Your Office May Be Making You Sick

If your office has high ceilings, low cubicle walls and access to sunlight, it may be a boost to your health. In the Wall Street Journal, Jonah Lehrer reported on several studies linking poor office environment to higher stress levels and described how office design can influence your mood, your cognitive skills, and your memory. One of the studies looked at two measures of stress--heart rate variability and levels of the stress hormone cortisol--in people working for the same organization but in two separate office buildings, an old office space which was characterized by floor-to-ceiling walls, poor natural light, and offices that run around the perimeter, and a newly-renovated office building that had a more open-air feel, cubicles with lower partitions and offices in the core of the floor. Here's what the study reported:

• Workers in the old office space experience less heart rate variability at night and a higher rise in morning cortisol, two factors that are associated with an increased risk of heart disease.
• Workers in the new office space reported greater satisfaction in the air quality, amount of daylight
  and access to window views compared with those in the older office space.
• Although air-flow and ventilation were similar in the two office buildings, workers perceived the new space, with a more open design, to have better air quality.
• The old offices also had more low-frequency mechanical noise compared with the new space and poorer noise-dampening acoustics. This type of noise has been linked to discomfort and the stress response, the authors wrote. If you have any low-humming machines in your office, it might be a good idea to move them outside your office space if possible.

Though people in the blue group performed worse on short-term memory tasks, they did far better on tasks requiring some imagination, such as coming up with creative uses for a brick or designing a children's toy. In fact, subjects in the blue environment generated twice as many "creative outputs" as subjects in the red one. Why? According to the scientists, the color blue automatically triggers associations with openness and sky, while red makes us think of danger and stop signs.