How our environment can help minimize stress and bolster immunity

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Your phone is buzzing circles on the table. The water bill is due, you’re organizing care for your parents who are ill, and your boss wants to set up a virtual conference on Friday at five. There’s a growing list of demands you have to meet, and it feels like there’s never enough time in the day.

When stress starts to mount, it’s important to find effective ways to address it with mindful activities to help you sort through the clutter. But what happens when we don’t address the stress? It’s not only our mental well-being that suffers.

The effects of ongoing, chronic stress can be pervasive. Left unmanaged, stress can adversely impact mental well-being and sleep, as well as our immune system response and overall physiological health. For many researchers, including Dr. Esther Sternberg, best-selling author and research director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, stress is a key component to understanding our body’s ability to fight illness and stave off infection.

“If a stress response goes on too long, known as chronic stress or allostatic load, that’s when it impacts your immune system. Your body releases hormones like cortisol to turn down your immune system’s ability to fight and prevent infection or mount an antibody response to a vaccine. And these things are so crucial now,” Sternberg says. “There’s a wealth of evidence over the past 30 years showing that chronic stress impairs the immune system’s ability to fight infection.”

Sternberg notes that the goal isn’t to eliminate stress outright—because some stressors can be good. Acute stress triggers the fight or flight response and can help us get things done on time, keep us motivated and even address potential dangers in our environment. But it’s important to find ways to mitigate chronic stressors, and the places where we spend our lives play a central role in addressing and minimizing the levels of chronic stress we experience.

Limiting stress through building design and policy
It’s well understood that the buildings we frequent—from our workplace to the doctor’s office—elicit different responses depending on how they are designed, built, operated and maintained. A beautiful view to nature can feel calm and relaxing, while a noisy room can feel chaotic and oppressive. Understanding how the elements that make up our environment can either help or hinder our stress response can enable us to make smarter design choices.

“There are seven domains of integrative health including healthy sleep, nutrition, spirituality, relationships, movement and exercise, the physical environment and resilience,” Sternberg notes. “The built environment can affect every single one of those domains, and spaces can be designed to minimize the stress and maximize the relaxation response.”

Sternberg suggests several ways organizations and businesses can address environmental factors to improve the stress response for employees.

“Addressing the domains of health is important—from providing healthy snacks and supporting good nutrition to giving employees meditation areas and natural settings to disconnect every once in a while. Spaces for movement are crucial to stress management and well-being too,” Sternberg says. “Circadian light can also lead to better sleep quality, faster sleep at night and better overall moods and less depression. Many studies have proven the effectiveness of optimal lighting. These and many other practices are all important to stress reduction. The environment is critical.”

Start with internal leadership
Sternberg suggests creating a Chief Wellness Officer position—someone at an organization or business who can oversee and implement wellness strategies that work.

“It’s essential to elevate the role of the individual in an organization or building who is knowledgeable and can address health and wellness. That person needs to be positioned to communicate with C-suite individuals. Without a commitment to that role, issues of health and well-being, stress and depression are shifted back on the individual workers,” Sternberg says. “If a whole organization pays attention to how the operation and environment is impacting workers, they’ll be able to address issues of stress and well-being—and that’s needed in the C-suite.”

Championing health and wellness can help employees, and the workplace at-large, thrive in the short- and long-term. By implementing strategies that encourage mindfulness and relaxation responses, organizations can assist individuals as they aim to manage and mitigate the negative impacts of stress on their immune systems and daily lives.

At IWBI, we’re committed to fostering prevention and preparedness, resilience and recovery as we look to the future beyond COVID-19. We’re bringing together interdisciplinary experts from across the health and wellness industry to examine how healthy places support healthy populations. For more details and evidence-based strategies for creating places to thrive, register for our regular webcasts.