I’ve bet you’ve never thought about how the colors that you surround yourself with impact your mood and mental health. Ever since I studied color theory in my marketing class, I’ve been fascinated with this facet of psychology. And in fact, if you never want to see companies the same again, look into how they use color to completely manipulate you (fast food “restaurants” are infamous for this by using red and yellow to make you hungry).

Sight is pretty important to humans, and so it would seem reasonable if we were able to influence our mood with this sense. As a matter a fact, when was the last time your mood was affected by something you saw? I’m guessing it was pretty recently (especially if you came to this article from Facebook). But where does color fit in all this? Let me start with an extreme example. Imagine you came across a flowing river, but instead of being kinda blue, it was dark red. Would you get any closer to that water? Probably not because the color informed you that there was something very wrong happening upstream.

Well, believe it or not, humans have adapted to react to colors, even if you don’t realize it. And those instincts apply to everything in your life that contains color. For example, did you know that the red teams in video games statistically beat the blue at a rate far above chance? And the same effect occurs in Olympic one-on-one combat sports. The theory behind this is that red incites aggression while blue calms and relaxes. And upon learning this information, I set out to positively influence my life through manipulating color theory.

Before we get started, I think it’s also appropriate to mention that the simple act of believing something will affect you (like that red will give you an advantage in video games) can affect you. So it’s impossible for me to tell how much the colors are affecting me and how much the belief that they’re affecting me is affecting me. Whew, I know. Psychology is complicated.

The first thing I did was to change my phone’s background to an orange quote graphic. Not only is orange my favorite color (which makes me happy), but it’s also a cousin to red which gives me a small jolt of motivation every time I look at it.

But that was a small experiment. To step it up, I started examining what I was wearing and the general mood I was in for the day (yes, I have bad days just like everybody else). On days when I woke up tired and lazy, I wore something red. When I was irritable and in a bad mood, I wore blue. What I found wasn’t too earth-shattering, but I did notice a change in my mood throughout the day.

And these are just two different ways I used color theory to impact my life. Whenever I notice myself in some type of negative mood, I’ll try to be more aware of what I’m consuming with all of my senses and how I can change what my mind is taking in to turn my day around. Whether it’s the color of the room you’re in, your phone’s background, your clothes, or the album art of the song you’re listening to, color has the potential to affect you in small ways.

And for your convenience, here’s an infographic showing you exactly which colors affect you how.

color psychology and mental health