Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546135
and vitamin D, both of which are necessary for our health. There's a joke about mixers and editors being like mushrooms: We sit in a dark room all day, and get fed bulls#$t. Our OT, Colleen Carroll, says, "Access to daylight is going to drastically improve your mental health. If you can see sunlight, maybe some trees, that can also help with your biorhythms, your circadian rhythm, and with your energy levels." Needless to say, not every studio can add windows or a skylight. "Another thing you can do is add what we call 'glimmers.' It's something we use in mental health counseling. It's basically adding things into your environment that help create these micro moments of joy, peace, or just happiness that cue your nervous system to feel calmer. Maybe it's a bouquet of flowers or maybe a nice plant. Maybe it's a picture of your favorite landscape that's in your line of sight. When you look at it, it helps you to regulate in that moment. Maybe you can't add a skylight, but you can put up a picture of a nice landscape or the ocean or hang some plants. "I work in a basement with no windows, and I have house plants. You can get those little grow lights that plug into USB and they grow just fine. And because I work in a basement and don't have a window, I filled my office with pretty fairy lights, as well as the plants. These are things that bring me joy and help me feel more comfortable in the space that I'm in for hours and hours every day. There are LED bulbs where you can change the colors, and dimmers to adjust the brightness. You can use bright colors like yellows to help increase your energy levels. There are different sensory cues you can tap into to help you be more productive." There's a mistaken notion that you can't have windows in a sound studio. Russ Berger likes to put windows in all his studios. "If you don't have something to look at, if you can't orient the building and everything so you've got a view, then we cut clear story windows in up above. A clear story window starts at about seven or eight feet and is maybe a couple of feet high or more, depending on your ceiling. You can have runs two, three, four feet wide, and you have pushed openings like that to the outside. So now, when you look up, you're looking at sky. It's very calming and pleasant." If you can't have a window to the outside, there are lights that are full spectrum for people with seasonal affective disorder. The type of lighting in your space can make a difference between being in a dim, uninviting cave, or a comfortable, properly lit space. Bad lighting along with bad monitor placement can lead to eye strain, fatigue, and burnout. This gets to the aesthetics of the lighting in the room. Is it inviting? Is it going to be stressful on the eyes? Are the colors going to be comfortable to work in? Peter Grueneisen agrees, "Lighting is a very good example of what we use to make a space comfortable and functional. One of the things we try to establish early on is where the client and workstation would be located, because that allows us to place lighting so you don't have any glare in your or your client's eyes, but also, where you don't have a shadow from your own head. That's something that often gets overlooked. And we do like to have things clean, so recessed lights are what we use. Spend time on finding the right spot from the beginning. A lot of lighting in studios, as you know, is pretty low and dimmed down. To have the ability to dim, without cutting off or flickering or buzzing is important. Getting the sort of lighting that won't get in the way of you being able to see the picture properly is a necessity." Peter continues, "And there are a lot of options—different beam widths and angles and all that. And then, maybe you want some ambient lighting that kind of gives you a comfortable feeling in the room that's not actually task lighting. You need to go with fixtures that are really commercial grade where you have this type of setup. If you just go and buy it at a hardware store, a lot of times you don't have any of these options and it's just a light