The Best Paint Color If You're Seeking Creativity

While many complex aspects of our environment play a role in our overall wellness and the way we feel, color is one of the most significant. According to WebMD, color can not only affect your mood and emotions, but it can have physical impacts as well, having the capability to alter our sleep patterns and even change the way our food tastes.

Because color has been shown to play such a major role in the way we live our day-to-day lives, incorporating them into your own living space that fosters an environment conducive to overall wellness is important — and because different shades help promote different aspects of our well-being, they can each be utilized in various ways for specific purposes.

If you are seeking a boost of creativity, either in your professional or personal life, ensuring your living space is one that helps foster and inspire a sense of originality is essential in getting and keeping your creative juices flowing.

Though much of our emotional and psychological reaction to a specific color can be attributed to our personal life experiences and our learned perceptions — making color psychology subjective to some degree — according to many studies, including one from Behavior Research Methods, much of our psychological responses to color also inherently come down to science.

And with more and more people ditching the traditional idea of driving to work every day to sit in a gray cubicle, many are now considering the walk down their hallway to their home office to be their new morning "commute" to work — prompting many people in creative career paths to wonder which paint color can best help boost their energy and creativity levels on a slow Monday morning.

Sue Wadden, Director of Color Marketing at Sherwin-Williams, tells Martha Stewart that if you are on a creative career path, fun and bold shades of coral or pink are best suited to foster that type of environment. Nicole Gibbons, interior designer and founder of Clare, also noted that a room painted with these warmer hues could help boost creativity by promoting focus and concentration.

In addition to warm shades of pink and coral, research suggests that green — specifically, a shade commonly found in nature — can also help boost creativity levels. Since green is linked to growth, it might also be related to psychological and/or mental development. This involves being broad-minded, creative, and open-minded. A recent study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that people who were shown the color green before a task produced more creative ideas than those exposed to other colors.

The author of the study, Dr. Stephanie Lichtenfeld, suggests via NBC News that green, being related to growth in plants, is connected with how we think about psychological development. Because shades of this color found in nature boost the desire to improve and demonstrate task mastery, it helps foster growth and creativity. Therefore, choosing paint in a shade of green that mimics plants growing in the natural world can help expand your creativity levels.