How to Use Color to Affect Your Mood: Color Decorating Series

Color is powerful. It is the first thing you see when you roll out of bed in the morning, before that first cup of coffee. It invades your brain, affects your emotions, and forms a sense of where you are in space.

Used in decorating, warm and cool hues influence the perception of how big or small a room is, whether the walls seem to advance in (warm colors) or recede (cool colors) on you. Knowing how colors affect mood in this way can mean the difference between creating a space where you feel cozy, calm, and contained, and one where you feel expansive and able to spread out and collect your thoughts.

Set the intention of a room by using an active, passive, or neutral color scheme. In other words, you can choose just the right colors to give you active energy to work on that proposal long into the night, or to help you passively float to bed for some shut-eye after you’re done reading that last bedtime story.

Set your mood by consciously choosing a color scheme to influence your senses. For example, do you want to feel serene, perky, rejuvenated, or amped up? Find out which colors affect our moods in these ways, and more:

Colors and Their Affects
Red: bold, daring, exciting, attracts attention, encourages appetite, raises blood pressure, good choice for entertaining

Orange: exciting, infuses energy, perky, fun, stimulates appetite

Yellow: color of sunshine, happy, uplifting, cheerful, nourishing, comforting

Green: most restful, symbolizes nature, soothing, fresh

Blue: calming, relaxing, most productive, lowers blood pressure, good for bedrooms

Purple: rich, dramatic, luxurious, sophisticated

Neutrals (black, white, grey, tan, taupe, beige): basic, flexible, classic, serene, great background for accent colors

This post was written in collaboration with Annie Krug.