Starting From Home: A Foundation Guide to Passive House Design, Neurodiversity and Self-Regulation

By Eleni Leounaki

What if your home could become one of the most powerful tools for supporting self-regulation?

Every day, your nervous system responds to the environment around you-light, sound, temperature, air quality, acoustics, and the way your spaces are organized. For neurodivergent individuals, these everyday conditions can influence stress, attention, sensory overload, emotional regulation, and overall well-being.

Starting From Home: A Foundation Guide to Passive House Design, Neurodiversity and Self-Regulation introduces a new way of thinking about healthy buildings. It explores how Passive House design principles can do more than improve energy efficiency-they can help create calmer, healthier, and more predictable environments that support everyday functioning.

Bringing together building science, environmental psychology, neuroscience, and lived experience, this accessible foundation guide explains how the built environment can become an active partner in supporting regulation, comfort, and quality of life-without requiring technical knowledge of architecture or construction.

Inside this book, you'll discover:

- How the built environment influences the nervous system

- Why predictability plays a central role in self-regulation

- The connection between Passive House design and sensory wellbeing

- Practical ways to reduce unnecessary sensory load at home

- Clear explanations of lighting, acoustics, ventilation, thermal comfort, and indoor air quality

- A practical Home Assessment Checklist

- Access to companion resources and practical tools that continue to evolve beyond the book

Whether you are a homeowner, architect, designer, educator, therapist, parent, or simply interested in healthier living environments, this guide offers practical, research-informed insights that can be applied in everyday life.

Rather than focusing solely on sustainability or energy performance, Starting From Home introduces a broader perspective: a home can also be designed to support regulation, reduce cognitive load, and promote everyday well-being.

Grounded in Passive House design while remaining accessible to non-specialists, this book bridges architecture, environmental psychology, and neurodiversity to provide a practical framework for creating spaces that work with the nervous system rather than against it.

This is not a design manual or a clinical textbook. It is an invitation to begin seeing the places we live through a different lens-one that recognizes the powerful relationship between our environments and our everyday experience.

Starting From Home is the inaugural title in the Regulation Space series, exploring how the built environment can support healthier nervous systems, improve quality of life, and contribute to more inclusive, human-centered design.

Because every environment shapes the nervous system.
Start where every day begins. Start at home.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H9B6TR5V
• ISBN13: 9798186503798
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 7.0" x 10.0"