Crafting Healthier Workspaces: A Conversation with Dr. Esther Sternberg
In this podcast episode, Gayathri, the founder of Liveable, engages in a thoughtful discussion with Dr. Esther Sternberg about the essentials of creating a healthier workspace. Their conversation, based on insights from Dr. Sternberg's book, "Well at Work, Creating Well-Being in Any Workspace," explores how thoughtful workspace design can significantly improve both physical and emotional well-being.
Dr. Esther Sternberg is a medical doctor and a pioneer in blending medical science with architecture and design, paving the way for enhanced well-being and productivity in workspaces. She's the Research Director at Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine, and Founding Director at University of Arizona Institute on Place, Wellbeing & Performance. Her notable work with the U.S. General Services Administration on wearable devices informs post-COVID workspace design. She's advised several prestigious institutions on design and health. Author of "Healing Spaces" and the new "WELL at WORK," her work drives the design-health movement into the post-COVID era, showcasing how integrative health in workspaces can boost physical health, emotional wellbeing, and productivity.
Good Air Quality: the Start
A key point is the importance of good ventilation and filtration in creating the foundation to a healthy workspace. Dr. Sternberg emphasizes that the idea of 'well-being workspaces' goes beyond just air quality and supports the physical health and emotional well-being of individuals.
Simple Practices, Big Impact
Simple practices like monitoring room humidity, taking walking breaks, and having meditation moments can have a huge impact. These small changes can easily be added to office operations and daily routines, helping manage stress and improve overall well-being.
The Benefits of Open Offices
The conversation explores a study Dr. Sternberg led with the US General Services Administration, revealing the advantages of open office settings in promoting physical activity and reducing stress among employees. Real-world exemplars like the Green Mountain Power Headquarters demonstrate how thoughtful design can foster a collaborative ethos, potentially redefining employee wellness in modern workspaces.
Centering Intentionality
Dr. Sternberg relates the essence of the Japanese tea ceremony to the need for intentionality in workplace relationships, and how it translates to designing for well-being in office spaces.
Preparing for Hybrid Work
As hybrid work becomes more common post-COVID, creating inviting office spaces is essential. The conversation explores the vision of a future office that fosters community, social interactions, and support among employees.
A Call to Action
This dialogue is a call to action for entrepreneurs, designers, and decision-makers to step beyond traditional design. By embracing a holistic approach that caters to both the physical and emotional needs of individuals, we can create workspaces that people love being a part of and can help them thrive.
Resources
Here are some of the resources mentioned during the podcast episode.
Books
"Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being" by Dr. Esther Sternberg
"Well at Work, Creating Well-Being in Any Workspace" by Dr. Esther Sternberg
Studies and Examples
US General Services Administration study on the impact of open office design on employees' wellness
Paper on the correlation between sound levels and stress response
Whitehall Study by Michael Marmot on hierarchy and mortality rate in the workplace
Innovative Solutions
Wellness Techniques
Transcript
Dr. Esther Sternberg: [00:00:00] So health goes far beyond getting rid of toxins and allergens and bacteria and viruses. And I think after COVID, most people think of a healthy workspace as only that great ventilation, lots of fresh air turnover.
Welcome to Changing Tomorrow with your host Gayathri Unnikrishnan. In each episode, Gaia 3 talks to the people reshaping entire industries and societies. Changing tomorrow is the destination for the change makers of today. Here we explore the mechanics of creating lasting impact, turning ideas into tools that shape a brighter future.
So turn up the volume, grab a seat, and join Gaia 3 for engaging conversations with those who are shaping the future right now. Welcome to Changing Tomorrow.[00:01:00]
Gayathri: Hi everyone. Hope you had a good couple of weeks. I'm so excited to introduce you to today's guest, Dr. Esther Sternberg. She is something of a celebrity in the interior design and architecture fields. She's actually a medical doctor who uses some extensive research to build and design environments that are good for our health.
She's currently the research director at the Andrew Wills Center for Integrative Health. medicine and a professor at the University of Arizona. This recording was a riot and I really hope you enjoy it. So without further ado, this is Dr. Esther Sternberg. Hey, Dr. Sternberg. It's so great to have you here.
It's great
Dr. Esther Sternberg: to be here. Thank you.
Gayathri: I'm excited to dive into what I think are some controversial topics in your new book. Um, but before we begin, before we dive into that, I wanted to ask you, if you had a [00:02:00] superpower, what would
Dr. Esther Sternberg: it be? Ah, okay. I've been thinking about this and it's a really tough one. To bring people together.
I think bringing people together in this day and age is, is really crucial. And, you know, I do that in my work with integrative teams, integrated teams and multidisciplinary teams, but if it were a superpower, I would hope that it would go far beyond that. And that
Gayathri: is much needed superpower in today's world.
For sure. Dr. Sternberg, I really enjoyed reading your book, Well at Work, Creating Well Being in Any Workspace. And I think that there is a lot that we need to explore in the topic. Okay. But before we begin, can you talk a little bit about what you think healthy space is, if that's not too vague a question?
Dr. Esther Sternberg: It's not a vague question at all. It's, it's what the book is about, and I'm glad you [00:03:00] enjoyed reading the book. So health goes far beyond getting rid of toxins and allergens and bacteria and viruses. And I think after COVID, most people think of a healthy workspace as only that. Great ventilation, lots of fresh air turnover, materials that don't off gas and so on.
But it's much more than that. You need healthy ventilation. You need good ventilation. You need good filtration. That's absolutely essential. That's the foundation of a healthy workspace. But it's not good enough. And what we need. And what I'm proposing in the book is we need well being workspaces, that is, workspaces that enhance not only physical health, but also emotional well being.
And it's, that's what's going to keep us resilient and healthy in a holistic way. The, you know, when you [00:04:00] think about COVID, there are, or any viral infections. There are three aspects to whether you get sick and how sick you get. One is the dose of exposure to the virus. The other is the duration of exposure to the virus.
And the third and really important leg of that stool is your own resilience. Now you can mitigate, you can reduce duration of exposure and dose of exposure with excellent ventilation, with distancing, with masking, with filtration. But in order to enhance your own resilience, your holistic health, you really need to Engage in all seven domains of integrative health, and that's what this book is about.
And you know, what are the seven domains of integrative health? It's stress and relaxation response. So resilience, the environment, which includes clean air and good ventilation and [00:05:00] lighting and temperature and humidity. And it also importantly includes nature, being in nature, access to nature, green spaces and plants and so on.
Movement. relationships, spirituality, nutrition, and sleep. And all those are the seven domains of integrative health, as defined by the Andrew Wiles Center for Integrative Medicine. But it's really important, it's really difficult, for people to actively engage in all of those domains of integrative health.
You know, you think about after New Year, you, you promise yourself you'll exercise more, you'll go to the gym more, you'll stop eating hamburgers and french fries and so on. But it's hard to actively engage in these. So designing your workspace where you spend much of your day to help you engage passively in those activities will help keep you resilient and be your healthiest self.
Gayathri: [00:06:00] And thank you for that. Kind of summary of the book, what I really liked about your approach is you bring things that are within our circle of influence if you're working remotely or in our own home office, as well as what organizations can do at scale in their offices as
Dr. Esther Sternberg: well. Yes, yes. So, you know, there are certainly things that you can do locally and talk about, for example, humidification and it's, it costs a lot.
It's from a point of view of energy expenditure. It really is very expensive to dehumidify a humid space or to humidify safely. Uh, dry space. But what we found in our work using wearable devices with the U. S. General Services Administration and measuring the impact of up to 11 different environmental attributes on the stress response, stress and relaxation response, sleep, sleep, quality movement and sleep, sleep, quality movement.
In psychological [00:07:00] responses, we found that when it's too dry when it's less than 30 percent relative humidity, your stress response is 25 percent higher. That's your physiological stress response. So, and people are not sub are not consciously aware. of that. So it's very simple to improve the humidity in your local environment.
You put a humidifier next to the desk. You put a humidifier in your bedroom when you're sleeping and that can help reduce the stress response and keep you healthy. And
Gayathri: that is such a simple, uh, but almost intangible aspect. It's, uh, there are these cool monitors that tell you what the humidity is. So it's easy to monitor, but you need to be intentional about it.
And I did not know about the link to stress response. That is pretty profound research. Well, we,
Dr. Esther Sternberg: we didn't know that either until we did the research. So when the relative humidity is It's less than 30 percent and greater than 60%. So outside the ASHRAE standards, [00:08:00] the stress response is that much higher.
And you can imagine that if day in, day out, you are having a 25 percent higher stress load, that's a cumulative load in the medical range. And people are just not, we are not consciously aware of how the physical environment around us impacts our stress response and resilience. And the people, I mean, that's the other thing, is the people who were more stressed during the day had poorer sleep at night.
And sleep is really important for protecting you against infection and keeping you alert and making you less fatigued during the day, keeping your cognitive performance at peak, and so on. That's
Gayathri: fascinating. And you also talk about the inflammatory responses and kind of how it impacts the inflammation levels in our body.
We're hearing a lot about inflammation in the media and kind of how we need to reduce inflammation. What [00:09:00] insight can you kind of share about our spaces and how it impacts?
Dr. Esther Sternberg: Well, so again, it's, uh, it really has to be this holistic approach and, and engaging in these healthy behaviors does help reduce inflammation.
I'll tell the story of my own experience with inflammation. I went through a period of extreme stress about 20 some years ago when my mother was dying of breast cancer and I was a long distance caregiver and I was undergoing a lot of stress at work. And. And I had, I was working at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and I had discovered about nine years before that, that the brain's stress center is really important in susceptibility to autoimmune inflammatory diseases like arthritis.
I discovered that in rats, and when you can prove that in rats, then the medical community starts to believe in the mind body connection and that [00:10:00] stress can make you sick and believing can make you well. So I had discovered that about nine years before. Then I went through this period of extreme stress and I developed inflammatory arthritis.
I'm a rheumatologist. I'm an arthritis doc. That's what I was trained as. And it was ironic that I developed this arthritis. And I, it's not a coincidence. I, I'm, I'm sure it's not a coincidence that it happened when it happened. I mean, I have the genes, there's arthritis in my family, but the timing in relation to the stress was.
Not a coincidence, the, I moved into a new house, which is also a big stressor and my neighbors who were Greek knocked on the door and brought me Greek food, tzatziki, dolmades, moussaka. I love all that food. And they saw me writing on my computer, which was to become my first book. But at the time I hadn't written any books and they said, Oh, are you a writer?
[00:11:00] And I said, I don't know, why do you ask? And they said, we've always wanted a writer to stay at our cottage in Crete. So I said, I'm a writer. And I went with them to Crete, to this tiny village on the south coast, the south coast of Lentas. And of Crete, I went with them to this tiny village on the south coast of Crete called Lentas.
And I was there only about 10 days and I began to heal. I had knee biopsies and whatnot at NIH. I was supposed to go back into hospital and get a liver biopsy and knee biopsies and get put on some experimental drug. And I was so much better after I got back that my doctor In his notes, he said, well, she doesn't need to go back into hospital.
She's much better, and it was not a miracle cure. What I didn't realize is that I was engaging in every one of those seven domains of integrative health. [00:12:00] I was swimming in the ocean every day. I was surrounded by my neighbors and the villagers and all these grandmothers in the village who were sharing their stories of arthritis with me and they were feeding me this healthy Mediterranean diet.
I was sleeping soundly sometimes on the roof of the little cottage under the stars. I started to climb the hill behind the town. And there was the ruins of the temple to Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. And on top of that, there were the ruins of a Byzantine chapel. And on top of that, there was a tiny Greek chapel that had icons and candles and so on.
And, and I would sit in the doorway of that chapel and look out over the Mediterranean at the blue, blue, blue. ocean and against the white stucco buildings and the fuchsia bougainvillea and I'd listen to the sounds of the wind and the sheep and the [00:13:00] goats and hours would pass and I didn't realize it and I didn't know I was meditating.
That's what meditating was. You know, so That's what helped me heal. It's being engaging in those activities that helped me heal. And I had an aha moment where I realized that if I continued doing what I was doing in Crete, when I went back home, I would continue to heal. And if I fell back into my old sedentary ways and eating hamburgers and French fries, and you know, not sleeping well, and I would Continue to be sick.
And so for me, it was a very personal recognition that if you engage in these kinds of activities on a regular basis, you will reduce your inflammation to the extent possible. Dr.
Gayathri: Sternberg, that is such a beautiful story about serendipity, and I think you have convinced me and [00:14:00] everybody who's listening to book tickets to Greece.
Dr. Esther Sternberg: So
Gayathri: here we are. I'm going to be going on the flights and checking. But the second part of the story... story. Yeah. It's around kind of the day to day habits and experiences and one thing that you said about meditating without realizing that you're meditating, all of these aspects that kind of almost, and I'm going to use the word reversed, already used the symptoms that you were feeling.
Dr. Esther Sternberg: Yeah. So I talk about that in the book, you know, how do you bring. spirituality into the workspace, you know, and I don't mean spirituality in terms of religious experience. I mean, spirituality and the elements of spirituality that help you be well and heal. And there are several elements. And these meditation moments are very important.
And you don't have to say, um, and you don't have to make a prayer or anything like that. [00:15:00] But going offline Just even for a few moments will help reset your stress response. And you can do that by deep breathing. You can do that by Dr. Andrew Wiles, 478 breathing method, which is a kind of yoga breathing.
You can look it up online for seven, eight breathing, Dr. Andrew Wiles, and you'll, you can. You know, find out how to do it, but, but those kinds of things can move that stress response out of the danger range and back into a healthier range because you know, you, you need your stress response in order to perform at peak.
It's your stress response that gives you focused attention and the ability to fight or flee and gives you the energy to perform a task, but if you're too stressed, then. You've your performance fails. So what you want to do when you're feeling too anxious or too stressed is you want to move that [00:16:00] response back into that healthier range.
And meditation can do it. Deep breathing with your diaphragm can do it. And it also helps to get into that a state of flow, which we would all love to be in. You know, when you're working and you're really, you feel energized when you're solving a problem or accomplishing a task and it feels effortless.
And you know, brain studies have shown that it's not actually effortless. Your stress response is turned on when you're in that state of flow. Interesting. But the parts of the brain that make you recognize that you're stressed or feel those bodily feelings are tuned down. And so it feels effortless and you enjoy it.
So, so you can monitor yourself. If you're too anxious or too stressed, you can take some meditation breaks. If you're feeling logy, on the other hand, and you're tired and you don't have that energy, get up and take a [00:17:00] walk, go outside, be in nature. All of that can help bring that energy back. And so if you think about it as a kind of an A rainbow and your stress response can either be very far at the right hand side where you're extremely stressed and you're, you're paralyzed, you're failing, or it can be very low where you're half asleep.
You don't want to be at either end of the rainbow. You want to be in the middle where you're at peak performance and you can adjust your stress response on a very minute basis by, you know, having these meditation moments or getting up and taking a walk and getting outside. I was just going to say
Gayathri: my daily walks are I think the singular habit that I have been able to keep up for a very long time, for years at this point.
I started it in the beginning of COVID and it has helped with Simplified, in a simplified way, it's helped my sanity levels, but [00:18:00] it also helps that I have a dog, that I need to take her for a walk, if you hear some snoring in the background, that is her, so sorry. But, uh, I'm not saying get a dog, but I think the walking aspect of it, or just mindfully removing yourself from a situation is helpful.
something that we can try to do. And you also touched upon integrating these habits into day to day rituals, learning from the Japanese tea
Dr. Esther Sternberg: ceremonies, et cetera. Yes, yes, that's very true. So ritual, actually people have studied rituals and have found that people who engage in rituals, even made up rituals, these studies were used.
completely made up rituals, and that people were able to solve math problems much better if they engaged in a ritual beforehand. And you can see, you know, elite athletes, you know, if you watch figure skating or if you watch the Olympics, they're all meditating before they go on and do their thing. And, [00:19:00] and they all, many of them have rituals that they engage in beforehand.
So yeah, rituals are definitely important. And yes, and walking, as you said, exercise, I try to swim every day. I'm very lucky that now I live in Tucson, Arizona, and I can swim every day. And it's not only good for physical health, it is, there's no question that it's good for mental health. And, you know, I find that after 20 minutes of swimming, all of a sudden problems that I had that.
Seemed insurmountable. I have the answer right away in the pool. So yeah.
Gayathri: Yeah. Because you're stepping away in a way in your mind. Yes. Dr. Sternberg, what is one commonly held belief that you disagree
Dr. Esther Sternberg: with? Well, I mean, we talked about this a little bit before about open office design. Yes. When we published the study with the U.
S. General Services Administration using wearable devices to measure people's stress responses and movement and activity, sleep quality in different [00:20:00] office spaces, we found that people in open office settings moved significantly more than people in private offices. They were 32 percent more active during the day.
They were 20 percent more active than people in cubicles. And the people who were more active during the day were significantly less stressed at night when they went home and even while they slept. So they were 14 percent less stressed. when they went home at night. And that's with the physiological stress response.
They weren't subjectively aware of this. And when you add up 14 percent more stress every day, that's a tremendous load of stress. And by reducing that load of stress, you're helping to keep yourself well. And the people who had less stress slept better at night and were less fatigued the next day when they went into work.
So, I published that paper in 2018 and the social media [00:21:00] really, uh, didn't like it. People hate their open office spaces. Well, I think the reason is because the, the word open office is a misnomer. When Robert Propst designed his Active office design in the mid 20th century, he had in mind that people would move to different spaces in the workspace to accomplish whatever tasks they had at hand.
You know, you go to a quiet space when you need to be quiet, you go to a more open space when you need to be more with more people and and so on and unfortunately that. Active office design morphed into the dreaded cubicles when organizations were trying to stuff as many people into an office space as possible.
And if you don't have choices, if you don't have many choices of where to go, then yes, it's going to be more stressful. But the idea that there are many choices that fit individual personalities and that fit [00:22:00] individuals need for the type of work they're doing. At that moment in time is really what is needed.
And the single biggest complaint that people have in open office settings is noise. And there is no reason that offices should not be designed to pay attention to noise. You know, in a recording studio, in theaters, there are acoustical engineers who engineer the sound levels to the level that you want.
Every single material that goes into the built environment has an acoustical rating. And if you thoughtfully design the space to minimize the noise, you can have an open office setting that is not stressful and not noisy, but has the advantages. of being open and having the options to go to different spaces.
So in the book I describe, [00:23:00] I visited Green Mountain Power in, uh, the headquarters of Green Mountain Power in Colchester, Vermont, where they're the electrical company that maintains the entire electrical grid for the whole state of Vermont. And you can imagine in the middle of a snowstorm and a blizzard when, you know, there's power outages.
The call center at Green Mountain Power is very busy. Well, it's an open office setting, which is designed to absorb sound. It has baffles on the ceiling that direct sound. There are cubbies that absorb sound. There's rubber flooring, there's carpeting, and it's really very quiet. So these things can be done and should be done in office spaces.
Gayathri: And I want to come back to the social media for or because open offices have been getting a bad rap. And what we see as open offices usually is in industrial [00:24:00] looking office. You know, it looks cool, but has little to no acoustic treatments going on. Right. And people are just, you know, Okay. assigned a spot and they don't really have another place to go if they want to do some focus work or maybe just have conversations.
Dr. Esther Sternberg: Right. Well, you know, with, again, with the U. S. General Services Administration, they on purpose designed their spaces and especially in the headquarters Building where, which was one of the buildings where we studied. You do have lots of choices. There are quiet rooms. There are rooms for gathering smaller groups or larger groups.
And, you know, we walked around, there's a beautiful rooftop area with a rooftop garden and windows to beautiful views to the Potomac and the monuments in Washington. And there was a lady sitting there at one of the tables next to the window. And, and we said, is this your desk? And she said, no, but she loves it.
And she comes and works. works there all the time. So, you know, giving [00:25:00] people choices to suit their own personality is very important. And in fact, so the, one of the most recent papers, we published two papers this year that touch on this, uh, these Two aspects, sound and personality, again, mining the data from that well built for well being GSA study.
So what we found with personality is that people who are more extroverted prefer the open office settings where there's more going on and more movement, more people. And I mean, you see people sitting in coffee shops all the time. I mean, that's not a quiet setting, you know, and people who were Extroverted were happier and more focused in those kinds of settings, whereas people who were more introverted were less happy and less focused.
So it means that you have to give people choices so that they can choose where they prefer to work. The other thing we found with sound was, and this is a paper whose lead author was Kartik [00:26:00] Srinivasan, who mined the data. It was published in Nature Digital Medicine. And we found that when the office space was Too noisy, people were stressed, their physiological stress response was higher, which is not surprising.
Loud noise is definitely stressful. Loud, really loud noises can be detrimental to your ear. It can harm your ear. But we also found that when it was too quiet, The stress response was higher. And so there was an optimal point about 45 decibels, which is a bit of a, it's not a very quiet office, it's an office setting, and that's really the optimal where the stress response was.
optimal. And interestingly, 45 decibels is the loudness of birdsong. Yes. So I put in the book, I don't know if this, you know, we have no proof of this at all, but maybe we'd like to hear bird sound. because it kind of gets us [00:27:00] to that optimal stress level, which brings me to another point about noisy office spaces.
You can certainly mitigate the unpleasant noise with white noise or with nature sounds or what they call pink sounds. And. That can also help you sleep at night. You can download all of these sounds from the internet. I love hearing the sound of rain on the roof. I'm in the desert now, so it's nice to hear the rain on the roof.
People have done studies with, you know, babies fall asleep faster to vacuum cleaner sounds. So if you choose not to vacuum in the middle of the night to help your baby fall asleep. You can download the sound of a vacuum cleaner from the internet, believe it or not. Well,
Gayathri: that's good to know. Pink sounds and sound masking, I think they call it, is something that is absolutely an option.
And it's interesting that you found kind of the sweet spot at 45 decibels, which [00:28:00] isn't too... Silent, and not too loud, and, uh, which is accessible. And
Dr. Esther Sternberg: I, we think, we don't know why that is, but I think it's because the brain is a difference detector, and when, when it's really, really quiet, you can hear a pin drop, and that'll startle you out of whatever focus you're doing, and that's the stress response.
So I think that that may be part of the reason why when it's really quiet, uh, your stress response is higher. Can I ask
Gayathri: you, what do you mean by... What do you mean by when you say, uh, your brain is a difference detector? What does that mean? Well, your
Dr. Esther Sternberg: brain is designed to recognize change. Your brain. All of our brains.
Whether you're a fruit fly, or a mouse, or a cat, or a human, or anything in between. In order to keep you safe. I mean, what is your stress response there for? It's to get you out of danger. It's to give you the energy to fight or flee. It's the ability to [00:29:00] focus on a task. That's what it's there for. And, and if you're a mouse in the field and, you know, suddenly there's a change in the environment, a noise, uh, a rustling, a movement, that's when the animal gets vigilant and ready to get out of danger.
So the brain is tuned. to be able to detect sudden changes to protect you.
Gayathri: Can we come back to fruit flies and the insight that you have about what we can learn from fruit flies and how we can apply to open offices? I'm super simplifying this, but I just thought it was an interesting correlation that
Dr. Esther Sternberg: you, we're not talking about people leaving food around and fruit flies flying around the office.
No. You can look up on YouTube, fighting fruit flies. And there's a professor at Harvard who does genetic studies on behavior. And fruit flies happen to be a very good way of [00:30:00] studying behavior and manipulating genes and, you know, changing different genes so that to see how they behave. Well, it turns out that there are hierarchies in fruit flies.
Yeah. So, and the way a hierarchy in male fruit flies. The way hierarchies are established is they fight, and they fight to the death, unfortunately. So this professor, in order to get two male fruit flies to fight, he puts them on a cork under a microscope, and he puts a female in the middle, and of course they fight over the female.
And the first one to knock the, the other guy off the cork wins and establishes that hierarchy. So that becomes the alpha fruit fly. Now, interestingly, female fruit flies do not fight over males. They fight over food.
Gayathri: Females have their priorities, right? [00:31:00] No matter the
Dr. Esther Sternberg: species. That's right. Well, wait, it gets even better.
Females. So, you put two females on a cork with a piece of food in between them, and they push each other a little bit, and then they start sitting down and they eat the food together. I love that.
Gayathri: There is a lot we can learn from fruit flies. That's right. About
Dr. Esther Sternberg: behavior. Yeah. But the reason I think you brought this up was the question of hierarchies in the workplace.
And there's a lot of work on hierarchies in the workplace. Sir Michael Marmot, whom I describe in the book, was the first to show in his study in Whitehall, it's called the Whitehall Study in London, where he studied civil servants, you know, federal workers in the British Civil Service, and he found that the lower you were in the hierarchy, The earlier the mortality, the higher the mortality rate.
He studied people over decades and [00:32:00] he found in subsequent studies that the reason was the stress response was higher in the people lower in the hierarchies. So to the extent that the workspace can be designed to flatten the hierarchy, it can help. Again, it's another way to reduce the stress response and enhance health and wellbeing.
So again, I visited the Green Mountain Power in Colchester, Vermont, and the CEO had moved this. Workforce out of what she called the Crystal Palace in downtown Burlington, Vermont, and which had a lot of private offices. And the president and CEO had an enormous office and he was guarded by three secretaries and you couldn't get to him unless.
You know, you were, uh, you said a secret word. That's right. That's right. Well, she moved the, the new CEO moved the team [00:33:00] into what used to be a warehouse and it was all open office design. And she purposefully Put the C suite team, the CEO, the COO and so on next to the service team, the teams that went out to fix the lines when the power was out.
And they were literally next to each other in this open office design. And she did it on purpose and it flattened the hierarchy. And it, it also showed that. Everybody in that organization was equally important. You know, you cannot run an organization without everybody doing their job. And by doing that in a tangible way in the office design, you can help people have.
have more commitment to the entire organization. Yeah. And I'm
Gayathri: sure that the leadership learned a lot because they were getting insights directly from
Dr. Esther Sternberg: folks who were on the ground. Yes, [00:34:00] absolutely. Absolutely. Dr.
Gayathri: Sternberg, I want to come back to your superpower and talk about community. And how important it is in terms of driving well being and personal well being, well being of people in an organization.
Could you share a little bit about what you've learned in that
Dr. Esther Sternberg: aspect? Yeah, so community is really important and you know, there, there are many ways to build community. But if you don't have A physical environment that can support relationship building. It doesn't work. I mean, you have to program events, program activities to help people engage in community.
But if you don't have a space to engage in then for different size groups, for example. So again, I, I give a lot of examples of, of. places that I visited, where the organization has [00:35:00] intentionally included spaces for gathering of different sizes. And we're now building at the University of Arizona, the new Andrew Wiles Center for Integrative Medicine.
Building complex. We have three buildings. We have the mind building, the body building and the spirit building. And we have from the beginning incorporated all these seven domains of integrative health into each of those buildings. And in terms of community. In the, what we call the body building, we have a large open, uh, space, multi purpose space that can be used for classroom teaching of the physicians and health care providers whom we're training.
But it can also be used for yoga, for tai chi. We'll have a teaching kitchen there so that people can learn how to cook healthy food from Dr. Andrew Weil and You know, as we're, as the building is coming up on the campus, we're having a lot of people say, boy, we want to come, we want to visit, we want [00:36:00] to be there.
So, you know, if you don't create spaces to attract people, then it really becomes very hard to have a sense of community. I describe in the book, the, uh, Underwood family Sonoran desert garden outside the college of architecture, planning and landscape architecture. that used to be a parking lot, and they turned part of this parking lot into this beautiful, beautiful garden with reclaimed water, recycled water, and has all five ecosystems that are in Arizona.
And you always see students and faculty sitting out there eating, talking, working. It, it attracts people and that creates a sense of community.
Gayathri: And it attracts people from all over. It's not per
Dr. Esther Sternberg: department. Oh, correct. People, yeah, people come from all over. Yeah. Yeah.
Gayathri: And that's such a simple way, trans, you know, translating your, [00:37:00] or making your parking lot into a garden.
Dr. Esther Sternberg: Right. Well, I just want to say something about that. That transitional spaces are really important. And nature and having gardens around are really important. So when you think about a workspace. It's, it's not enough to think about the building, the office building, it is what is the surrounding. So you get into urban planning and the notion that having micro parks or green spaces in a city, or if you have the luxury, if you are an organization that's big enough that has the ability to, to do landscape architecture around your, your building, that gives people a place to go offline and.
Take a walk in nature and we're also going to have gardens, desert gardens around a new building.
Gayathri: Yeah. I wanted to spend some time on spirituality in the workplace. [00:38:00] And you bring it up as one of the seven tenets, one of the seven pillars, one of the seven key things that we need to address. What do you mean by spirituality in the workplace?
Dr. Esther Sternberg: I don't mean bringing prayer or religion into the workplace. Absolutely not. But what I dissect the elements of spiritual experience and, you know, we talked about meditation moments. There's community. There's a sense of purpose and a greater good that what you're doing is for the greater good. There's a sense of respect.
That's really important for everything around and for everyone around. And I described the Japanese tea ceremony in that regard. And my significant other who was with Suzuki Roshi, who, who brought Zen meditation really to the United States back in the seventies, sixties and And he described to me how Suzuki Roshi [00:39:00] would very intentionally, very slowly, in almost a single fluid movement, take the cup of tea and gently place it in front of him.
In, with such respect, he was respecting not only the tea and the tea cup, but everyone around. And if you are intentional in that, and intentional In your relationships with people in the workplace, that's what I mean by spirituality in the workplace. And then, you know, in that chapter, I talk about flow and that sense of effortless enjoyment and how you can get into that sense of, uh, that state of flow.
So that's all part of spirituality.
Gayathri: I definitely recommend those who are reading, listening in to read the book. It's just such a lovely book and Dr. Sternberg, your voice is so engaging. It's like having a conversation almost. So I [00:40:00] highly recommend, I will link it down, but I wanted to talk about you for a second and you are, like you mentioned earlier, an arthritis doc, you're an MD and you're talking about spaces and you have.
almost redefined, I would say, through your work, how people perceive spaces and how they impact their well being. So how did you get
Dr. Esther Sternberg: here? Well, I alluded to that a little bit earlier. So as I said, I was working at the National Institutes of Health. I was studying the brain immune connection at a time when Physicians and scientists didn't believe that the brain and the immune system could talk to each other.
They didn't believe that stress could make you sick, that believing could make you well. There were no ways that this immune system could signal the brain and the brain signal the immune system. Well, we know that's very. wrong now. We know that there's no question that there are many, many ways that the brain and the immune system talk to each other, and that's basically the science of the mind [00:41:00] body connection.
And so I was studying that at NIH, and particularly I had discovered that the brain's stress response was important in susceptibility to inflammatory arthritis in Rats, but I was studying stress and it was the year 2000 and the then Director of Research for the U. S. General Services Administration asked me at, we, we met at a conference and we were sitting and having lunch with the group, um, who were on this panel and Kevin Kampscher, uh, asked me if there was a way that we could study the impact of the office environments that he was overseeing at the GSA on people's stress response and to help him to create office spaces and office environments that were not stressful and where people were happy, healthy, and productive.
And so that's when I started working with Kevin Kampscher and the GSA using [00:42:00] wearable devices to measure the impact of built office spaces in the federal government on physi physiological stress responses on health and well being. And we just continued working together for the last 23 years. It's been a very, very productive, very informative line of research.
Which has, really, which is now informing post COVID reentry for the entire federal government. Really, when, when you want to design an office to minimize stress, to maximize health and well being, you need a prescription for that office. You need a granular prescription. What is the decibel level? That's good.
What is the humidity level? That's good. What is the layout that helps you move more? What is the layout that helps you sleep better? And so basically what we did is using these wearable devices, we came up with a very granular prescription for a healthy [00:43:00] wellbeing office space. We didn't even talk about lighting.
In parallel to the work that I was doing with Kevin Kampscher and the GSA, Mariana Figuero, who is a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic, now she's at Mount Sinai in New York, was doing studies with Judy Heerwagen and Kevin Kampscher and Brian Steverson and a whole team at the GSA. measuring the impact of lighting on sleep and health.
And, you know, she found that being exposed to full spectrum sunlight from 8am to 12 noon is important for healthy sleep. It's a little counterintuitive that what you do during the day and in the morning helps you sleep at night, but it does. And, you know, people who were exposed to the circadian light in from 8am to 12 noon had, fell asleep faster, had better sleep quality and had better moods the next morning when they woke up.
And so again, exposure to [00:44:00] circadian light is really important for health and well being.
Gayathri: The work that Dr. Figueroa did has been instrumental alongside the work that has been done in Harvard and I think in Manchester in really redefining how we're looking at light. And that I come from the lighting industry.
So that's really changed, you know, in the past, like 10 years, how we look at light has impacted how the lighting industry has looked at light and how we have looked at what light can do. So yeah, absolutely essential. I think research and something that we can do just by going out and getting that full spectrum daylight.
We don't need those fancy fixtures. That has been my rant for a while, but
Dr. Esther Sternberg: the fancy fixtures can help if you don't have access. I. I'm fortunate because I live in Arizona where there's a lot of sun all year round. Every morning, even if it's chilly or even if it's really hot, I sit outside and have breakfast outside.
That is one of [00:45:00] my rituals. I think I did it, I started doing it because my father used to do that in Montreal when, well, not in the winter, but We would sit out on the terrace and have breakfast together and, uh, it sort of brings me back to that, that time. But if you don't have that luxury and you're in a darker climate, then certainly LED lights and bluer light in the morning, redder light in the evening.
Uh, or Marianna has done studies on submariners who are stuck in submarines for months at a time and set up this LED lighting. With, you know, redder in the redder in the evening and bluer in the morning. So, yeah,
Gayathri: yes, absolutely agree with you that when windows are not available and when we don't have access to the outside, even in offices, et cetera, when there aren't windows and folks can't like go out easily, absolutely, we should be using the right.
Electrical lighting. Right. Just, yeah, I want to clarify that for all my lighting friends listening in. [00:46:00]
Dr. Esther Sternberg: Well, another, another point that Mariana makes is that, uh, 40 minutes of exposure to the blue light in the evening. is as, as alerting as a cup of coffee. So I now have a, a pair of blue light absorbing glasses that I wear in the evening.
Yeah. Absorbing. Yeah. So that you, I don't get the blue light in the evening. And in order to remember which pair of glasses is which I have red frames on the morning glasses and blue frames on the night glasses.
Gayathri: That is genius. Um, such a simple way. And I mean, I know that the science says over and over again that light is almost equivalent to caffeine.
Unfortunately, I feel like my body doesn't believe that. I'm hoping I'm still in the process of phasing out my caffeine addiction. I'll keep you posted. But Dr. Sternberg. As you look into the future [00:47:00] and into the post COVID world, I don't even think it's a future. It's the now. It's the now. What do you see as offices?
What is the role that offices can play? What is a healthy well being office of now?
Dr. Esther Sternberg: Well, so I want to say one thing. There's no question we're building the airplane as we fly it. We don't have the magic answer yet. I mean, we're all in the same space. What is the office of the future. But my whole thesis of the book is that the office of the future has to be an attractive space, a well being space where people want to go, where they are able to engage in these healthy activities in these integrative health activities.
Again, you know, I live Five, 10, 20 minutes from five world class spas. Nobody is forcing people to go to these spas. People want to go there and it's the, we can, we have a lot in the workspace design [00:48:00] business, a lot to learn from the hospitality industry, from the spa industry, from the entertainment industry of how to create spaces to Attract people to them.
And it's not only the space it's programming, the spaces, what do you do in the space? So you have to be intentional also about programming so that people will want to come to the office. And I think that's going to be the office of the future. It's certainly going to be hybrid work. You know, there are studies that show that for heads down work.
You are better off alone at home. Now, that is if you are alone at home, if you have multigenerational families, lots of children, even one child crying in the background, you know, we've seen this on zoom pets running around, you are not going to be as productive at home. And this speaks also to equity because You know, higher socio socioeconomic [00:49:00] level people higher up in the organization who have the wealth and the wherewithal to have a private office at home.
Yes, you'll be more productive at home, but people lower in the hierarchy are not going to be more productive at home. So there has to be attention. Paid to that equity piece. And there's also equity in terms of access to the broadband and internet. That's another issue. So we have a lot to solve in terms of hybrid work, but I think hybrid work is here to stay and.
You know, what are the, what is then the reason for the office? If you can be just as productive, if you're working from home, the reason for the offices gathering is social interactions is community is that sense of bonding that really, it does not work only on these zoom interactions. It's much better.
Then if we didn't have zoom, if we didn't have video conferencing, I can't even imagine [00:50:00] if COVID would have happened 10 years ago, it would have been impossible, but there is an advantage to being physically together, all in the office to support each other, to create that sense of community. And so offices have to be designed in that case.
to support social interactions, to encourage social interactions as a primary goal, rather than to have these spaces where you're sitting in quiet, in cubicles, isolated from everybody. Just filling
Gayathri: in the seats. Yeah. Dr. Sternberg, where, what advice would you give to those aspiring to kind of change up the way that they're doing things and really helping drive positive change
Dr. Esther Sternberg: in the industry?
Well, advocate, advocate for yourself, advocate for your team. You know, I, one thing I didn't mention, which I think I should mention here in terms of team building, I talk [00:51:00] about in the book, uh, a young woman, Morrell Phillips, who, after she was in the video game industry and, uh, she was in a, in an accident, she had neurotrauma, she was in and out of hospitals and she craved nature.
And when she got better, she decided to get out of the video game industry and to create immersive nature spaces in hospitals. And that was in 2019. She established a studio in New York city called studio elsewhere. And that studio created these immersive environments to feel like you're really in nature.
And then 2020 happened and COVID hit and New York city was. pretty much ground zero for burnout, suicidality amongst healthcare providers, and she quickly ramped up, first with Mount Sinai Hospital, and now she has 60 recharge rooms, they're called recharge rooms, in 60 hospitals around the country with over a million users.
[00:52:00] What Murrell Phillips found is that even five or ten minutes in this immersive nature environment, which the whole wall becomes a video of. A quiet mountain lake, for example, it's a small room darkened and you sit in there and you call out elsewhere. Take me to a quiet mountain lake. And she has the sounds of the water lapping and the birds and sometimes music with these different nature experiences.
And even five or 10 minutes significantly reduced. stress, anxiety, experiencing this daily for several weeks, helped reduce burnout, helped improve sleep, reduced depression. And we're starting to study, work with her to measure, use other kinds of measures to, to see how this is impacting well being. But the interesting thing that she found is that the access to these kinds of Rooms for everybody in the hospital.
It wasn't just for the [00:53:00] doctors and nurses. It was for the, you know, the facilities, staff, uh, cleaning staff, everybody. She found that it created a sense of community and teamwork that everybody was in it together. and they were able to support each other. That doesn't happen when you're on a video conference.
And so these kinds of experiences, amenities in the workplace to help people connect are going to be very, very important. And
Gayathri: coming back to that connection piece and how important it is to not only the productivity and all of that, but also to wellbeing. I need to look up her work because all the work that I have read this far about biophilia specifically is when people know it's fake, it doesn't have as much of an impact, but this is something that I, it's fascinating and it's, yeah,
Dr. Esther Sternberg: it sounds really cool.
Well, again, again, I'm, you know, It comes from the entertainment industry. If you go to Disneyland, you know, you really feel you're in those [00:54:00] places. And this is what she's done. She's basically created those immersive experiences.
Gayathri: Wow. Okay. Where can folks find you? and reach you if they would like to, Dr.
Sternberg.
Dr. Esther Sternberg: Well, they can go to my website, www, um, sorry, what is it? I'm going to link it, yeah. www. estersternberg. com, and it's with an H E S T H E R, sternberg. com. And, you know, there's a contact form and you can connect with me there. And certainly you can. Buy the book on anywhere books are sold, on the internet, in your local bookstore, and so
Gayathri: on.
And Dr. Sternberg, my final question to you today is, what is giving you hope right now?
Dr. Esther Sternberg: Ah, what is giving me hope? Well, it is a really terrifying, scary time. And the only way I can have hope [00:55:00] is to try to Use my skills to make the world around me a tiny bit better. If each of us who is. Committed to building up, to creating, to helping others.
If each of us who is doing something positive, who is creating, who is building up, who is helping others in our own tiny little sphere can keep on doing that. I'm hoping that Each of these positive actions can add up to maybe outweigh all the terrible stuff that's going on around. And that's all we can do.
You can't fix the rest of the world, but you can do what you can do to try to help in your own sphere. And that's what gives me hope. Certainly... Changing [00:56:00] your own immediate environment is something you can do. It gives you control. You may not be able to fix the entire office building, but you can fix your own local environment so that you yourself and your family and your loved ones will be better.
Gayathri: Thank you, Dr. Sternberg. Let's keep on doing what we're doing, and try and build up. Uh, folks, this is Dr. Sternberg, the amazing person, uh, behind the body and mind connection related books. I'm going to link all of them if you haven't read Healing Spaces. Highly, highly recommend. And thank you so much for coming on,
Dr. Esther Sternberg: Thank you. It's been a real, a real pleasure. Thank you.
Gayathri: Honor to have you. If you're still here, cheers to you. If you want to know more about what we discussed today, check out the blog post and the resources in the show notes, as well as our website, which is www. makeitliveable. [00:57:00] co. I am also very excited to announce that we will be releasing a newsletter, which is really going to capture the trends that you're seeing when we are talking about creating purpose driven organizations and purpose driven spaces.
So I highly encourage you to check that out and would love it if you subscribe. All of it can be found on the website, www. makeitlivable. co. Hope you have a lovely day and see you in two weeks.