How Our Indoor Spaces Influence Our Health:
A Conversation with Emily Anthes
Emily Anthes is a science journalist and author of the new book The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness, an exploration of the ways in which the design of indoor — and, spoiler alert — outdoor spaces can influence our health and well-being. This topic is of great interest to us at Building H because of our core belief that it is the environments in which we live that have such a dominant effect on how we behave, how we feel and ultimately on our health. I had a chance to talk with Emily about what she learned in the course of researching the book and where we should go from here. I’ve edited the conversation for length and clarity.
Steve Downs: The book is about the surprising ways our indoor spaces shape our health. Can you break down the key categories of influence and walk us through that?
Emily Anthes: The general argument is that our physical indoor spaces affect nearly every aspect of our lives and sometimes in profound and unexpected ways. And so part of that is physical health. There’s evidence accumulating that the microbes that we’re surrounded with, particularly early in life, might affect how our immune systems develop. So the microbial communities you invite into and allow to exist in your home might help your kids develop a stronger immune system. That’s a relatively new strain of research.
There’s also some literature that goes back a bit farther and is quite robust on things like nature and daylight, which have really strong effects on our physical health. Exposure to nature, whether it’s a view via a window or an indoor plant or nature photograph, can reduce physiological stress, reduce pain, reduce blood pressure. Daylight has some of those effects too, and it has well-known connections to our circadian rhythms. So exposure to the sort of the blue enriched light that’s typical in the morning can keep you more alert during the day — but also help you sleep better at night. That’s the physical health piece. These environments also affect the mind — both mental health and cognitive performance. Some of those same factors play a role: so we know that exposure to daylight can boost mood; and exposure to both daylight and nature seem to boost cognitive performance. Nature has what’s sometimes considered to be a restorative effect. The idea is that the tasks of daily living are cognitively taxing. And nature is interesting and appealing to us. But it’s an effortless kind of engagement. If you take a break from your work, look out the window, and stare at some trees for a while, that gives your brain a break, allowing it to rest, and that helps you when you return to work.
Steve Downs: If I could just jump in on that. There was an interesting term you quoted in the book called “soft fascination.” Could you explain that?
Emily Anthes: So “soft fascination” is just that. It’s something that engages us but doesn’t require our brains to do a lot of work. Think of a counter example, like, maybe you’re reading a fascinating article, and that’s engaging, but your brain is working pretty hard to do that. Whereas, if you’re sitting gazing out at trees, your brain is engaged, but it’s not hard work. So it’s a way to be engaged in something while also allowing your mind to rest. At least that’s the theory. It’s called attention restoration theory.
Steve Downs: Can you tell us about some of the other effects on health that you explore in the book?
Emily Anthes: The roles of nature and daylight are relatively well known. I also became fascinated by some lesser-known factors that I didn’t fully appreciate before I started the project. I’m thinking in particular of ventilation, which we know is important from a health perspective. Of course there’s a lot of discussion around that right now because of COVID. And we also know that ventilation is helpful for reducing our exposure to indoor air pollutants. But there is an increasing recognition that the carbon dioxide we exhale — if the space is not well ventilated enough, and it’s highly occupied — those carbon dioxide levels can get high enough to impair our thinking. And so if you’re in a university classroom, or maybe a poorly ventilated conference room, for hours at a time with a number of people and you’re not getting good airflow — that might explain why people are throwing a lot of bad ideas around. There is a very convincing experiment that was published in 2016 that shows that bringing in more outdoor air and increasing the ventilation rate improves people’s performance on cognitive tasks, presumably by reducing carbon dioxide levels indoors. So that’s something that I had not thought much about. And it’s largely invisible to building occupants, but it turns out it could be really important.
Steve Downs: I’d like to drill down a bit on the microbes. You were saying this is still fairly new science. And if I understand it right, the bottom line seems to be that the diversity of the microbiome in general is a good thing. Is there much more that we can say?
Emily Anthes: It’s really complicated and it seems unlikely that there’s one magic microbe that’s good for us. It’s more about the community dynamics. And it’s been a lot easier to identify specific pathogens than it has been to identify “good” microbes. If you’re talking about actionable knowledge, there’s one theme that weaves through the book: it’s that our modern buildings have created too strong of a barrier between the indoors and outdoors. We’ve sealed ourselves up too tightly. Letting more of the outdoors in, whether that’s nature, whether that’s daylight, whether that’s fresh air, or soil microbes — all of those things seem to be beneficial for us. And so I think the more we can think about ways to make our buildings a bit more permeable, that could have a lot of positive ripple effects, in theory.
Steve Downs: It’s funny because it does seem that the irony of your book, if I, if I can jump to a conclusion, is that the best function of indoor spaces is to be less indoors. And as I understood it, your advice on the microbes is less about buying fancy products designed to cultivate a better skin microbiome, but actually just, you know, go outdoors, get a dog or I think you said if possible, get a cow.
Emily Anthes: Actually getting a dog is one of the better supported interventions you could make in terms of microbiome health. I think that the science is relatively clear. But even opening the windows, especially now, with COVID. There have been studies from hospitals that have shown when the windows are closed, you have all these human associated microbes that accumulate in a space, which in some cases means pathogens, but if you open them, then you’re getting all sorts of soil and plant microbes. That might be helpful for us.
Steve Downs: And if I understand it right, that advice actually goes back to the ancient Greeks and also Florence Nightingale.
Emily Anthes: That’s something that’s really interesting. And another irony is that these thinkers didn’t know about microbes. They had a correct intuition about a lot of this stuff that we kind of moved away from. Fortunately, the pendulum is beginning to swing back. But we still have work to do.
Steve Downs: For sure. There’s another term you raise in the discussion around nature and its influence, which is the biophilia hypothesis. Could you walk us through that?
Emily Anthes: There are two popular explanations for why nature is so powerful — one is the biophilia hypothesis and one is the attention restoration theory — and they’re complementary but they’re not quite the same. The biophilia hypothesis posits that because we evolved out in the natural world, we have this innate affinity for nature. And that being in nature or being exposed to nature, therefore, is a positive distraction. So it takes our mind off of whatever might be stressing us and reduces our stress. This hypothesis holds that nature works because it reduces our stress and then all of the other benefits are essentially downstream effects of that. If you reduce your stress levels, your immune system has more resources to rebuild. The attention restoration theory, on the other hand, holds that the mechanism is that nature reduces our cognitive burden. So looking at nature gives our minds a break, and the benefits then flow downstream from that. So by giving your mind a break, that might reduce your stress, improve your focus. It’s not necessarily the case that one is right; they could both be true. And they’re very similar, but have a slightly different emphasis in terms of the mechanism.
Steve Downs: Your work covered a lot of ground. It covered many different settings and, as we’ve discussed, many different aspects of health. Were there unifying themes that popped to the surface?
Emily Anthes: One of them is to try to bring the outdoors in. Another one is that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all space. Environments and people are both complex. And individuals have different needs and sensitivities. So while there are some things that seem to be good for everyone — for example, I don’t think I know of a study that says that nature is bad for anyone — what kind of lighting you prefer, or what air temperature you prefer, that varies a lot. And it’s not just a matter of preference. One of my favorite discoveries was about air temperature. Studies show that women actually perform better cognitively at higher air temperatures than men do. And so office temperatures, which tend, of course, to be calibrated to men’s preferences, might actually be bad for women’s productivity. It’s hard to balance when you have lots of different people. But interestingly, the research shows that women suffer more from having the temperature too low than men do from having the temperature too high. That’s just one small example, but it underscores a key lesson, which is that there are a lot of guiding principles and evidence we can be turning to, but we’re never going to have a single ideal office that works for everyone.
Steve Downs: Which is an interesting tension to manage. As we move into an era of personalized medicine and personalized health, this issue of variability comes up. What’s a good diet for me might not be a good diet for you, but that’s sort of negotiable because we don’t have to share our food. But for a public space or even a household, different people will have essentially different needs for the environment that they share.
Emily Anthes: I’ve gotten a lot of questions about how should we design an office and I’m sympathetic to the challenge. It’s a hard problem. But it’s important to think about choice and control. So the more you can create different micro environments, the better. And then actually trust and empower your employees to know what is best for them. If they want to work on this couch in the dark corner and that’s what works for them, go for it. And so one way to handle this tension is to create what are sometimes called “activity based workspaces,” where people can move around throughout the day. It’s not a bad solution. But it’s a hard problem. Technology is definitely allowing more of that personalization. I write about some systems where workers can use an app to get more cold or warm air at their own workspace and some of these systems then learn user preferences over time. So if every afternoon they want a blast of cold air, it’ll start automatically keeping the temperature lower. There are a lot of things that are possible now that have not been possible before.
Steve Downs: I’d love for you to talk a little bit about the perspective you brought to the chapter on designing for Mars, because I thought you had some really interesting insights about how that connects to life on Earth as well.
Emily Anthes: I have had people ask me if it’s really important to spend time writing about how to build homes for Mars when there are so many problems here. And I have two responses to that: one is that it is a really useful thought exercise because building a base or a colony on the Moon or on Mars gives us an opportunity to create a human settlement from scratch. So it’s an opportunity to think through everything we’ve learned about how the built environment affects us. And even more than that, to think about our values, about what kind of society we want to create and what kinds of structures we want to create. Thinking through that can help us clarify what’s important to us. But then, on a more practical level, a lot of the ideas that people have come up with for living in space can be applied here on Earth, especially as our own environment becomes more extreme. Our future is going to be turbulent. There are going to be more severe disasters, resource shortages, extreme weather. All the sorts of challenges that are likely to face us in space are either already happening here on Earth, or we’ll be seeing them come down the pike. To get more specific, researchers are thinking about how to use resources more wisely, to create a more sustainable type of concrete for use in space — that’s something that could be used here on Earth, because our concrete is not a sustainable material. So that’s the more practical reason for thinking about space architecture.
Steve Downs: I’d love to sort of segue into the question of where do we go from here. Imagine that, now that you’re armed with all of this new knowledge and insight, you have this unprecedented influence on housing and building construction in the future, and you could kind of be in charge of the guidelines of how things are built. What would you do? How would you wield that power?
Emily Anthes: I think one thing that’s important to say, and something that I didn’t fully appreciate when I started the project, is that while the built environment is really important, it is not the only thing that matters. Architects I talked to use the analogy about hardware and software. You can think of a building as the hardware, but then if you’re thinking of a school, everything that happens in that school — its programs, its policies — is the software. We now have plenty of scientific data that will allow us to build healthier homes and buildings if we want to. But along with that, we also need to think about policy, we need to think about societal changes, economic incentives, things like zoning laws and who has access to safe environments?
One thing that we haven’t really touched on is accessibility, in all senses. This came up when I was talking to people about sustainability. Often the projects that get a lot of attention are these super fancy, multimillion dollar smart homes with all these bells and whistles, And while that’s great, it really only gets us so far if it’s something that’s not available to everyone. So we need solutions that are affordable and accessible, both in terms of financial accessibility and disability.
Steve Downs: Let’s drill down a little on the role of tech because you do talk about that in one of the chapters. One of the things that fascinated me was the Spanish researchers who talked about the house that was essentially an affective computing house that would sense your mood and then manipulate the environment to, say, lift you up a bit. Can you say more about that?
Emily Anthes: The idea, essentially — and I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic — was a mood manipulating home. It would sense, via facial recognition or some other biometric sensors, that your stress level had risen and you’re anxious, and then maybe it would dim the lighting and play calming music. I think it’s really interesting because, if you just describe the system like that, it doesn’t sound that sinister. But, obviously, you’re starting to get to a place that I think would make a lot of people uncomfortable. And even beyond the manipulation of the mood, if you take the first step of that: would you really want your home to be able to recognize and identify your emotional states? On the one hand, it’s a fun thought experiment — in the sense of “look what we can do.” On the other hand, it’s disconcerting.
Steve Downs: Given everything you learned in this project, now that we’re suddenly living in a world where people are spending more time at home and there are real questions about the nature of where people will work in the future, how are you thinking about the future of work?
Emily Anthes: I’m skeptical of two pronouncements I’ve seen: one is that this will be the end of the open office and the other is that this will be the end of the office altogether. Those systems — and I don’t want to misuse the word “evolved” — but they evolved for a reason. There’s a reason that most of us go to offices. When the pandemic is no longer a major threat, I think our tendency will be to try to return to life as usual. We tend to quickly forget. That said, I certainly expect to see employers being much more willing to allow remote work. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we see things like businesses having smaller office footprints, and moving to sort of a hybrid model where people work at home some of the time and come into the office some of the time. There are real costs to all remote work all the time. So I don’t think it’s the end of the office. There will be more subtle shifts than that, but time will tell.
