Why do offices often feel draining?
Whether you are returning from a summer vacation or from several years of working remotely, the contrast can be hard to miss. At home, you might work next to a window, step outside for a few minutes, or experience changing daylight without even thinking about it. Then you return to the office and spend eight hours or more a day mostly under a ceiling filled with conventional light fixtures.
The problem isn’t that offices are dark. They’re often biologically dim. And that distinction could matter more than we realize.
The office has to earn the commute
The return-to-office debate is often framed as a question of policy: How many days should employees come in? But there’s another question employers should be asking:
Why would someone want to come into the office?
The answer can’t simply be “because we said so.” Offices must support the fundamental drivers of productivity.
A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that 46% of U.S. workers whose jobs can be done from home said they would be unlikely to stay with their employer if working from home were no longer allowed. Among workers younger than 50, that number rose to 50% (Parker 2025). The survey was based on 2,315 U.S. adults with jobs that can be done from home, with data collected October 7–13, 2024.
At the same time, remote work has its own shortcomings. Among people who work from home at least some of the time, 49% said their current work arrangement made it harder to feel connected with coworkers, and 34% said it hurt their opportunities for mentorship (Pew Research Center 2025). People don’t necessarily want less workplace. They want betterworkplace. That means creating spaces that make it easier to collaborate, focus, connect, recharge, and feel good while doing it. And one of the most overlooked factors driving productivity is light.
How can bright office lighting make us feel dull?
Our eyes have a secret power beyond allowing us to see. Specialized sensitive photoreceptors in the eye respond to blue-sky light and communicate with brain systems involved in circadian timing, alertness and other non-visual biological functions. The intensity, spectrum, timing and duration of light exposure all influence these responses, but the general conclusion is we need adequate blue-sky light each day to perform our best (Chellappa et al 2011). In addition to a presumedly more sluggish office environment, low regular daylight exposure increases risk of depression (Burns et al. 2022; Spitschan & Zauner 2026) and overall mortality risk (Windred et al. 2024).
How doe we measure healthy office lighting?
Unlike ordinary lux, which describes light according to the visual sensitivity of the human eye, melanopic EDI (m-EDI) provides a standardized way to describe the effectiveness of light for stimulating the melanopsin-containing retinal photoreceptors involved in these non-visual responses.
Biomedical research consensus, also followed by the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES), recommends that daytime indoor environments provide at least 250 melanopic EDI lux at the eye, while emphasizing that this should be achieved without causing discomfort, glare or excessive energy use (Brown et al. 2022; ANSI/IES RP-46-25). In other words, the goal isn’t simply to make an office brighter. It’s to deliver the right kind of light, where people actually receive it.
How do I know if my office lighting is unhealthy?
A room can look perfectly bright while delivering surprisingly little biologically-effective light to the eyes. One reason is that conventional lighting is primarily designed around visual tasks: illuminating desks, floors, walls and work surfaces. Field measurements show that offices typically range from 20%-50% of the needed blue-sky criteria, with the majority below 30%. This is despite the spaces feeling well-lit.
Another reason standard office lighting doesn’t typically support occupant wellbeing is that tuning the color temperature (CCT) to boost blue light isn’t necessarily enough. While high CCTs like 17000K have been reported to improve employee wellbeing, functioning and work performance (Mills et al. 2007), research with more natural appearing color temperatures (e.g. 6500K) found that changing color temperature alone did not produce significant improvements in subjective alertness or cognitive performance (Ru et al. 2019).
That’s an important distinction. A ‘cooler’ color temperature light isn’t automatically “healthy light.” And a color tuning or fixture labeled “circadian” doesn’t automatically mean occupants are receiving enough biologically effective light. The biologically-relevant blue-sky light has to reach the eyes and appear natural and not glary.
Read: Color Tuning vs. True Circadian Lighting for Improved Health
What happens when office workers receive more blue sky light?
Blue-sky light is energizing. You feel different outside on a nice, sunny day and that feeling remains under blue-sky lighting indoors. A particularly interesting 2023 clinical study looked at what happened when researchers supplemented a low-melanopic lighting environment with a SkyView high-melanopic task lamp. Sixteen healthy young adults participated in a controlled, three-day study involving simulated eight-hour workdays. In the low-melanopic condition, participants received approximately 30 melanopic EDI lux from the ambient lighting. In the supplemented condition, a task lamp increased exposure to approximately 250 melanopic EDI lux (Grant et al. 2023).
The higher-melanopic condition was associated with greater daytime alertness and improvements in several measures of neurobehavioral performance, including reaction time and attentional performance. Participants also reported improvements in measures including sleepiness, mood and motivation (Grant et al. 2023). This was a small, clinically controlled study, but it provided a first, intriguing demonstration of what can happen when daytime electric light exposure moves from a biologically weak level toward the range recommended for daytime environments.
Subsequent research in a variety of real office installations showed clear and reproducible improvements in mood, focus, alertness, self-reported productivity, and sleep quality because of healthy blue-sky lighting (Soler & Long 2025).
Read: Boosting Blue Sky Light Indoors Reveals Fundamental Drivers of Office Productivity
The challenge of boosting blue light to promote a positive work environment
Modern office design incorporates daylighting and electric lighting where needed, but just adding blue-enriched light isn’t a sure-fire way to create a pleasing, natural feeling environment. A 2025 study tested six different melanopic EDI levels—from 54 to 694 lux at eye level—with 30 healthy participants in a daytime office environment. The researchers found that 150 melanopic EDI lux produced the highest comfort and satisfaction, while 250 melanopic EDI lux improved performance on memory and problem-solving tasks (Zeng et al. 2025). Interestingly, more wasn’t always better. The highest exposure, 694 melanopic EDI lux, actually reduced comfort and satisfaction (Zeng et al. 2025).
These findings and others show that glare is an ever-present danger in office environments. That’s exactly why healthy lighting isn’t simply about “more blue.” It’s about getting the dose, spectrum, direction and distribution right. This is fundamental to the design of SkyView™ healthy, blue-sky lighting that results in a naturally low-glare general illumination you can feel.
How can lighting improve the ‘feeling’ of office space?
There’s another piece of the return-to-office puzzle: how the environment makes us feel.
Research on daylight provides an important clue. In a controlled crossover study of 30 office workers, researchers compared an office environment with greater access to daylight and views with an environment where windows were partially blocked by conventional roller shades.
The differences were striking. Participants were 48% less likely to report eyestrain and 77% less likely to report feeling depressed when they had greater access to daylight and views. They were also substantially more satisfied with the daylight available to them (Boubekri et al. 2020). Although about daylight and views, not electric lighting, this study and others testing the effect of biophilic design elements reinforce a powerful idea:
People respond to office environments that feel more connected to the natural world.
And that’s precisely the experience many offices are missing. Even in offices utilizing natural materials, textures, and botanical elements, short-wavelength light is disproportionately absorbed, depleting healthy blue sky light exposure even further.
Bringing the blue sky into the office
Daylighting is severely limited by proximity, viewing direction, latitude, seasons, weather, window tinting, shades and louvers.
Watch: Videos on combined effects on daylight
Read: Daylighting, Weather, and Wuthering Heights
We also know that standard office lighting falls way short of providing a healthy blue sky experience. We need some better options.
This is where SkyView™ by BIOS Lighting is different. SkyView™ isn’t simply a brighter ceiling fixture. It isn’t a tunable-white light that changes from warm to cool. And it isn’t a fake skylight designed primarily to create the appearance of an outdoor view.
SkyView™ is designed around an important characteristic of the natural daytime sky scene: biologically-effective light coming toward the eyes from above. Its patented Blue Sky Gradient™ technology creates a carefully engineered spectral gradient that delivers high-angle, blue-enriched, biologically-effective light toward the vertical plane where occupants receive it, while providing lower-angle, warmer, comfortable illumination toward the task plane as you would see it below the horizon.
- The effect is a natural-feeling, high-CRI, high m-EDI light with low glare.
- The objective achieved is a vibrant, inviting office environment with the required ≥250 melanopic EDI lux at the eye across the occupied space, while maintaining visual comfort and energy efficiency.
- And it doesn’t require reinventing the building.
SkyView is available in Tile, Pendant and Linear Pendant formats, making healthy blue-sky lighting a practical lighting upgrade rather than a complicated specialty system.
How do I make people want to come back to the office?
The best return-to-office strategy may not be another mandate, another perk or another message from HR. It may be creating a workplace that simply feels better to be in.
A place with better spaces to collaborate. Better spaces to focus. Better access to nature. And better light.
Because after years working at home where blue-sky exposure could be spotty or seasonal,
An energizing, productive office with comfortable, energy-efficient SkyView™ lighting would feel welcoming and special.
So maybe the question shouldn’t be: “How do we get people back to the office?” Maybe it’s: “How do we make the office worth coming back to?” Healthy light is a good place to start.
References
Boubekri M, Lee J, MacNaughton P, Woo M, Schuyler L, Tinianov B, Satish U. The impact of optimized daylight and views on the sleep duration and cognitive performance of office workers. International journal of environmental research and public health. 2020 May;17(9):3219.
https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17093219
Brown TM, Brainard GC, Cajochen C, Czeisler CA, Hanifin JP, Lockley SW, Lucas RJ, Münch M, O’Hagan JB, Peirson SN, Price LL. Recommendations for daytime, evening, and nighttime indoor light exposure to best support physiology, sleep, and wakefulness in healthy adults. PLoS biology. 2022 Mar 17;20(3):e3001571.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001571
Burns AC, Windred DP, Rutter MK, Olivier P, Vetter C, Saxena R, Lane JM, Phillips AJ, Cain SW. Low daytime light and bright night-time light are associated with psychiatric disorders: an objective light study in> 85,000 UK Biobank participants. medRxiv. 2022 Oct 17:2022-10.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.16.22280934.abstract
Chellappa SL, Steiner R, Blattner P, Oelhafen P, Götz T, Cajochen C. Non-visual effects of light on melatonin, alertness and cognitive performance: can blue-enriched light keep us alert?. PloS one. 2011 Jan 26;6(1):e16429.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016429
Grant LK, Crosthwaite PC, Mayer MD, Wang W, Stickgold R, St. Hilaire MA, Lockley SW, Rahman SA. Supplementation of ambient lighting with a task lamp improves daytime alertness and cognitive performance in sleep-restricted individuals. Sleep. 2023 Aug 1;46(8):zsad096.
https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsad096
Illuminating Engineering Society. ANSI/IES RP-46-25: Recommended Practice: Supporting the Physiological and Behavioral Effects of Lighting in Interior Daytime Environments. 2025.
Parker K. Many remote workers say they’d be likely to leave their job if they could no longer work from home. Pew Research Center, January 13, 2025.
Pew Research Center. How COVID-19 changed U.S. workplaces: Looking back 5 years later. February 12, 2025.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/02/12/how-covid-19-changed-u-s-workplaces/
Ru T, de Kort YA, Smolders KC, Chen Q, Zhou G. Non-image forming effects of illuminance and correlated color temperature of office light on alertness, mood, and performance across cognitive domains. Building and Environment. 2019 Feb 1;149:253-63.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2018.12.002
Soler R, Long K. Boosting blue sky light indoors reveals fundamental drivers of office productivity. BIOS. October 2025. https://bioslighting-skyview.com/boosting-productivity-with-blue-sky-lighting/
Spitschan M, Zauner J. Light Exposure as a Modifiable Determinant of Mental Health. Current Psychiatry Reports. 2026 Apr 28;28(1):24.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11920-026-01671-7
Windred DP, Burns AC, Lane JM, Olivier P, Rutter MK, Saxena R, Phillips AJ, Cain SW. Brighter nights and darker days predict higher mortality risk: A prospective analysis of personal light exposure in> 88,000 individuals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2024 Oct 22;121(43):e2405924121.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2405924121
Zeng, Y., Smolders, K. C. H. J., de Kort, Y. A. W., Sun, H., Yu, J., & Lin, B. (2025). The effects of lighting levels on the perception, performance and physiological responses in offices. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 107, 102804. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2025.102804
