How Your Workspace Shapes Your Thinking — and What to Do About It
Your workspace is already shaping how you think and feel. Natural light, plants, and materials are not trends — they are how environments teach you how to be.
Why Nature Keeps Finding Its Way Back Into Where We Work
Biophilic design is often described as a workplace trend. Plants in offices. More light. Softer materials. A splash of green in the corner of a room.
But that framing misses the point.
At its core, biophilic design is not decorative. It is relational. It asks a deeper question: what happens to people when the places they work in remember that they are human?
The idea is simple. Humans evolved in relationship with the natural world — light, shadow, texture, rhythm, weather, seasons. We are shaped by environments long before we ever open a laptop. When workspaces strip those elements away, something subtle is lost. When they reintroduce them, something begins to return. Not immediately, not dramatically, but measurably. In attention, in mood, in the ease with which thinking happens.
This applies not just to offices. It applies to co-working spaces, home studios, kitchens turned into work zones, any place where work happens. Wherever you work, the environment is already teaching you how to feel.
Why nature keeps finding its way back into where we work
Research has spent decades confirming what most of us already sense. Natural light regulates energy and mood. Greenery calms the nervous system. Organic materials feel grounding in ways synthetic ones rarely do.
Judith Heerwagen's research into the connection between buildings and human wellbeing found that environments rich in natural elements do not just improve mood — they influence focus, recovery from stress, and the sense of safety and connection that makes people willing to think openly rather than defensively. We are drawn to natural spaces and tend to avoid environments devoid of them.
This is not about productivity hacks. It is about restoration. The human nervous system was never designed for constant artificial light, sealed air, and uninterrupted cognitive demand. Nature introduces pauses. Variation. Breath. And where there is breath, there is capacity.
I have worked in buildings with almost no natural light — portholes for windows, blinds on whatever glass existed, no plants that survived, no natural materials. The effect on mood and energy was tangible within days. Not because the work was harder, but because the environment was extracting something that was not being replenished.
Noticing the weak signals
During the shift to remote work, I began noticing small changes on video calls.
A plant appears in the background. Then another. A shelf of books. A wooden desk. Sunlight repositioned deliberately. Nobody announced a strategy. Nobody mandated it.
These were weak signals — quiet, individual acts of rebalancing. People unconsciously reintroducing nature into environments that had become too flat, too digital, too abstract. Later, those same signals began appearing back in offices. Bamboo laptop risers. Natural fabrics. Fewer harsh overhead lights. A slow correction, led not by policy but by instinct.
Weak signals matter. They tell us where systems are under strain — and where people are already trying to heal them before anyone in leadership has noticed the problem.
The sustainability confusion
Biophilic design is often conflated with sustainability. They overlap but they are not the same thing.
Sustainability focuses on the planet. Biophilic design focuses on the human experience of place. A solar panel helps the environment. A window helps a person. A green roof becomes biophilic only when someone can see it, walk on it, or sit among it. If the sustainable intervention is invisible to the people inside the building, it does not produce the biophilic effect.
The most effective spaces understand this distinction. They do not just optimise energy usage. They reduce psychological friction — they make it easier for people to feel settled, focused, and present. When workspaces ignore this, people compensate in other ways. More breaks. More exhaustion. More quiet disengagement.
What this looks like in practice
The practical changes range from significant to trivially small — and most of them cost very little.
Natural light is the most impactful and most overlooked. Positioning yourself to receive daylight from windows rather than behind you — which creates a silhouette on video calls — makes a meaningful difference to mood and energy across the day. If natural light is genuinely unavailable, a SAD lamp in winter months is a reasonable substitute. The research on light exposure and wellbeing is consistent and strong.
Plants are the most obvious intervention and for good reason. Even hardy, low-maintenance plants — the kind that survive infrequent watering — calm the nervous system and give visual rest during cognitively demanding work. The research distinction that matters here: virtual greenery (backgrounds, screen savers, wallpaper images of nature) shows little to no measurable effect on mood or productivity. The real thing, however modest, works in ways the virtual equivalent does not.
Natural materials — wood, stone, fabric rather than plastic — provide a tactile grounding that synthetic materials do not. A wooden desk surface, a bamboo riser, a fabric chair rather than a moulded plastic one. These are small changes that accumulate into a different quality of environment.
Acoustics matter more than most workplaces acknowledge. Open-plan offices built around the assumption that noise equals collaboration create environments where deep thinking is genuinely difficult — which is why most people in open-plan offices have headphones on most of the time.
Soft furnishings, books on shelves, fabric wall hangings, and even curtains absorb sound waves that would otherwise bounce and accumulate. Quiet spaces for focused work and open spaces for collaboration work better as distinct environments than as one undifferentiated floor.
Colour shapes mood in ways that are measurable even if subjective. Colder, darker colours tend toward calm and focus. Warmer, brighter colours toward energy and optimism. The specific response is personal, but it is worth paying attention to what the colours of your working environment are doing to your energy across a day.
A personal moment in a field
I recorded the podcast version of this piece while walking outdoors — wind through barley, uneven ground, sound that did not repeat itself. Nothing about it was efficient. And yet within minutes I felt clearer. That is not unusual. That is the point.
Back at a desk, the same principle applies at a smaller scale. A wooden surface. A living plant. Light that changes through the day. These are cues to the nervous system that it is safe to think. That is not sentimental. It is physiological.
What this means for leaders and managers
Work does not happen in isolation. It happens in rooms. On streets. At tables. In buildings that quietly shape behaviour long before culture decks and values statements ever do.
When environments are harsh, people harden. When they are sterile, people disengage. When they are thoughtfully designed — with natural light, living things, materials that connect to the physical world — people soften, and tend to think more clearly.
The question worth asking is the same one the Work Makes Us essay asks from a different angle: does this environment enrich the people inside it, or extract from them?
Look around where you work. Not critically — curiously. What does the space encourage? What does it drain? What does it ignore?
Sometimes the most meaningful changes are not grand redesigns. They are small acts of noticing. Opening a blind. Moving a desk toward the light. Letting something living share the room.
Work should not feel like exile from the natural world.
From the Cultivated library — take this further
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A collection of photos from my walk where I recorded this episode
Bibliography
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Biophilic design [WWW Document], n.d. URL https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Biophilic_design (accessed 7.18.24).
Bolten, B., Barbiero, G., 2020. Biophilic Design: How to enhance physical and psychological health and wellbeing in our built environments. Visions for Sustainability 11–16. https://doi.org/10.13135/2384-8677/3829
Dalay, L., Aytaç, G., 2022. Biophilic Design: Integrating Nature Into the Urban Environment, in: Emerging Approaches in Design and New Connections With Nature. IGI Global, pp. 1–19. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-6725-8.ch001
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Mollazadeh, M., Zhu, Y., 2021. Application of Virtual Environments for Biophilic Design: A Critical Review. Buildings 11, 148. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings11040148
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