House Plants
For all of you Grey’s Anatomy fans, you might remember the episode where they introduced the 3 “mood rooms”? One room was particularly interesting to me, it was filled with plants. Plant life improves physical wellbeing. It decreases anxiety and blood pressure and increases attentiveness.
Houseplants can positively affect your health in numerous ways. The benefits range from filtering the air you breathe to reducing stress and keeping humidity in the ideal range.
One of the greatest health benefits of houseplants is their ability to clean your air of toxins. Back in the 1980s, NASA began studying this topic and found that plants can remove many indoor air pollutants. It turns out that a plant itself can absorb pathogens and chemicals that come from the air, destroying them, and converting them into new plant tissues. This is true for things like bacteria, formaldehyde, benzene, and other harmful compounds. For example, rooms with plants in them can have 50-60% fewer molds and bacteria in them compared to rooms without plants.
Having plants in the indoor spaces around you can also affect the way you feel emotionally. For example, being in the presence of plants can help increase positive feelings such as happiness, cheerfulness, peacefulness, relaxation, calmness, warmth, and pleasantness. Plants can also decrease negative feelings like anxiety, pressure, and fatigue. Overall, this can increase your quality of life. Plants are natural stress reducers. Even just walking past greenery or interacting with indoor houseplants can help to reduce stress and anxiety.
Plants release moisture into the air around them. For ideal health, we want the humidity in the air around us to stay between 30 and 60%. When humidity is too low, you can become more susceptible to getting a sore throat, catching the common cold, or having dry skin. Houseplants can promote ideal humidity, helping to decrease the likelihood of those kinds of health problems.
Indoor houseplants are a great way to introduce the friendly kinds of bacteria into your space, which can positively impact your health and well-being.
Memory, productivity, accuracy, creativity, and quality of your work can all go up in the presence of plants. This can help you to feel better about your work and less stressed at the end of the day.
It’s such a simple, effective strategy that can leave your air cleaner, your space greener, your mood brighter, and your productivity a little higher.
