How Your Spaces Shape Your Happiness With Leidy Klotz

Live Happy Now

Live Happy LLC

Mental Health, Health & Fitness, Health & Fitness:mental Health

4.7 • 522 Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2026

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on Live Happy Now, Paula Felps sits down with University of Virginia professor and author Leidy Klotz to explore a topic we rarely think about: how the spaces around us are quietly shaping our well-being. He explains why our homes, workplaces, and everyday environments can either nourish or drain our basic psychological needs for agency, competence, and connection. From choosing where you sit to spark creativity to reclaiming small freedoms in spaces you can’t control, Leidy shows how simple shifts in how we interact with our environments can profoundly change how we feel. In this episode, you’ll learn: Why your physical spaces influence your happiness more than you realize — and how they feed (or starve) your core psychological needs. How to use your surroundings intentionally to boost creativity, strengthen family connection, and reclaim a sense of control — even in places you can’t redesign. A simple practice for experiencing more awe in your daily life by noticing and revisiting the spaces that shift your perspective.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for joining us for episode 568 of Live Happy Now.
0:08.2	What if changing the space we're in could also change how we feel about what we're
0:12.7	trying to accomplish?
0:14.1	Today's guest tells us how it can.
0:17.0	I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm talking with University of Virginia
0:20.6	Professor Lighty Klaughts about his latest book, In a Good Place, which connects the dots on
0:26.0	how spaces can support or undermine our basic psychological needs.
0:31.1	Lydie is here to offer practical strategies for applying these observations at home and work,
0:36.3	and involving family members, especially children,
0:39.4	in shaping shared spaces to build ownership, growth, and a sense of fun.
0:43.6	Let's have a listen.
0:45.9	Lydie, thank you for coming on Live Happy Now.
0:48.5	Thanks for having me, Paula. I'm thrilled to be here.
0:50.8	You have a new book out, and this is something that we have never talked about on the
0:54.8	show before, which is something I don't very often get to say. We typically don't give much thought
1:01.1	to how our physical spaces are affecting our well-being. And that is what you are talking to us about
1:06.8	today. But I'd love to start by finding out how you became so interested in this concept.
1:12.9	Yeah, that's a great question.
1:14.9	My academic background is engineer, and I teach engineering and architecture students.
1:19.9	I'm a professor at the University of Virginia.
1:21.9	And then my research over the last 10 years or maybe 15 years has really gone more into
1:27.3	the psychology of how people are experiencing space has really gone more into the psychology of how people
	...

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