Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a biweekly podcast from the American Psychological Association.

I'm your host, Caitlin Luna.

Before we dive into our conversation, I want to remind you that we love to hear from you.

If you have any comments, questions, or ideas for us,

please email me at K-Luna at APA.org. That's K-L-U-N-A-A-A-D-org. Now onto the conversation.

The spaces we are in every day influence our mood and well-being, whether we're aware of it or not.

Creating spaces to make us feel our best is a hot topic in community planning in the office and on HGTV. Here to talk about designing spaces to optimize

well-being is APA fellow Dr. Sally Augustine, an environmental psychologist who is a principal

at Design with Science, a design consultation firm. Welcome, Dr. Augustine.

Nice to be here. So the start of 2019 brought us the Marie Condo effect, is what I'll be calling it.

She's the famous Japanese professional organizer whose show on Netflix called Tidying Up has been wildly popular.

So Americans seem hungry for this type of program to show us how to

declutter our lives and our homes. And as a design psychologist, what are your thoughts on the

response to the show? I think the response to the show indicates how burdened so many of us are

by all the things in our physical environment. We have books, we have chachis, we have all

sorts of stuff that surround us, and all those materials create an environment that's really

very complex visually. And when we're in a complicated visual environment, we feel stress. So I think the success of the Marie Kondo show indicates that people really, really need

to tone back all the visual activity in the spaces that are around them.

And they need to create a space that has about the same number of

colors, shapes, patterns, et cetera, as they're likely to find in an interior designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Can you explain more why clutter makes us stressed? I mean, it seems like Americans tend to have too much stuff and it makes us stressed. But giving it away and getting it, getting rid of it is difficult. So can you talk about why clutter, though, is still stressful for us?

Clutter is stressful for us because whether you realize it or not, you're always surveying the

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