Trouble Sleeping? Something In Your Office Could Maybe Help…

It is probably something you take for granted if you have it, or something you never thought about if you didn't.  We don't have one here in the Y105 studio, but other rooms in the building do. It's impossible to have them everywhere, so many of you are stuck without one as Tom, Brent and I are! What is it?

There isn't one here in the Y105 studio that goes to the outside of the building, we do have one that opens up to a neighboring room, just not the sunshine. I have often wished we could have one, I've even thought about making a fake picture of the window with sunshine and tacking it up on the wall. It probably would not do the trick anyways. There is a study that was done that discovered that having a window in your office could give you as much as 46 more minutes of sleep at night!

The study results were published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. As you probably could assume, they compared people who were working in conditions that allowed for a natural light source compared to those who didn't have that.  Mohamed Boubekri is the person who lead the study, affiliated with the University of Illinois. He told Fast Company Design in an interview that office buildings were chosen for the study because we spend a good chunk of our lives at the office.

They did discover some other information with the research too. Windowless workers appeared to have more fragmented sleep patterns, and also, those who were exposed to natural lighting during their workday seemed to have more energy to participate in activities after work than those who went without the windows.

I think we've all known for quite some time that sunshine is a good thing for a person.  Maybe I can blame the lack of a window in my 'office' for the nights when I can't sleep? I wonder if the people who work outside for a living fare? Do you suppose they get that extra 46 minutes of sleep at night?

 

Source: [Fast Company]