Cold plunging, the practice of immersing yourself in cold water between 38-60°F, is more than just a modern wellness trend – it's an ancient therapeutic practice with scientifically-backed benefits. From boosting cognitive performance and strengthening cardiovascular health to enhancing emotional wellbeing and supporting faster muscle recovery, cold plunging offers a comprehensive approach to improving overall health. Though challenging at first, this intentional form of stress can train your body's resilience and adaptability, similar to the benefits gained from strength training.

Discover the hidden power of connecting with nature through touch, smell, and taste in your home. Beyond visual aesthetics, learn how incorporating natural textures, scents, and flavors can boost your well-being and create a calming environment. From wooden furniture to aromatic herbs, explore practical ways to bring the outdoors inside. Uncover the science behind nature's non-visual benefits and transform your living space into a sensory haven that promotes growth and relaxation. Embrace a fuller, multi-sensory connection with nature—no backyard required.

In many of our blogs so far, we have highlighted the benefits of nature in design, focusing specifically on the visual aspects of nature. However, non-visual aspects of nature can also benefit your wellbeing. In this blog, we want to showcase how nature, even when experienced non-visually, can have a positive, healing, and de-stressing impact. This blog will highlight the effects of sounds of nature, how they have been shown to alleviate stress, and how you can incorporate sounds of nature into your living spaces.

When digging into the validity and effectiveness of a given topic, some of the topics we have researched are already vetted by high quality, peer-reviewed supporting evidence, which sets a solid precedent for our research process. But at the end of the day, there are bound to be some products and techniques that aren’t super well-researched or historically grounded, yet there are passionate people convinced they’re the next big thing.

Sometimes, there are promising hypotheses based on well-understood mechanisms within the body and mind, but the hypotheses remain unproven. In this case, solutions may be caught in the middle: there’s a lot of reason to believe in a solution’s efficacy, but the cause-and-effect relationship simply has not been proven. In cases like these, a layered approach to research is key.

This is a continuation in our series on Research in an Age of Distrust. See our last blog for an introduction to this series which outlines our mission for transparency and trust-based research.

Unsurprisingly, the cornerstone of our research process is academic and scientific research. We first look to high-quality, peer-reviewed research papers from reliable sources when inspecting a product, method, or modality. For topics like air quality, water quality, and sauna, there is significant literature published and reviewed by world-class institutions that make questions of efficacy an open-and-shut case. Overwhelming evidence in the form of high-quality research sets a terrific precedent, meaning that the following steps merely add greater context and understanding.

Have you felt a decline in your senses of community, openness, and trust over the past decade or two? If so, you are not alone.

As a part of being a trustworthy source of information on innovations, technologies, and methods for making spaces that feel good, we at Frequency felt it necessary to do some digging on the challenges people face when doing this research on their own.

As mentioned in our previous blog on bio-inspired patterns, there are a few key principles of nature-inspired design beyond the patterns of nature covered previously. We refer to these principles as organized complexity, modes of mystery, and prospect and refuge. Here, you’ll find a combination of theoretical and practical insights leading to the creation of spaces that feel good.

When assessing the agreement between the philosophy of nature-inspired design and biological responses to certain aesthetic themes, some principles of person-focused design emerged. These principles include nature-inspired patterns, organized complexity, modes of mystery, and prospect and refuge. By incorporating these principles into design, we can create spaces and aesthetic experiences that are attuned to people, helping them feel comfortable and safe.

Recently, our research team attended the ScienceinDesign symposium, an event focused on uniting the art of interior design and the science of evolutionary biology and neuro-aesthetics, the study of the brain and body’s response to viewing different environments. 

In our continuous efforts to learn about new, innovative ways of making people feel good, we found this group bridging the divide between academic experts and real world practitioners of design and architecture. It’s no surprise that neuroscientists and interior designers don’t seamlessly communicate with one another, so ScienceinDesign’s mission of uniting the two sides is imperative to the broad creation of spaces that feel good.