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Can Your Environment Impact Your Well-being?

  • 3 days ago
  • 13 min read

Updated: 3 hours ago

By: 63° Editorial

August, 2026


We tend to think about health as something we manage through what we eat, how much we move, how well we sleep and the choices we make every day. But our bodies do not experience those choices in isolation. The places where we live, work, sleep and move through can quietly make some healthy behaviours easier, others much harder, and in some cases affect our health directly.


Have you ever gone somewhere and suddenly slept unusually well?


You are still you, with the same body, the same brain and probably many of the same things on your mind, but the room is cool, properly dark and unusually quiet. There is no traffic outside, no generator humming nearby and nothing flashing through the curtains. You wake up and realise you have not slept like that in months.


Or perhaps you have noticed something else when you travel. You spend a week somewhere walkable and suddenly you are doing 12,000 or 15,000 steps a day without once scheduling a workout. You see people more often because meeting them is easy, spend more time outside because there is somewhere pleasant to sit, and arrive home at the end of the day without having spent three hours getting there.


Then you return to normal life and wonder why all those “healthy habits” disappear.


We often explain the difference as personal behaviour. Perhaps we were more relaxed on holiday, more disciplined, more motivated or simply had more time. Sometimes that is true, but sometimes the person has not changed nearly as much as the environment around them has.



Once you start looking at health this way, you begin to ask how much of what we call a “healthy lifestyle” is really a healthy person making good choices, and how much is an environment making those choices easier to make?


  1. Your environment starts working on you before you get out of bed

Sleep is usually presented as something we do. We are told to go to bed earlier, stop scrolling, keep a consistent bedtime and aim for enough hours each night, all of which can matter, but sleep also depends on the conditions in which we are asking the body to sleep.


A bedroom that remains very hot through the night is not physiologically equivalent to a comfortable one. Neither is a room beside constant traffic compared with somewhere quiet, or a dark bedroom compared with one repeatedly exposed to bright light at night.


Noise is particularly interesting because human beings can become remarkably good at believing we have adapted to it. After enough time in a busy city, the horns, generators, aircraft, construction and traffic can become part of the background. Yet environmental noise is no longer treated by public-health researchers as merely an annoyance. The WHO reports evidence linking excessive noise with sleep disturbance and increased risks of ischaemic heart disease and hypertension, alongside growing evidence involving other health outcomes.


This does not mean that the occasional noisy night is damaging your heart, nor does it mean that everyone living in a busy city should become anxious about every sound they hear. The concern is repeated exposure over time, particularly when noise interferes with sleep or repeatedly activates the body's stress responses.


It also gives us a useful way to think about the increasingly sophisticated world of sleep optimisation. If you are tracking your sleep every night and your device keeps telling you that your sleep is poor, there comes a point when collecting more data becomes less useful than asking what is happening in the room itself. Perhaps your bedtime needs attention, but perhaps the room is too hot, too bright or too noisy. The highest-value intervention is not always another supplement, wearable or sleep product; sometimes it is fixing the condition that is making sleep difficult in the first place.


  1. Then you step outside and start breathing

Air is one of those things we barely think about until something is obviously wrong with it, yet we inhale thousands of litres of it every day.



This is not a small public-health issue. In a June 2026 technical brief, the WHO described air pollution as the leading environmental health risk factor, estimating that it contributes to about 6.6 million deaths globally each year, with much of that burden coming through noncommunicable diseases.


Those statistics can feel abstract until we translate “air pollution” back into ordinary life. Depending on where you live, it may be the traffic you sit beside every morning, diesel exhaust, construction dust, smoke from burning waste, an inadequately ventilated cooking area or a generator operating close to occupied rooms.


For someone living in Lagos, Accra, Nairobi, Cairo, Delhi or another rapidly growing city, environmental exposure does not necessarily arrive as a dramatic pollution event. It can simply be part of getting through the day.


That is what makes environmental health so important and, at times, uncomfortable. You can choose whether to buy a supplement. You cannot choose whether to breathe.


  1. Your commute is an environmental exposure too

Suppose it takes you 90 minutes to get to work and another 90 minutes to get home. That is three hours a day, 15 hours across a five-day working week and roughly 60 hours over four weeks.


Before we have even discussed traffic pollution or stress, something important has already happened; time that could have supported your health has disappeared. Those hours have to come from somewhere. They may come from sleep, exercise, cooking, seeing friends, spending time with children, hobbies or simply having enough unstructured time to recover from the day.


This is one reason health advice can become strangely unrealistic when it is separated from the life in which someone has to follow it. Getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, preparing nutritious meals, maintaining relationships and finding time to recover all sound perfectly reasonable until work and commuting have already consumed most of the waking day.



Sometimes the answer really is to become more disciplined with your time. At other times, there simply is not much time left to discipline.


  1. The place where you live can quietly decide how much you move

Think about the last time you visited somewhere where walking was simply the easiest way to get around. Perhaps the pavement continued all the way to your destination, roads were easy to cross, shops and cafés were close together, public transport worked well enough that you did not need a car for every journey, and walking felt safe. You may have moved considerably more than usual without once thinking of yourself as exercising.


Now imagine the opposite environment, where every useful destination requires a vehicle, pavements disappear halfway down the road, crossing traffic feels dangerous, the heat is intense and there is nowhere particularly useful or pleasant to walk to. The same person can behave very differently in those two places.


This is one of the most useful things the science of the built environment adds to the conversation about movement. Physical activity is certainly influenced by motivation and personal choice, but those choices happen inside places that contain their own defaults. The WHO notes that urban planning can influence access to safe walking and cycling, recreational spaces and other opportunities for physical activity.


So when we ask why people are not moving enough, it may be worth asking another question alongside it; Have we built places that make movement an ordinary part of life?


That matters particularly for people who cannot afford gym memberships, home equipment or boutique fitness classes. One of the most democratic forms of physical activity is walking, but only when the environment makes walking reasonably safe and possible.


  1. Heat changes what your body has to do simply to get through the day

If you have ever tried to sleep, work or exercise through extreme heat, you already know that temperature affects more than comfort.



This has become increasingly important as extreme heat becomes more common. The WHO's July 2026 update on heat and health notes that prolonged high daytime and nighttime temperatures create cumulative stress on the body and can worsen risks associated with cardiovascular, respiratory, renal and other conditions.


It also changes the way we should think about exercise and productivity. Telling someone to “push through” a workout in extreme heat is not automatically evidence of discipline, just as telling someone who works outdoors to manage their exposure without considering the conditions of their work misses part of the problem.


Sometimes intelligent health behaviour means changing the time you exercise, reducing intensity, seeking shade or cooling, hydrating appropriately and paying attention to heat warnings rather than forcing the body to perform as though the environment has not changed.


  1. Your home is part of your health infrastructure

We spend an enormous proportion of our lives at home, which means housing conditions have repeated opportunities to interact with health.



Again, the useful response is not to become frightened of everything inside your house. There is an entire corner of the wellness industry built around convincing people that their homes are full of vaguely defined “toxins” that require expensive products to eliminate. Environmental health does not need that kind of exaggeration because there are already well-established exposures worth paying attention to.


Persistent damp and mould deserve attention. Smoke or generator exhaust entering occupied spaces deserves attention. Poor ventilation deserves attention where indoor pollution is a problem. A bedroom that becomes unbearably hot every night deserves attention, particularly when it is repeatedly disrupting sleep. The point is to identify the actual exposure, rather than turning your home into another endless optimisation project.


  1. What about trees, parks and green space?

This is where environmental-health research becomes particularly interesting because an environment does not only expose us to risks; it can also make health-supporting behaviours easier.


A growing body of research has associated access to green space with better mental and physical health, greater physical activity and social benefits, although these relationships are complicated and not every study can establish that green space itself caused the outcome. The WHO's 2025 technical brief describes green-space exposure as being associated with outcomes including mental wellbeing, cardiovascular health, physical activity and reduced loneliness.



In other words, the physical environment can quietly become a movement environment, recovery environment and social environment at the same time.


This is also why simply telling people to “spend more time in nature” can be surprisingly unhelpful. Not everyone has a forest, beach or beautifully landscaped park nearby, and access to green space is itself uneven. The more practical question is whether there is somewhere reasonably accessible to you where being outside feels safe and restorative. That might be a public park, a shaded street, a school field, a garden, a waterfront or simply a quieter outdoor space where you can walk or sit.


Nature does not have to become another luxury wellness experience before it counts.


  1. Money changes your environment

It is impossible to talk seriously about environmental health without acknowledging that people have very different levels of control over the places in which they live.


Money can buy a home on a quieter street, better ventilation, reliable cooling, a shorter commute, more living space, access to a gym, a garden, private transport, flexible working arrangements and the ability to leave an environment when it becomes uncomfortable. Someone with fewer resources may know perfectly well that their room is too hot, their commute is exhausting or the air around their home is polluted and still have very little ability to change those conditions.


That matters because environmental health should not become another way of turning inequality into personal failure. If a neighbourhood has no safe pavement, an individual cannot personally build a pedestrian network. If unreliable electricity means households and businesses rely heavily on generators, telling one family to “avoid air pollution” does not address the infrastructure producing the exposure. If someone spends hours commuting because affordable housing is far from employment, telling them to prioritise recovery can ignore the conditions consuming their time.


Health is personal, but it is also shaped by housing, transport, energy, urban planning and public infrastructure. Both things can be true at once.


  1. That does not mean there is nothing you can do

The useful place to begin is not by asking whether your entire environment is “healthy,” because very few environments are completely healthy or unhealthy. Instead, think about what your body is exposed to repeatedly and what creates the most friction in the life you are trying to live.


If you consistently sleep badly, look beyond your bedtime and consider whether heat, light or noise is contributing. If there is persistent damp or mould, finding and addressing the source of moisture is more useful than repeatedly covering the visible problem. If smoke or exhaust regularly enters the home, reducing that exposure where practically possible deserves attention. If heat makes outdoor exercise difficult, changing when or where you train may make movement more sustainable.


The same principle applies to behaviour. If reaching the gym requires an hour in traffic, perhaps the best exercise plan is not the theoretically perfect programme but the one you can do closer to home. If you spend the entire working day sitting, finding small ways to build movement into the day may be more realistic than relying on motivation at 9 p.m. If your commute is consuming several hours every day and you have the flexibility to change your route, schedule or number of days on-site, the time you regain may be a meaningful health resource in itself.


None of these changes is particularly glamorous, and perhaps that is the point.


  1. If you can afford to optimise, optimise the problem rather than the data

There is another version of this conversation for people with more resources, because modern wellness makes it remarkably easy to spend a great deal of money measuring a problem without fixing it.


Your wearable tells you that your sleep is poor, so you upgrade the wearable. The new device provides more detailed evidence that your sleep is still poor, but perhaps the room remains too hot and the traffic outside still wakes you at 4 a.m.


At some point, the better investment may be improving the conditions in which you sleep. The same applies elsewhere. If a punishing commute is leaving you exhausted, another energy supplement may not address the main problem. If you never use your home gym because the room is unpleasant, upgrading the equipment may be less useful than changing the space. If a beautifully designed office keeps everyone sitting for ten hours, adding a wellness programme does not automatically make the working environment healthier.


This is a useful rule well beyond environmental health. Before optimising around a problem, ask whether you can remove or reduce the problem itself.


  1. Perhaps this changes what we mean by a “healthy lifestyle”

A healthy lifestyle is usually described as a collection of behaviours; eating reasonably well, moving regularly, sleeping enough, avoiding smoking, managing alcohol, maintaining relationships and looking after our mental health. All of that still matters.


What environmental-health research adds is context. Sometimes you walk more because the environment makes walking easy. Sometimes you sleep better because the room allows you to sleep. Sometimes you spend more time with people because they live close enough to see without planning the meeting three weeks in advance. Sometimes you exercise less because two hours of your evening disappeared on the road.


Personal agency still matters enormously, but the environment can either support that agency or demand that you fight against it every day and once you see that, the question changes from “Why can't I stick to healthier habits?” to “What in my environment is helping or getting in the way?”

63°Take

Yes, your environment can affect your health, and in some areas the evidence is exceptionally strong. Air pollution is a major environmental health risk, excessive and persistent noise is associated with sleep and cardiovascular effects, extreme heat places measurable strain on the body, and poor housing conditions can expose people to risks including damp, mould, indoor air pollution and temperature extremes.


There is also substantial and growing evidence that the environments we build influence behaviour. Neighbourhood design, transport, access to safe walking and cycling, and green space can help determine whether movement and time outdoors become ordinary parts of life or activities that require additional time, money and planning.


What the evidence does not support is becoming frightened of everything around you or trying to construct a perfectly “non-toxic” life. The goal is not environmental perfection, and you do not need an expensive collection of wellness products to begin thinking about your surroundings more intelligently.


A more useful approach is to notice the things you encounter repeatedly. Consider the air you breathe, the conditions in which you sleep, the amount of noise and heat you experience, how much time you spend commuting, whether your surroundings make movement easy, and whether your home gives you somewhere to recover. Then separate what you can realistically change from what requires changes by landlords, employers, developers, communities or governments.


We spend a great deal of time asking what we should do to our bodies to become healthier. Environmental health asks us to consider the other side of that equation. What kind of world are we asking those bodies to live in?


Sometimes the next useful health change may be something you eat, practise or do differently. At other times, it may be worth looking around first.


Sources


63° provides health and wellness information for educational and informational purposes only. This content is not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of a qualified healthcare professional with questions about your health or before making significant changes to your health, treatment, diet or lifestyle.

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