this feeling of comfort and inviting space that I'm after? And just, just be curious, just be curious about what it is that you prefer, because probably a lot of it is unconscious at this moment.

Another important aspect to be aware of is bringing elements of nature inside. So as we talked about before humans, were shaped by the forces of evolution. We had our environment of evolutionary adaptation, which obviously was a lot closer to nature than most people live in nowadays. Our modern day environment has a lot less contact with nature, than that environment in which we evolved, and there have been so many studies, and we'll have more in an episode later about this, about how nature affects us psychologically and how important it is for our health and wellbeing. How contact with nature reduces anxiety and improves our attention and has a restorative effect on our mental state. How it is correlated to increased, lifespan longevity and health, better health. So we'll talk more about this because it is an extremely important thing to be aware of when we're talking about anxiety, to look for ways to increase our contact with nature. But there are ways, since now we're talking about the indoor space, there are ways to bring elements of that natural space, of outside into inside, that can minimize these discords that we were talking about. We have our mismatches in that our modern day doesn't have as much contact with nature as we had in the past. And this has been shown in the studies that we'll talk about later in another episode to be detrimental for us, it causes more strain, more stress, and more anxiety, but if we can bring more of these elements of nature into our indoor living space, into the place where we spend most of our time, then we can have some of the benefits of these restorative effects of nature, even inside our own homes. Of course, one way to do this is with house plants.

Another way that you can bring in nature into your indoor space is through water. Studies have shown that we have a preference for scenes with water, that we feel more positive emotions, more restorativeness from the scenes with water, than from those without water, which is interesting. So if you don't have a view of water from your windows, you can maybe include artwork or photos that, that show scenes with water. Another way that people incorporate water into their homes is by having little indoor fountains that create that little burbling noise in the background. Figure out whatever way feels most inviting to you, but consider the idea of ways to bring water into your house.

Another important way that we can incorporate elements of nature in our house is fractals. Now, what are fractals? Fractals are patterns that repeat itself on different scales. So for example, a seashell. You'll see that there is a smaller part of the spiral, and then it gets larger and larger as it goes out. And it'll have the same pattern on that small part of the spiral as it does on the larger part of the spiral. Think about a fiddlehead Fern, for example, similar things happening here. So you'll have a pattern that repeats in different sizes or different scales. So some parts of the image or object are going to have the pattern and on a large scale, kind of in a zoomed in way, and there's going to be other parts of the image or the object that are going to have the pattern in a very small version. So you see this all over in nature. You can see it in flowers. You can see it in trees. Trees will have branches, large branches that will then branch off into smaller branches and those branches will then branch off into even smaller branches. So this pattern of branching repeating itself on different scales over the whole tree. Um, you'll see it in river networks. And even in lightening bolts. Um, crystals. Snowflakes. Waves. Galaxies. And it even happens in our own bodies. You can see it in our blood vessels. In our neurons. If you look at our lungs, our lungs are full of fractals as well. And so this is something that occurs all over in nature and it has been studied by a lot of different researchers. One researcher in particular, Richard Taylor, Dr. Richard Taylor at the university of Oregon has a team that has been looking at this for quite a while and they have a blog with links to almost 40 articles that have been published in relation to their research. I'll include this in the show notes so you can look at these. They're very interesting. What he and his team have found is that our visual system itself has fractals in it. Our own eyes have fractals in them. And it's a certain type of fractal that occurs very often in nature. And what they found is that when the person looks at a fractal that has the same structure as their visual system fractal, that that image it's very relaxing. And this is what they've called a hard wired response. This is something that is true for us as a species. That looking at these types of patterns relaxes us, is an automatic relaxer. And so. They have investigated what happens when you have artwork that copies these fractal patterns, and whether or not that has the same effect on people as looking at it in nature. And they've found that it does relax people as well. So that is another way that you can bring nature into your house, is trying to find fractal patterns that relax you, you look at it and you feel good, and bringing it into your house. It can be pictures. It can be with artwork. It can be with actual plants, you know, houseplants, as we talked about before, it can be with flowers. It can be with patterns on your sofa, on your carpet, on your bedspread that are fractal patterns. So because we spend so much of our time nowadays in environments that do not have these fractal patterns, in these modern man-made environments, this has the result of creating more visual strain, more headaches, more overall stress. That is from the additional effort exerted by our visual systems to process these more artificial patterns. But anyway, just starting to be aware of the fact that these fractal patterns are a hard-wired relaxer for us as humans. We respond to fractals in a way that makes us feel relaxed and good. It makes us feel alert and relaxed at the same time, because it's interesting. It's an interesting pattern. You're seeing this re repetition and yet it's on different scales. And so it really engages our eyes. But it's relaxing at the same time. But we can bring these patterns into our inside spaces and give our brains, our visual system, this pleasure and this relaxation and this easy to process pattern recognition that seems to just universally relax us.

Okay, one more way that you can bring nature inside is through fragrance. So of course there are different essential oils that can bring natural fragrances into your house. You can bring actual live flowers or pine branches into your house to bring that fragrance in. There've been studies that examine the effect of things like Cypress oil as a calming agent for people and found that it does relax people. But the point here is to find those fragrances that you find most inviting, that you're automatically that your brain automatically gravitates to. Or automatically has a response that it feels pleasant, that you like it. That it makes you feel calm and relaxed and safe.

So I just want to remind you of that, of the importance, the function of your home environment, as being this place that can trigger these automatic reactions that we want. So it involves the two steps involves first of all, being more conscious of the automatic reactions that our brain generates that we're not very aware of. So increasing our awareness of those. And second of all, making the choices in our home environment, in our situation and manipulating it in a way that it will work with those automatic appraisals to foster those types of appraisals that we want, that are going to help us feel less anxious and more in control in our lives.
So always go back to remembering that your appraisal is what is really responsible for your emotional experience, but there are things that we can do to manipulate our environment to manipulate our situation that can make certain appraisals easier.

So just wanted to bring those points up to you today. Thanks for joining me once again and see you next week. ​