How about integrating the latest immunity-boosting, post-pandemic practices in your office and residential spaces? Have you considered having an environment within your home, office, and leisure facilities that protects and strengthens your health, employees, and customers?
Below are a few easy-to-implement post-pandemic practices in your office and leisure spaces. If you are working in a hotel or a residential building, typically, your fitness, spa, and wellness centres would be essential to implementing them without breaking the bank for them and creating so much added value for your and your guest’s wellbeing.
1. Aromatherapy
Essential oils can fortify the immune system or eliminate harmful bacteria and viruses at work or in office spaces. Depending on their characteristics, essential oils can fight viruses, purify the air, alleviate flu-like symptoms, and bring comfort during illness. While all essential oils contain antibacterial, antiviral, and antiseptic properties, some have more than one.
Besides the biological factors, essential oils also provide psychological benefits. Essential oils from herbs such as lavender and rosemary promote relaxation by reducing stress levels (cortisol).
You could easily prepare your signature blend by mixing the ingredients below and improvising with your preferences, adding more or less of the oils in the mixture. The citrusy, punchy aromas are typically suitable for the morning when the body wakes up. However, for the evening, choose scents such as lavender, rosemary, patchouli, ylang-ylang, etc.. Keep your combination a secret once you find the best fusion for each season and time of the day.
How to create your SPA immune boost blend:
Recipe for 10ml = 200 drops
• Lemon 100 drops
• Eucalyptus globulus 60 drops
• Tea tree 25 drops
• Rosemary 10 drops
• Clove 5 drops
What are the benefits of each oil, and why choose them?
Eucalyptus Globulus has a refreshing fragrance and cleansing properties and supports respiratory illness relief by opening the respiratory tract and soothing painful coughs.
Lemon essential oil uplifts the mood, alleviates symptoms of anxiety and depression, and enhances the production of lymphocytes, the body’s primary type of immune cells.
Rosemary protects you from airway illnesses, reduces cortisol levels, and increases the strength of your immune system.
Tea tree essential oil fights infections and inhibits harmful bacteria due to its high alpha-sabine and antiseptic qualities.
Clove supports strong antimicrobial and antifungal properties that cleanse harmful molecules from the air.
2. Lighting
Our circadian clock controls the timing of hundreds of biological processes in our bodies. When your circadian rhythm is firm and tightly synchronized, you sleep better at night, feel more alert during the day, and your immune system can fight all the viruses and bacteria. A 2016 study from the University of Cambridge, England, reported that knocking out BMal1, the critical circadian clock gene, triples virus replication rate in animal studies.
How to strengthen the circadian clock in your leisure and office spaces:
The LIGHT is the GUIDE of your center. In other words, it’s the LIGHT that directs the energy of the areas, and it’s the LIGHT that has the most decisive influence on your and your guest’s sensation and comfort.
The lighting design needs to fit perfectly into your entire facility. Always consult a professional in this process rather than relying only on your classic, trusted electrician.
To promote molecular wellness and level up the health of our cells, you need to fine-tune your circadian rhythms by managing your light exposure. Humans need blue-rich light during the day, but the average person spends 93% of their daytime indoors away from natural light while getting too much blue-rich electric light after the sunsets. This unbalanced exposure to blue light, such as LEDs, fluorescent bulbs, and incandescent bulbs, can interrupt standard sleep patterns and lower immunity.
Relaxation
In the lighting design of your relaxation spaces, the most common mistake is to add too many lighting fixtures, which spread an excessive amount of light and spoil the direct result – the customer’s relaxation. The sunlight needs to be primarily soft and indirect inside the relaxation areas. The temperature must be a warm colour, between a minimum of 2200 K and a maximum of 3000 K (the spectrum of orange and yellow colours)
Shower areas
With the new LED technologies, you can reduce and control light quantity and colour. The lighting fixtures need a greater IP protection rate inside the shower areas to protect against dirt and water. If it’s impossible to achieve indirect light, try at least to direct the light sources towards the walls. That creates a magical, cosy ambience without undermining visual comfort.
You can use RGB LED lights with three red, green, and blue diodes. For chromotherapy, these are mixed in different intensities to produce various colours, such as red, green, and blue.
For Hotel Massage/Therapy Rooms
The treatment rooms are often designed with a modern lighting system to dim and brighten the lights. However, many therapists not used to that simply switch it off before every treatment.
The massage room spaces need to have indirect or filtered LED lighting, soft, low-intensity, warm light to transport the customer into a feeling of relaxation and comfortability. The switch must be customizable through a light dimmer.
For Offices/Co-working Spaces
See my article for that in this blog.
3. Sanitation and Visual Presentation
Residences, Hotels, and leisure centres can better present COVID precautions and hand sanitisers. Think about how you represent your message through visual signage and do it in an appealing and inviting way for the guest. The smell of the Sanitizer could be much more pleasant if you mix a few drops of essential oils such as lemongrass or tea tree and present it in a beautiful spray bottle at easy-to-reach guest spots.
How effective are the hand sanitisers, and are they causing more harm than good?
The FDA recently released a list of 9 hand sanitisers that contain methanol alcohol, a type of wood alcohol that can be toxic when absorbed by the skin. It is always advisable to read the labels before buying these, or what is even safer, do it yourself.
How can you make your Sanitizer?
Try out a simple recipe with only three ingredients:
- cup of isopropyl or rubbing alcohol (91% alcohol)
- ½ cup Aloe Vera gel
- 15 drops of antibacterial essential oil of your choice, such as Tea Tree Oil
To produce a batch of germ-fighting natural hand sanitiser, you must use a 2:1 ratio of alcohol to Aloe Vera and mix all three ingredients. This mixture ensures that the alcohol content stays at around 60%, as the World Health Organization recommended.
You could install an automated hand sanitiser dispenser for a visually appealing display at the entrance of working and guest spaces. Ultimately, you aim to send an important message to them the moment they step into your area: your business seriously protects health and wellbeing.
4. Cleaning & Disinfecting Mini-Checklist:
If you work with an outsourced housekeeping or cleaning company, ensure they do not miss the following areas, as they are the ones to get most of the fingers throughout the day. It is equally essential to disinfect them as frequently as after every touch.
ü Remote controls
ü Alarm clocks and timers
ü Landline phones
ü Cabinet and drawers
ü Drawer handles
ü Doorknobs and door locks
ü Light switches
ü Desk surfaces
ü Information booklets and brochures
ü Minibar drinks and coffee bars
ü Faucets and handles
ü Massages tables and chairs
ü Changing cabinets
5. Color therapy
Did you know that a daily dose of colour may boost immunity?
If you still could transform the interior design and bring in some colours, perhaps as paintings or art décor, take advantage of the immunity-boosting properties of the colours below.
ü ORANGE
Orange colour increases immunity and sexual potency and helps with digestive ailments and chest and kidney diseases. Orange will have a gentle warming effect if used lightly. Orange, like red, should be used for a short time. It is not a good colour for nervous people or people who are easily agitated.
ü WHITE
White includes all of the colour spectra. It represents the source of conscious creation and purifies the body on the highest levels. It is the highest charging field to bring peace and comfort. In Hinduism, white symbolizes Pure Consciousness—sattva– upward movement, the light, and manifestation.
ü SILVER
Silver is the colour of peace and persistence and the best for healing cancer, tissue inflammation, and blood purification.
Gold is the most robust colour to help cure all illnesses and strengthen all body and spirit fields. It is so strong that many people cannot tolerate it and must get used to it over time.
Our immune systems help keep bacteria, toxins, and viruses at bay and prevent us from getting sick from the diseases they cause. Immune systems further help remove unhealthy or infectious cells from our bodies and regulate the body’s responses to otherwise harmless activity (food or our bodies).
ü GOLD
Closing notes
Boosting your immunity is enticing, but is that possible at all? There’s no magic “healthy pill” there are tried-and-true ways to take your immunity superpowers up a notch. To prevent or fight disease, it’s always good to use as many natural ways as possible to keep the immune system high-functioning. The immune system functions as a system and not as a single entity. Therefore, it requires balance and harmony within all related systems inside out. Similarly to your body, your natural environment needs to project and portray a safe and healthy way of living. Follow the alternative ways above to enhance your body’s natural defence mechanism and leverage the immunity of your home, work, and leisure spaces.