Why Your Building Is Making You Tired

There is a kind of tiredness we all experience at some point during a lifetime, it’s one that sleep does not, and will not fix. You do all the right things; you wake up adequately rested, arrive at work or a waiting room or maybe it’s a shopping centre, and within an hour something has you drained. Focus now feels laborious. The smaller decisions feel unexplainably heavy, and there maybe this overwhelming urge to want, more than anything, to be somewhere else- anywhere else, and if asked you couldn’t say exactly where.

We turn within and blame ourselves for this. We may reach for another cup of coffee, maybe check our sleep data, maybe we’re coming down with something, but we rarely look around? Why do I say do that we rarely look around? Because more often than not, it’s the space within that’s causing this.

The brain has a hidden fuel tank, and your building is burning it; Let’s go back for a bit. In the late 1980s, environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan identified something they called Directed Attention Fatigue. Directed attention is the effortful, voluntary focus we use to concentrate; this helps us do things like filter noise, sustain a line of thought, or make a decision. It’s the cognitive resource most in demand in modern life.

It is also finite. It has limits. It depletes with use. And here is the part that most people will miss: it is not only depleted by demanding tasks. It is depleted by demanding environments.

A space that is visually chaotic, spatially ambiguous, or difficult to navigate forces your brain to spend directed attention just orienting itself. Figuring out where exactly you are, what you’re supposed to do, which direction leads where. You haven’t done a single unit of actual work, and your cognitive fuel tank is already lower than when you walked in.

The Kaplans called this effect measurable and real. It produces symptoms that can include things like; difficulty concentrating, irritability, a sense of mental dullness, all things that we have collectively decided to attribute to ourselves rather than to our surroundings.

We have a word for this now, it is Spatial Friction; Think of it like this. Friction in a mechanical system is the energy lost to resistance, energy that was supposed to go somewhere useful, consumed instead by the environment itself. Spatial Friction is the same thing, applied to your nervous system.

It is the low-level, persistent cost of inhabiting a space that keeps your brain in a state of mild, unresolved alertness. Your amygdala, the brain's ancient threat-detection system, doesn’t clearly distinguish between a predator and a poorly legible corridor. What it responds to is unresolved uncertainty. An environment that cannot be quickly read, cannot be easily navigated, cannot be understood at a glance, keeps that system quietly running in the background. Never alarmed. And never calm.

You don’t necessarily feel this as stress. You feel it as tiredness. As friction.

We’ve had the science to fix this since 1987; And this is the part that gets me. In 1987, a medical sociologist named Aaron Antonovsky published a framework he called salutogenesis. Instead of asking why people get sick, he asked why people stay well, even under significant stress. His answer was the Sense of Coherence (SOC): the degree to which a person experiences the world as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful.

Antonovsky was a sociologist. But his framework maps onto the built environment with precision. A space that cannot be read is not comprehensible. A space that offers no affordance, no orientation, no sense of support is not manageable. A space that is generic, impersonal, and interchangeable is not meaningful. Strip away all three, and you have produced, quite reliably, quite measurably, an environment that depletes the people within it.

A salutogenic environment does the opposite. It is legible enough to be comprehensible. Supportive enough to be manageable. And specific and resonant enough to be meaningful. It doesn’t just avoid making people worse. It actively helps them recover.

So why aren't we building this way? The knowledge exists. It has existed for nearly four decades. Kaplan and Kaplan gave us the framework for restorative environments. Antonovsky gave us the language of health generation. Subsequent research has deepened, replicated, and extended both.

And yet the default output of the construction industry -the open-plan office, the clinical waiting room, the retail environment- optimised for footfall rather than experience, continues to be designed as though none of this research exists.

This is not a knowledge problem. It is a priority problem. Human neurological wellbeing is not yet a primary brief. It is a nice-to-have, a wellness add-on, a feature rather than a foundation.

That needs to change. Not because it is a pleasant idea, but because the cost of not changing it is being paid, quietly and continuously, by every person who spends time in the environments we keep building.

The science is there. The framework is there. The question is simply whether we are paying attention.

This article draws on the theoretical work of Rachel and Stephen Kaplan (The Experience of Nature, 1989) and Aaron Antonovsky (Unraveling the Mystery of Health, 1987), explored as part of a self-directed study in environmental psychology and salutogenic design following completion of the Brain, Body and Building programme at Stanford School of Medicine Continuing Studies.