Why Working In A Windowless Office Under Circadian Lighting

Why Working In A Windowless Office Under Circadian Lighting Could Be Destroying Your Sleep & Productivity

Artificial Skylights, Fake Windows, Office lighting

April 15, 2022

The Ultimate Guide To Windowless Office

Research in workplace ceiling panels design shows that having a windowed office does more than signal status. It also means you’re getting a better night’s rest — and with rest comes productivity. Mounds of research show that getting enough sleep speeds your decision-making and learning ability, while sleep deprivation does the opposite. Did you know the human body’s highest alertness is at 10:00 A.M. And it’s fastest reaction time is at 3:30 P.M. However, most people are still refilling their coffee mug, fighting to stay awake in the boardroom or napping. In their secret hiding spot due to irregularities in their circadian lighting rhythm. According to Northwestern researcher Ivy Cheung, working next to a window by day could have a profound effect. But, most people work in an office that closed off and windowless.

Benifits To Make Windowless Office More Valuable?

In a pilot study presented last June at the annual SLEEP meeting. Cheung and her colleagues tracked the behavior and light exposure. The 49 day-shift office workers — 27 worked in windowless workplaces and 22 worked in workspaces with windows. The results: “Compared to the group with no windows,” Cheung and her colleagues write, “workers with windows in the workplace had 173% more white light exposure during the workday and slept an average of 47 minutes more per night.”

Windowless Office Secrets

While the study is preliminary and only found a correlation between sleep and natural light exposure during the day, the findings seem to make sense. Bright white light ceiling panels from the sun provides a signal to our bodies, cuing our cycles of sleep and wakefulness. If you don’t get enough sunlight, studies suggest, your body won’t have the same cues that it needs to get ready for bed.

Something Good Environment of Your Windowless Office

This is also why using your smartphone before bed is a bad idea: The bright, blue-colored light sparks your brain’s wake-up cycle, right when it should be shutting down. While being starved of natural light is more a problem for workers crammed into the windowless open office than managers lounging in the well-lit corner suite, the insight has impacts on management. Research shows that sleep-deprived people aren’t just irritable; they have a tougher time remembering things and take stupider risks. Circadian lighting rhythms can influence sleep-wake cycles, hormone release, body temperature and other important bodily functions. They have been linked to various sleep disorders, such as insomnia. Abnormal circadian rhythms have also been associated with obesity, diabetes, depression, bipolar disorder and seasonal affective disorder. The diagram below shows body functions of a well calibrated circadian lighting system.

The Hidden Mystery Behind Windowless Office

Cheung and her colleagues outline a few options to getting around the problem. For one, they say that office lighting ceiling panels should be designed to provide more windows to workers. But, if you can’t knock down any walls, a much cheaper option could be investing in LED Skylights which mimic outdoor daylight conditions and create an illusion of nature on your ceiling as seen below. A small start-up from Detroit, MI, aptly named Artificial Sky, is leading the fight against dimly lit, unproductive offices with an army of more than 200 distributors globally and over 5,000 installations to date! Artificial Sky uses high-intensity, full spectrum lighting which helps set normal sleep-and-wake rhythms. So, if you’re sleepless in Seattle or windowless in Warsaw, look into an LED Skylight or Artificial Sky’s latest LED lighting system, the Virtual Sky, to help launch your company into the next level.

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