March 8, 2023

How Hardwood Floorings Help with Your Well-being

Young couple sharing a relaxing day lying side by side on their backs on a wooden living room floor with their bare feet up on the sofa

This 2023, interior designers are pushing to promote health, wellness, and sustainability in homes and other spaces. Now that more home and room layouts focus on these designs, hardwood floorings are becoming more popular. But there’s more to hardwood floors than their material. Owning classic hardwood flooring provides numerous benefits to homeowners, like increased ROI, low-maintenance floorings, and timeless elegance. They also do wonderful things for your well-being. Find out what these perks are and how they work.

Home As a Sanctuary and Hardwood Psychology

Your homes are places where you can enjoy the safety, comfort, and happiness you want and need for a long time. While your and your family’s energies create these forms of security within the house, the choices you make when decorating your home have a massive effect on the space’s general atmosphere. Because of that, renovations and other improvement projects require proper planning and execution.

Hardwood floors are no exception to that rule. While flooring projects are massive undertakings that often provide subtle changes, they have numerous contributions to creating your home into the sanctuary you need. Hardwoods are some of the oldest structural and aesthetic materials when constructing homes, offering several psychological benefits.

One research in the 1980s demonstrated the idea of hardwood psychology. During the study, the researchers proved that using hardwood as part of a building or residential home’s interior has positive physiological and psychological effects. Some of their influences are lower heart rates and blood pressure. In addition, people have lower anxiety and stress levels in a space with hardwood flooring as it encourages positive interactions and a calming atmosphere.

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Biophilia and The Boom of Biophilic Design

Interior designs in 2023 center on health, wellness, and sustainability, which make biophilia essential in today’s trends. Biophilia is a term derived from ancient Greek that translates to the love of living things.

While it’s a relatively new term and a growing trend within the industry, biophilia started in the 1980s after a biologist detected how urbanization could lead to a disconnection from nature. In interior design, biophilic designs use natural materials, the abundance of natural light, and the use of greenery for homes to have an increased sense of nature connection.

The design originates from the idea of incorporating nature inside residential homes. Due to that, they provide similar psychological benefits that you can get when you spend time outdoors, and one of the best materials and additions to promote them is hardwood flooring. 

The Psychological Benefits of Hardwood Flooring

Hardwood plays a significant role in creating a healthier and more appealing home. It’s also your room’s direct link to nature. Several studies worldwide identified how hardwood flooring could help with one’s mental and emotional states. Here are some of them.

  • Increased comfort
  • Lower anxiety and stress levels
  • Faster recovery

While there is more research on their benefits, these perks are the most popular and evidence-proven. 

Increased Comfort

Hardwood flooring materials are naturally hypoallergenic and promote good indoor air quality. In addition, solid hardwood floors are analogous to nature, especially with planks that have more asymmetric graining and knots. In general, hardwood texture and colors generate warmth, comfort, and relaxation in people.

Several hardwood species, like oak and cherry, provide natural warmth and comfort due to their tone and graining. Wooden floorings increase the comfort levels in your home because of the floor’s appearance. It evokes nature and our response when we make contact with it.

Lower Anxiety and Stress Levels

One of the most popular benefits of solid hardwood flooring in homes is its ability to reduce stress. At a basic level, seeing wood graining and knots remind people of nature and produces a feeling of being in a forest.

In addition, hardwood planks absorb sounds well. Due to their delightful acoustic properties, they generate a peaceful environment within your home. Spending time in a room with hardwood flooring allows your mind to relax and prevents you from triggering your stressors.

Faster Recovery

Many studies in the 1980s proved how exposure to nature could cause faster patient recovery. There’s still a difference when spending time outdoors to adding biophilic design materials like hardwood floors in healing people on the road to recovery benefits from rooms with wooden floors.

For millions of years, nature has had the unique ability to heal people in a way medications and science are unable to do. By adding hardwood floors to your home, you can experience this psychological benefit.

Enjoying the Perks of Hardwood Floors in Austin, TX

Hardwood floors provide numerous benefits to homeowners, like property value increase and trendy, classic aesthetics. But besides their financial and design perks, these wooden floorings also have health advantages. Many of them are psychological, mental, and emotionally related. By understanding these things, interested hardwood flooring buyers can decide which planks best suits their homes and needs.

Find out more about hardwood flooring in Austin with Kelly Hardwood Floors today!