The Five Joy Factors That Actually Matter in Your Spaces
What your environment is actually doing for you, and to you, and how to feel more of what you want (and less of what you don’t) in the places you design.
I am writing this from my office, which is blissfully, gloriously, almost offensively quiet right now. My kids went back to school this week after two weeks of Easter holiday, and you know I am savouring every single second of this peace like it is a very expensive glass of Pinot.
This sacred space is particularly sweet because the rest of my house is anything but quiet right now…
A couple months weeks ago, we discovered a leak in our downstairs closet. By the time we fixed it, and understood the full extent of it, all the floors had to be ripped up. The result? Bare concrete, everywhere.
And better still… two massive dehumidifiers and three industrial fans, running all the time, in our main living areas (including the kitchen- yay!)
The first day they were in, I stood in my kitchen for about five minutes and felt super sick. Not just annoyed, or overstimulated by the oil-tanker sized noise polution, but actually nauseous. Whether it was the sound or the bone-dry air or the combination of both, I don’t know, but it’s truly awful. As you can imagine the dog is super thrilled about this arrangement as well.
I share all of this because it’s absolutely perfect context for the conversation we’re having over on the podcast today… exploring category 5 of the Joy First Audit: Environment.
In this episode:
I share my score for this category, which was reasonably high, as you might expect (given that colour psychology and designing joy first spaces are literally what I do for a living) And yet…
Sit me in a room with 2 giant dehumidifiers and three industrial fans and watch that score (and my will to live) collapse!! More on that if you listen-in…
If your score in this category seems low right now - I can definitely relate 🧡.
Why This Category Really Matters
When I was refining the Joy First Audit, I kept noticing that the happiness frameworks and coaching tools I’d been using for years didn’t give enough credit to the state of our environment. I found this really telling, because in my experience working with women and colour, is that most of sort of know the our environment has a huge impact on us, but taking control of modifying it often tends to be something we don’t prioritize, or need to seek permission for, or feel helpless to change.
In our modern lives, we spend about 90% of our time indoors.
That is an enormous amount of hours inside spaces that most of us have not designed very intentionally to be better for our wellbeing, let alone our joy. These spaces are affecting our mood, our focus, our nervous system regulation, the quality of our relationships, our health and even our longevity: all of it, all the time, like it or not.
So the audit asks fifteen questions about the spaces we inhabit: our homes, our workspaces, our bedrooms, even how we dress and whether our aesthetic choices feel like us. And I think if you haven’t really ‘taken inventory’ of this area of your life before, some of these questions are going to be quite illuminating.
The Big Five
In this episode I also walk you through the five environmental factors that come up most often in the research, which have also been validated by my experience working with clients and students (and in my own life). These are the places where small, intentional shifts tend to have huge return.
1. Natural light
Many of us already know our preferences here, even if we’ve never articulated them. I am a natural light girl, ambient light girl (lamps-not-overhead-lights girl)… nothing annoys me quite like a cold white LED spotlight 🤢 Funny enough, this has been a long-standing point of negotiation in my marriage because my husband is not a lamp guy. He doesn’t see the point. We have been living in overhead-light territory, and now that we are rethinking the house after the strip-out, I am very firmly putting lamps on the agenda.
The research around light and circadian rhythm and sleep quality and mood is fairly well established at this point, and I think as we get older and start to feel the effects of not sleeping well or not regulating properly, we get more motivated to actually do something about it.
But in addition to being mindful of your blue light consumption before bed (screen time, arg) and dimming light after sunset… I’d encourage you to notice is just where the natural light is in your home and let that start to guide your design decisions.
A south-facing room with big windows is going to make a light and airy vibe easy, but a north-facing kitchen that never really gets flooded with sun is going to struggle to ever feel naturally bright. In this case, you may be better served by aiming for a feeling that’s a little moodier, or more colorful, leaning into what it is rather than fighting it…. Tune-in to hear my explain why in this scenario the last thing you’d want to do with this kitchen is go ‘bright white’ to try to amp-up the ‘natural light’. You’ll likely be creating a space that is very, very bad for mood and wellbeing.
2. Greenery
I have been wanting to be better at plants (inside and outside my home) for basically my whole life. The reality is: I kill them. Every time. Usually because I over or under water them - I can never seem to get the balance right.
Then I feel guilty about it, and ‘why am I so shit at this’ which is the opposite of what plants are supposed to make you feel. So I’ve built workarounds: I buy fresh flowers every week as part of my grocery budget (we are talking one pound dandelions, three pound fifty tulips from the supermarket), and where possible, I few stems clipped from the garden. We recently got one of those little hydroponic herb growers that sits on the counter and I’ve just planted mint, basil, coriander and salad under a growlight. I’m looking forward to having this little green corner of our kitchen that smells incredible and basically takes care of itself!
The first thing I did when we got home from the Easter break
Was go stock up our fridge, and get some fresh flowers to load up the bud vases in my kitchen window. Every time I walk in and stand at the sink, there is green and colour and something living just looking back at me. It is such an easy access source of joy. And there is plenty of research behind why this is good for us, including one study out of Melbourne found that adding plants to a previously bare office space increased productivity by 15%. So it is not just that it looks nice and feels good, it can actually improve our productivity - how cool is that!?
3. Clutter vs. Clean
This one is a constant in my life and I suspect in yours too if you are neurodivergent like me, or you work from home, have kids (and or a dogs).
I love organisation. All the clothes in my house have the Marie Kondo fold. I label things. My husband and I have annual time where we pare our kitchen mugs and water bottles down to reasonable quantities for a family of 4, and when we can achieve and maintain minimalism, it brings me genuine peace.
But in several places in my home and office I have piles of books, stacks of paperwork, a chronically messy living room full of toys, a non-stop splattering of small clothes and shoes, and places like the windowsills, my dresser and the island in our kitchen for some reason continue to be impenetrable dumping grounds for everyone’s stuff no matter how many times we clear them off.
The tension I’ve been sitting with lately on this topic, is that abundance is also a source of joy.
There is something genuinely nourishing about a full fruit bowl, a fridge stocked with everything you need, bundles of flowers, a shelf that feels curated and full, rather than sparse. We love abundance as human beings: it signals safety and fertility and that things are okay.
So minimalism usually isn’t the only the goal: it is finding your own version of the balance between spaciousness and fullness, which is different for everyone. The question I’d invite you to sit with is: when you walk into a clean, clear surface in your home, how does that feel? And when is the last time you had one?
4. Control & Agency
This one is maybe the most underrated of the five, and it is something I notice again and again in my work with colour: sometimes feeling like you have a choice matters more than what the choice actually is. There is something so powerful in being intentional, in stepping out of autopilot and deciding, even in a small way, how you want your environment to feel. It often has an outsized impact on your confidence.
This is also why getting comfortable navigating environments you cannot control is a skill worth developing. When we were at my in-laws over Easter, in a home that is beautiful and generous and truly the best possible version of not-your-own-space, there were still small things to negotiate. Where to work, when to work, how to make space for the things I need when the setup is not designed around them.
Recording this podcast, for example, would have been genuinely impossible there. So I didn’t try. Instead I thought about what I could control: getting outside in the morning for that first hit of light and green, having my notebook and my mug at whatever spot I claimed as my desk, being honest with myself about what I needed and being willing to be awkward in order to ask for it or take it, rather than trying to be heroic about not needing anything and working swiftly towards burnout from being around 5 people non-stop for 10 days.
These are small things, but creating an environment that is designed to feel the way you’d like, is often built from small things.
Fun Fact for Dog Lovers:
There is fascinating emerging research on giving dogs more choice-rich environments: more options for where to rest, how to move through a space, what to engage with. This reduces stress and increases wellbeing in dogs so we can help them have more joy too! I am not the expert on this, but my friend and former client Irith Bloom is, here’s a podcast episode she did on it if you want to explore further.
5. And then there is colour
Right, here we go.
The first question I ask whenever I am designing anything: a brand, a room, an outfit, is ‘how do I want this to feel?’
Feeling First.
Once you are clear on the feeling, colour is the most powerful tool you have to get there.
So let’s start with the basic understanding you’ll need to make choices about how colour will make you feel.
First, a quick primer on the psychological primaries.
For those who are newer to this here is the foundation of colour psychology:
Red impacts us physically
Yellow impacts us emotionally
Blue impacts us mentally and
Green is essentially a break, restorative & refreshing
Knowing just this gives you a really solid framework for starting to make more strategic colour decisions. Do you want to be focused in this space, or do you want to be in your body? Do you want to be activated or soothed?
Are you a lover of neutrals because you find them soothing?
Green is almost always a better answer than white or grey.
This is the hill I will die on.
Grey has zero positive psychological benefit. Zero.
And yet so many of us reach for it because it feels safe and we think it’s neutral and modern, when actually the neutrals that will do something genuinely good for our nervous systems are the ones we tend to overlook: soft greens, warm blues, gentle pinks (which can actually lower heart rate), dusty purples. These colours will give you the calm, the spaciousness, the sense of reset that we are all reaching for when we paint a wall grey. Grey may numb us out a bit, but simply will not deliver peace, calm or nervous system support.
One specific thing I want you to remember on this point:
if you have a north-facing room that does not get much natural light and you think the answer is white or a cool neutral to help ‘brighten it up’ or ‘make it feel bigger’, please hear me when I say that those cool hues will be greyed down by the flat light and you will end up with the coldest, most joyless room imaginable. If a room is not getting natural light, lean warm. Terracotta, mustard, a warm blush, bring as much warmth through the colour as you can handle, since the sun is not bringing it through the window.
And finally, on the question of what happens when you don’t get to choose.
I am currently living with the very specific dilemma of having gorgeous, expensive, Seaside-brown leather sofas that were gifted to us by family, that are not going anywhere anytime soon, in a living room that in my heart wants to be Fireside. Warm, amber, rust, that long exhale of a room. The sofas are Seaside. They are the main piece of furniture in the room. Do I design the room around them and create harmony? Or do I commit to the Fireside vision and let them be discordant until we replace them.
I genuinely do not know yet. What I do know is that the question has clarified something for me yet again: If I am optimising for how the space feels (not just my pre-conceived notions of how it should look) those two things do not always want the same answer.
If you have not taken the Joy First Audit yet, it is over here free to access as a subscriber, with an AI-powered version available to paid members that will help you work through your scores and figure out where to start. If you want to jump straight in to getting more support with your personalized colour decisions, consider joining us as a founding member to get access to our Colour Joy program (with very cool custom AI tool to support you).
Category 6 (Purpose) is coming next, and it is one I am very very excited about since I know first-hand how transformative having clarity of purpose can be.
If you want to watch the whole series to-datewhere I go category by category through the audit, here’s the playlist on YouTube.
With love, xx Nic
I'll be coming back to these when(ever) we move and get to decide on a whole new set of paint colors.