Two weeks ago, I had to go to the hospital for a minor surgical procedure. Nothing too serious but I found myself in a medical environment that I fortunately don't have to find myself in on a regular basis. And as I was sitting in the waiting room, I started observing my surroundings and myself. What happened? I had to wait in a narrow corridor with no natural light that felt like it had no ending. And as I was sitting there, I felt my mood drop. I wasn't looking forward to my procedure but also not dreading it, but I started to feel less healthy by the minute. To take my mind off things I started thinking about an interesting challenge:
How do you design a hospital where the body heals faster? And how might these insights serve us beyond this one case?
It sent me back to a study I have cited for years. In 1984, the researcher Roger Ulrich published work in ‘Science’ comparing patients recovering from the same gallbladder operation in the same hospital. The only systematic difference was the view from the bed. Some rooms looked onto a small stand of trees, others onto a brick wall. The patients who could see the trees recovered measurably better, leaving hospital sooner, needing fewer strong painkillers, and drawing fewer negative notes from nurses.
The body was healing to the view, not just the medicine. No room is neutral.
Sit with how strange that is. We tend to think the environment touches our mood and stops there, and that the body is a separate, more serious matter governed by biology. Ulrich showed the line is not so clean. The view reached past mood and into recovery itself, into pain and healing time, with no act of will from the patient. No one decided to heal faster. The room did its work regardless. The lesson reaches well beyond hospitals.
Any space where people recover, concentrate or feel safe is making a continuous argument to their nervous system, all day, whether you designed it to or not.
The waiting room, the classroom, the office. This is what Behavioural Design keeps finding. The body is not separate from the room it sits in. Change the room, and you change the person in it. So how do you make that argument the right one? Here are three practical moves:
Point the chair at something living. When you lay out a desk, a meeting room or a waiting area, ask what it faces. A window, a tree, a plant in the line of sight is not decoration, it is part of how people perform and recover. Turn the seat toward the view.
Treat daylight as a resource, not a luxury. Give the desks and rooms where people need to focus or recover the best natural light you have, and save the windowless spaces for storage and equipment, not for the people you want at their best.
Audit one space for what it tells the body. Pick a space where people are meant to focus, recover or do their best thinking, an office, a meeting room, a clinic, and read it the way Ulrich read those wards. Light, view, greenery, a sense of enclosure. Change the weakest one.
I left the hospital rid of a molar and a jaw infection, and while I admit I was feeling quite sorry for myself, I decided to spend the rest of the day sitting on our couch, looking at the tree in front of our house. I am all for empirical research. And all for healing, as a matter of fact.
Behavioural Design Summer School
Two days in Amsterdam with Tom and Astrid, and a small group of people ready to be more influential by September.
Day one builds a working Behavioural Design × AI workflow you can use from the following week. Day two: two masterclasses based on the founders' books, one on designing for happiness and energy, one on finding the leverage points that unlock stuck change.
Dinner together on the first evening. A follow-up session three months later. Both books included.
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The focusing illusion: why what you look at feels bigger than it is
Sitting in that windowless corridor, the wait was all I could think about, and it swelled to fill everything. That is worth pausing on, because there is a name for it. Daniel Kahneman and David Schkade asked people whether they would be happier living in California, and most said yes, picturing the sunshine. When they actually measured wellbeing, Californians were no happier than people in the Midwest. The pull they had fallen for is the focusing illusion, and Kahneman summed it up in one line: nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it. The weather barely moved their lives, but the moment they focused on it, it loomed large.
Whatever you put in someone’s line of sight starts to weigh more than it should.
This cuts both ways once you know it. If a team fixates on one harsh review among twenty warm ones, the bad one runs the room, not because it matters most but because it is the thing being looked at. The move is to widen the frame on purpose: set the one delay against the ten things that went right, put the single complaint back among the quiet, satisfied majority. You are not denying the thing. You are giving it its real size.
Attention is a magnifying glass, so be careful what you hold it over.
Here's to the stubborn optimists, who unlock the power of Behavioural Design for optimising work, life, and everything in between.
See you next week!
Astrid Groenewegen
Co-Founder of SUE | Behavioural Design Academy, Author of 'The Art of Designing Behaviour' / 'De Kunst van Gedrag Ontwerpen' and ‘De Gelukscode’.
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