Color Therapy at Home – 10 Ways to Bring More Joy to Your Life

Most people have a favorite color that they gravitate to for fashion, accessories, and home decor. You may have more than one or many that you use throughout your house or apartment. These colors do more than just present an attractive style, however. Every different shade and hue effects your mood, emotions, and state of mind. Color therapy or cromotherapy has long been used to transform rooms into invigorating, sensual, or relaxing living spaces that help you feel your best every day.

Before exploring the 10 ways that choosing different colors in your home decor can bring joy and contentment to your life, it is important to understand some of the science behind why this happens.

What Is Color Therapy?

It is long been understood that different colors affect our moods and mindsets the moment we see them. While this is partially an individual thing, color therapy has transformed this understanding into an alternative field of science. Using certain colors can simply make you feel better or counteract environmental forces that leave you feeling imbalanced, stressed, or run down.

The alternative or new age concept of cromotherapy frequently aligns different shades in the visible spectrum with various aspects of your spiritual being, mood, or experience as a natural human. If this is a part of your belief system, choosing the right colors for your living space contributes to overall health and well-being in a truly unique way. Even if you subscribe to a more regimented scientific approach, you should recognize that colors have been known to influence mood, energy, and thought processes for many decades.

When you decide what color to paint your walls, which sheets to buy for your bed, or what decorative fixtures and accessories to display around your home, the most important thing to consider is how they make you feel. Individuals have a diverse range of responses to different shades. For example, just because the experts say that mint green is a relaxing color does not mean that you will automatically feel relaxed every single time you look at it.

The goal of this color therapy guide is to introduce you to the commonly accepted understanding of how different shades interact with your mind so that you can make educated choices about decorating your home for maximum joy.

Color therapy takes a holistic approach to manage how you feel just by choosing smart home decor items and infusing your living spaces with the right colors. While there are clinical applications of light and color use, this guide gives ideas about how to incorporate it into your everyday life.

Home Décor Options to Use Color for Mood

No matter what type of home decor style you love, include specific colors to influence your emotions in all the best ways. You can make your home more energetic, relaxing, serene, or joyful with a new paint color, furniture choices, window treatments, throw rugs, or the right type of accent pieces and decorations. Consider the following 10 ideas to get you started on your color therapy journey.

1 – Introduce Bedroom Serenity With Blue

Your bedroom is one place where relaxation and peace are absolutely necessary. If you want to use color therapy techniques to promote this, choose from the wide variety of blues for wall paint, soft furnishings, and decorator accents. According to the science behind this practice, it does not really matter if you prefer a dark navy blue or pale baby blue when it comes to promoting a sense of calm. It is important to choose one you enjoy looking at if you want the maximum effect.

Blue has even been shown to reduce blood pressure, so it makes sense for the rooms you want to relax in the most. To expand on this calm feeling, choose soft furnishings like rugs, curtains, throw pillows and blankets in your favorite shades. Bright blues and turquoise are great for smaller accents.

2 – Choose Soft Green to Create a Bathtime Spa Feel

There is a very good reason why many spas and salons use soft green shades like sage or mint or have potted plants around every room. Green not only promotes a more natural and organic feel to any part of your home, but it also stands for freshness, vitality, and rejuvenation. These are all important things to feel whether you are getting ready for work in the bathroom or relaxing there at the end of a stressful day of work.

All the qualities listed above also make soft greens a good choice for bedrooms. You feel relaxed but also get that important sense of rejuvenation when you wake up in the morning and look around. There is no reason to avoid painting all of your walls with a soft green color, but you may prefer to stick with smaller items or houseplants to get the same effect.

3 – Yellow's Happy Hues Uplift Your Mood

If you want maximum happiness, joy, and an upbeat feeling, choose yellow accents and home decor items. This can work well in many different rooms of your house but be careful not to overwhelm your senses with two garish of colors. Yellow is a popular shade for kitchens, powder rooms that do not do double duty as a bathtime spa for relaxation, and energetic living spaces like exercise rooms and sun porches.

Although color therapy focuses on the positive aspects of mood and mindset, sometimes too much for color fails to provide what you want. Painting a room completely yellow can feel overwhelming for many people. Instead of a calm sense of joy, you get a heightened level of motion that can even lead to frustration or stress. Pick yellows in smaller doses such as a pretty lamp, a sunflower patterned pillow, or a basket of bright lemons on your kitchen counter.

4 – Consider Warm Browns for Natural Living Rooms

The warmth and natural feeling of wood furniture and trim has long been a staple of many rooms throughout your house. Of course, most people have wooden furniture, although there are many options in metal, acrylics, and other materials these days. Even if you do not have traditional tables, chairs, and bookshelves, you may still consider brown tones for your living room, library, or similar rooms in your house. They give you a steadfast and comfortable feel when looked at from a color therapy perspective.

Brown makes a warmer background for many other colors instead of choosing white, gray, or black. It is still considered a neutral but imparts a lot of feeling and emotional power to your living spaces. It can be either traditional or modern depending on how it is used. A rich warm brown paired with green makes you feel as if you are living in the natural world full of freshness and rich beauty. A soft taupe brown paired with rose pink gives an entirely different feel.

5 – Energize With Bright Reds in Your Home

Nothing promotes high energy more than bright red. This makes it the perfect main or accent color for a home gym or other busy room. Although it is difficult to decorate with pure red in large quantities, such as painting all your walls a solid color or choosing all your furniture in cherry or crimson, it also makes an exceptional accent color to provide sparks of energy and style to any daytime room.

Red raises energy. For maximum effect, consider an accent wall in a vibrant crimson. If you want a more subtle mood changing effect, add red tablecloths, window treatments, and knickknacks. Even a small splash of red can in view the room with a spark of vibrancy.

6 – Add a Touch of Romance With Pink 

Although many people associate pink with little girl's rooms, the wide variety of different shades of pink make it an excellent choice for any bedroom where you want to add a touch of romance and femininity. More men are embracing pink fashion these days, so it makes sense that home decor is not far behind. Pink can be a very relaxing color that promotes mental serenity. However, it also imparts a more affectionate or sensory feeling when used with certain decorator accents like soft pillows, elegant draperies, or curvaceous statuary and figurines.

Pink also spans a wide range from the palest petals to a rich fuchsia. The letter leans closer to purple when it comes to creating a unique mood in your house. It is vibrant, unusual, and creative. It also shares some of the sensuality of red. Ultimately, if you want to explore color therapy with pink, be very careful about the shade you choose to get the right effect.

7 – Pure White Stands for Clean, Pure, and Light Anywhere

White is the default home decor color for people who prefer a minimalistic lifestyle and look. It is a light, clean, pure, and promotes a true sense of serenity from a color therapy perspective. For some people, this mood backfires, and white ends up feeling sterile and cold. This makes it extremely important for you to know yourself before you start decorating your home using these guides. White works well in kitchens and bathrooms where the feel of cleanliness is of the utmost importance.

Would you speak of different shades of a color like baby blue to midnight blue, white usually does not enter the picture because it is such a neutral solid all its own. However, many shades of gray have entered the home decorator market, and black is also popular for furniture and accents. Although they lack the purity of white, they all provide a strong foundation for use with other colors used to evoke certain emotions in your home.

8 – Deep Greens Work for Bringing the Outdoors In

Any interest in the environment, gardening, or outdoor living can extend to the interior of your home when you choose deep and vibrant greens in any room. Unlike softer stage or mint greens that create a serene atmosphere, stronger tones offer a more organic and earthy feel. This makes them exceptionally effective for enclosed porches that combine outside and indoor living. They also work well for accents or base colors in living and dining rooms where you prefer to feel calm but with a steady underflow of energy for maximum comfort.

9 – Warm Oranges Boost Social Power in the Parlor

Although many people shy away from vibrant oranges in their home decorating schemes, they too have a rather strong force when it comes to color therapy. In rooms like the parlor or family room where you hang out frequently with housemates or guests, orange promotes sociability, laughter, and vibrant energy. The careful, however, as too much bright orange can feel like a warning sign instead of a splash of warmth.

Oranges another color that can get overwhelming in a similar way to yellow. Some of the best ways to use this vibrant shade is in more natural items like terra-cotta houseplant pots, paired with rusty browns and russets, or in softer tones that lean more toward peach and apricot. To counteract the dramatic power of orange, consider pairing it with a softer turquoise or create a more balanced color therapy scheme.

10 – Craft, Sewing, Art Room or Other Creative Space? Think Purple

Purple, the color of royalty, works well for bedrooms and more elegant living rooms for people who truly love this unique shade. However, from a therapeutic standpoint, purple stands out as the most creative and imaginative color in the entire spectrum. If you do art at home, have a crafter sewing room, write fiction, or do any other inventive activity, consider using purple to get your mind to the right mindset for inspiration.

The entire range of purple from the palest lavender to the deepest eggplant is available for you to explore in your home decorating color therapy projects. Although they all share a rather mystical and creative feel, the darker shades are much more sophisticated and dramatic than the pastels. These choices primarily come down to your personal tastes and whether you want to go bold or stick with soft surroundings.

Combining Moods With Multiple Colors

Of course, most rooms have more than one color. You may have a primarily white bathroom with yellow accents and greenhouse plants on the counter. This seems to combine a clean and calm look with a burst of energy. This may be the exact thing you need to feel your best and getting ready for work or simply refreshing yourself throughout the day. A bedroom that combines warm brown wooden furniture with soft blue gives you the coziness you need and the relaxation and serenity you crave. Do not be afraid of mixing colors to achieve the therapeutic benefits you desire.

A Note on Neutrals

Although white, gray, black, and browns were mentioned earlier in this article for their particular roles in the color therapy concept, it is important to understand that they make an appearance in almost every room no matter what. Look around your house. If you are like most people, your walls, trim, furniture, and other large surfaces are covered with some neutral shade. You may have all white walls or ceilings, all brown or black furniture, or chose beige or charcoal draperies because they are much easier to match with everything else.

If you are interested in redecorating your home on a budget and want to incorporate color therapy ideas into it, changing things like wall color, your furniture, or expensive elements will probably not happen. Any color from the palest pink to the most vibrant orange, the softest sage green to the deepest eggplant purple can go well with a variety of neutral. Focus on matching warm and cool tones, brightness and darkness, or going for more contrast to interview your room with increased energy.

The idea of using concepts studied and popularized by in the field of color therapy for your home decorating designs makes sense. After all, you spend a large part of your time in your home, and you want to promote the right types of feelings and energies in every room. Once you understand what every color stands for and helps you feel, you can make either drastic or subtle changes to introduce more joy, energy, serenity, romance, or creativity into your life.