Shades of well-being
By Nina C Zimmermann (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-24 09:32
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Experts say the colors that surround you have a powerful effect on your state of mind. Nina C Zimmermann reports
Is there anyone who has never felt blue? Or been so in love they see the world through rose-colored glasses? Colors take on broad meanings when used linguistically. They describe moods and they often reflect the soul.
Almost everyone can name color tones or shades that more or less agree with their state of mind at a given time. Psychologists call this visualized feelings.
"Colors are neurological stimulants of the nervous system," says professor Harald Braem of Germany's professional association for psychologists in Berlin. He compares the effect with wave frequencies, such as those used by radio stations, which reach different areas of the brain and from there exert an influence on the nervous system.
The traffic signal color, red, immediately comes to mind. It evokes blood or fire and is therefore popular for warning lights.
"Red triggers feelings similar to stress," says Braem, who heads an institute for color psychology. "It is universal."
The German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe assigned certain characteristics to individual colors. The bright, warm and active colors yellow and orange are designated as stimulating, extensive and expansive, according to current terminology, says Ingrid Kraaz von Rohr, an alternative practitioner in Munich.
Violet and blue by contrast release a calm, soft, more introverted feeling. Red is between both and could belong to either depending on its intensity and coloration. Green is the balancing, steady middle of all colors.
"Colors belong to life," says the author Wulfing von Rohr. "A person who feels he must go around only in black wants to protect himself and show nothing of himself."
Colors are just as important as light for physical and psychological well being. The lighter a color is, the happier and more positive moods become. That also explains why many people feel downcast and listless during the darker months when there is less sun.
Traveling to a sunny location or going to a tanning salon are two remedies against the winter blues. Braem also has a less costly suggestion: "Put on a pair of glasses with orange-yellow lenses. They amplify the residual light and lighten up the surroundings."
People who want to do intellectual work should paint an entire wall orange, a color tone that exhilarates. In a blue room, conversely, the body can easily start to shiver and humans then also begin to freeze emotionally.
Basically, however, colors have a calming effect, Braem says. This effect is used by anthroposophic-orientated therapists, those who take a holistic view of humans, to soothe people with nervous disorders. Some alternative practitioners use blue light beams as a supplemental application in treating people with neurodermatitis. The cooling property of blue is supposed to relieve the itchiness of the skin condition.
Red by contrast mostly animates: A room furnished completely in red in some psychiatric clinics helps depressed melancholics seriously in danger of committing suicide "re-tune", Braem says.
In a home, red generally should be carefully allotted, Kraaz von Rohr says. It goes well when a dab of it is used in the bedroom where it can have a sexually stimulating effect.
It's not advisable, however, for people with sleep disorders, who become easily irritable or who have a tendency toward hyperactivity. In an office, a touch of red can have a performance-enhancing effect.
While alternative practitioners and color psychologists accept that a particular effect can be ascribed to every color, medical doctors view the notions more critically.
"Color therapies certainly are not a method that is useful scientifically or as evidence-based," says Frank Schneider, of the German society of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Nervous System Medical Science in Berlin.
"However, we know that individual people are very prone to the designs of their own surroundings and thus feel better in rooms of certain colors at certain times."