Seniors with Alzheimer’s or dementia are often highly sensitive to their environment. Creating a soothing place to live helps minimize agitation, reduce challenging behaviors, and improve quality of life. Relish shares 5 helpful tips to easily modify the home and make it a relaxing haven for someone with dementia.
For people living with dementia, creating a relaxing environment is incredibly important to help minimize confusion and agitation, helping them feel calm and able to concentrate.
There are a number of factors you should consider when creating the perfect environment for a person living with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.
We share the top 5 ways to create a calming space for your older adult.
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1. Reduce noise
Sound, including background noise, can cause undue stress on a person living with dementia. If sound reverberates too much it can create an effect which can agitate and disorientate.
Introducing noise absorbing materials and soft furnishings, like carpets and curtains, to reduce the sound works well.
Similarly, if outdoor noise becomes too much for a person living with dementia, keep windows shut. If possible, double glazing should be installed to reduce outside noise even further.
However, silence can also be disorienting to people with dementia. Therefore, gentle and soft background noise can be calming. Perhaps try a familiar radio station with low music and gentle chatter.
2. Decorate carefully
Home furnishings can unwittingly cause distress for people living with dementia.
For example, they may mistake their own reflection in a mirror for that of a stranger watching them, which is a very frightening experience. Either remove all mirrors or cover them with a roller blind that can be pulled down when the mirror is not in use.
Mirror-like effects can also be caused by street lights at night on the window, causing reflections to be seen. These can easily be interpreted by a person living with dementia as a stranger looking through the window, causing them to feel frightened and agitated.
As soon as dark sets in make sure that all curtains are drawn to avoid this happening.
And when choosing colors in a room, try to ensure that the walls and floors are contrasting colors. The definition between the two colors will help a person with dementia, helping to prevent them from getting lost or falling.
3. Improve lighting
Lighting is incredibly important for people living with dementia.
People with dementia are often older and so may be struggling with their sight. It is integral to ensure that items are easily visible.
Keep all rooms well lit. Use natural light as much as possible, but where electrical lights need to be used, make sure the bulbs are of a high wattage.
Also, pay attention to the positioning of lamps, overhead lights, etc, as pools of light and dark may agitate or frighten a person with dementia.
Shadows can be misinterpreted as something or someone threatening, leading a person with dementia to feel distressed and scared.
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4. Create a calming retreat
Whether a person with dementia is living in a care home or with the family, it is important that they have a place to retreat to when they are feeling stressed or anxious.
This doesn’t need to be a large area, it can simply be a comfy chair and a small table.
But it is a calming place, separate to the hubbub of the rest of the house, where they can relax and perhaps do soothing activities, like painting or a dementia jigsaw puzzles.
5. Make things easy to find
For someone who is living with dementia, losing items can be incredibly stressful.
Therefore, it is a good idea to ensure that items are easy to find and within reaching distance.
You can place stickers on the cupboards, listing what can be found within them. Or replace cupboard doors with glass doors so all the items inside can be seen.
This will encourage a person with dementia to be independent where possible, and help eliminate any stress they may feel when looking for something.
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Guest contributor: Ben Atkinson-Willes was inspired to create Relish (formerly Active Minds), a successful business supplying activity kits for dementia and Alzheimer’s patients. Ben’s drive was born out of caring for his Grandfather who lived with dementia for 16 years. Ben and his family noticed as time progressed, the challenge was finding things to keep his Grandfather occupied. With Ben’s wealth of experience and passion, he understands the positive impact that tailored resources can make to the day-to-day wellbeing of somebody with dementia.
This article wasn’t sponsored and doesn’t contain affiliate links. For more information, see How We Make Money.
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