When you’re decorating a living space during college, it’s worthwhile to focus on the lighting as much as any other element. Although lamps and desk lights probably aren’t your biggest decorating priority at first, the right indoor lighting not only enhances the appeal of your home. It also makes your favorite indoor activities more enjoyable. Here are tips for finding the right type of light for the activities you do in your apartment.
Natural Light For Studying
As a Penn State student, studying is obviously a priority. Some apartment complexes provide dedicated study rooms. But even so, maybe you prefer to do homework at home. Humans are instinctually accustomed to reading under a natural light source, thus opening the shades and letting in daytime sunlight can make your home better for studying. You also can hang mirrors to reflect the light throughout your living room, bedroom, or wherever else you study. Meanwhile, at night, you can use a white or bluish-white bulb to mimic the color temperature of the sun’s rays.
Overhead Lights For Cleaning Your Apartment
How clean you like your apartment depends on yours and your roommates’ standards. But even if you seldom clean, when you do bust out a vacuum or sponge, the best light source to illuminate the areas you’re cleaning is an overhead light. To clean darker areas of the apartment, such as inside the cabinets or under the washing machine, use a flashlight for improved visibility.
Backlighting For Movie Nights
A movie (or Netflix series) is something you can catch playing in practically every off campus apartments near Penn State at least once per week. Binge watching, in particular, is a popular student activity. However, when the lights are turned off in the apartment, that bright glare of the screen can irritate your eyes, causing redness that may make it difficult to concentrate in class the next day. The best solution is bias lighting, a technique that involves adding backlighting to a TV to give your eyes a natural reference point to make the LEDs on the screen seem less intense.
Low Or No Light For Sleeping
Sleep experts recommend college students get seven hours to nine hours of rest every night. For that rest to be effective, you should transition through all four stages of the sleep cycle, and hopefully reach REM (rapid eye movement) sleep for optimal relaxation. However, artificial light sources, which include LEDs on TVs and phones but also regular light bulbs too, can send wake-up signals to your brain and prevent sustained rest. The ideal lighting for sleeping is no lighting at all but rather complete darkness. You can also achieve higher degrees of darkness with curtains or eye shades.
The Station State College offers furnished and unfurnished luxury townhomes to which residents can utilize the existing lights as well as incorporate their own lamps and other lighting ideas. To tour our off campus community near Penn State, contact us today!