Mental health is gaining more awareness nowadays. Stress and anxiety can creep into our lives as we go about our day. Often, we might find ourselves looking for ways to relax. While mental health is an incredibly complex issue, outdoor lighting can have some surprising effects on it. In this blog post, Unique Outdoor Illumination & Mosquito Pros will be looking at ways outdoor lighting can potentially play a role in improving your mental health or harming it.
It should be noted that mental health is a vast and complex subject, and there is no substitute for professional help.
Outdoor Lighting Benefits to Mental Health
It might not be obvious at first, but outdoor lighting can have several positive effects on your mental health. Outdoor lighting can enable you to do things that would otherwise be very difficult at night. By working with a professional outdoor lighting designer, you can create a lighting system that helps make your landscape a more calming and welcoming place.
In the following sections, you’ll find ways that outdoor lighting can affect your mental health directly and indirectly.
Outdoor Living
It’s no secret that being outdoors can have many benefits to our mental health, but it can be hard to find time in our busy lives to go out and enjoy it. This is especially true if you work from sunup to sundown or during winter when the days are short and the nights are long.
When you get home late at night, there is a temptation to spend the rest of the night inside. By creating an illuminated outside living space, you can enjoy spending time outdoors after the sun has gone down, or before it comes up. With outdoor lighting, you can lengthen the time you spend outside on an outdoor patio or outdoor living room. In addition, ambient lighting can create a relaxing atmosphere for you to experience.
Nature offers many benefits for mental health. While most of us don’t have vast, windswept plains or stirring mountains that extend beyond the clouds in our backyard, many of us have a little nature to enjoy. The chirp of crickets, the songs of birds, or a cool night breeze can be an immensely rewarding experience. Whether you are enjoying it by yourself or with friends and family, many will agree that time spent outdoors is time well spent.
Security Lighting
Humans are hardwired to be afraid of the dark. Throughout human history, darkness has hidden dangers, both real and imagined. While we may no longer face the same dangers our ancestors did, we still find solace in light. Lighting can be comforting to the human brain, whether in a vast wilderness or a suburb of Houston. By adding outdoor security lighting to your home, you may be able to help remedy this feeling of uncertainty.
Outdoor security lighting comes in different forms and can be configured to optimize its effectiveness for your yard. Security lighting works best when used with other measures, like alarms and cameras. When planning the security of your home, it is best to work alongside a security professional to optimize it.
A Sense of Accomplishment
When you look at your yard at night and see an illuminated garden, a rock garden, or a patio, you can feel a sense of accomplishment. You’ll be able to see the effects of the hours you spend working in your yard or tending to your garden. Garden lights can help you appreciate the work you put in, even when it is dark.
Gardening can be a relaxing and rewarding experience. It doesn’t have to be exclusive to the daytime. Night gardening can be an enjoyable and relaxing experience made easier by using garden lights.
The Negative Effects of Artificial Outdoor Light on Mental Health
While outdoor lighting has several benefits for mental health, it can also be detrimental to it.
Outdoor Lighting, Sleep Trouble, and Mental Health Issues
While outdoor lighting has many mental health benefits, it can also negatively affect sleep patterns and mental health in teenagers if used incorrectly. Artificial outdoor light has been linked to sleeping problems, mood disorders, and anxiety disorders in teenagers. Regardless of your age, outdoor lighting can negatively affect the quality of your sleep and possibly contribute to mental health problems. This drives home the importance of proper outdoor light positioning. By working with a professional, you can set up your lighting to minimize its impact on your home and your neighbor’s homes.
We can design a light setup for your outdoor lighting in a way that considers your and your family’s need for sleep.
Outdoor Lighting Design
There’s a lot that goes into outdoor lighting from selecting the optimal lighting to designing a lighting layout that helps you to enjoy the outdoors. If you’re in the Houston area, our experts can help create a relaxing and potentially more secure environment for you to enjoy. For over 20 years, Unique Outdoor Illumination & Mosquito Pros has worked with people to create beautiful and enjoyable outdoor spaces. When you work with us, you can be confident you will get outstanding service. In addition, you’ll understand why we have earned so many five-star reviews.
Not only do we design beautiful outdoor lighting arrangements, but we also offer installation as well as maintenance.
