That's My Chair: Why the Comfort of Familiarity Is Not Fussiness

A question worth asking yourself first

Before we get into the research, the psychology, and the care practice, try this.

Think about where you sit at home. Your chair in the lounge, your place at the kitchen table. Now imagine coming downstairs one morning to find a stranger sitting in it. Not maliciously. Not permanently. Just there, in your spot, for now.

How does that feel?

For most of us, even the thought of it produces a small but distinct flicker of irritation. We would not necessarily make a scene. We might not even say anything. But we would feel it. That low-level wrongness. The sense that something that belongs to our world has been quietly displaced.

Now imagine that you have dementia. That your ability to orientate yourself in time and place is already fragile. That the familiar has become precious in a way you cannot always articulate. That you have lost your home, your daily rhythms, much of your independence. And your chair, the one by the window, the one you always sit in, the one that has become the fixed point around which your morning organises itself, is occupied.

The person who dismisses that distress as fussiness has misunderstood something fundamental about what it means to be human, let alone what it means to live with dementia.

This blog is about why familiarity matters so deeply, what the evidence tells us about how routine and place support wellbeing in dementia, and what good care homes do to honour that rather than dismiss it.

We are all territorial. Every single one of us.

The idea that having a favourite seat is somehow a quirk, or worse, a behavioural problem, ignores something that psychologists have understood for decades.

Human beings are territorial by nature. We claim spaces, mark them through regular occupation, and feel a genuine sense of psychological ownership over them even when we have no legal right to them whatsoever. A seat in a classroom. A regular table in a café. Your side of the sofa. Your chair at the dinner table. These are what environmental psychologists call secondary territories: spaces that are not privately owned, but that through habitual use become deeply associated with a sense of self, control and belonging.

Research on psychological ownership shows that the mere act of regularly occupying a space creates feelings of possession and attachment. When that space is encroached upon, people react with something very close to the emotional response they would have if a genuinely owned possession were taken. This is not irrationality. This is deeply wired human behaviour, present across cultures and across the lifespan.

Crucially, research also shows that attachment to territories intensifies with age. The longer a person has occupied a space, the stronger their sense of ownership over it becomes. For older adults, particularly those who have already experienced the profound disruption of leaving their own home and moving into residential care, the establishment of familiar spots and routines in the new environment is not a preference. It is a psychological necessity.

This applies to all of us. The difference in a care home is that the stakes are so much higher, and the capacity to navigate the distress of having familiar space disrupted is so much lower.

What familiarity does for the brain affected by dementia

To understand why a familiar chair matters so much, it helps to understand a little of what dementia does to the experience of being in a place.

Dementia progressively erodes the ability to process new information, to orient in time and place, and to hold onto the thread of where you are and why. The world, over time, becomes more uncertain, more effortful to navigate, and more frightening. Novel environments, unexpected changes, unfamiliar arrangements, all of these require the kind of cognitive processing that is increasingly difficult.

Familiar environments, by contrast, engage what researchers call implicit or procedural memory. These are the memory systems that are preserved much longer into the dementia journey than the explicit, conscious memories that fade first. A person may not be able to tell you what year it is, but they can walk to their usual chair, sit down, and feel immediately settled. Their body knows this space. The route to it is encoded not as a conscious fact but as a deeply embedded bodily habit.

A remarkable research study, using detailed microethnographic observation in a long-term care facility, explored exactly this phenomenon. One resident, referred to as Li, was largely non-verbal and could not communicate his needs through speech. But when his wife brought his familiar bamboo chair from their home and placed it in his room, he resumed habitual activities around it, watching television, eating, napping, with fluid, settled movements he had not displayed before. His wife described it simply: "He continued as before. I didn't need to tell him, it happened naturally." The chair had not just given him somewhere to sit. It had reactivated the bodily memory of being himself in a familiar context.

This is the power of familiar environments. They bypass the damaged pathways and speak directly to the parts of the brain that are still working. They reduce the cognitive load of being in the world. They say, quietly and consistently: you are safe, you are home, you know this place.

A 2025 scoping review published in Frontiers in Dementia, examining decades of research on what constitutes a "familiar" environment in nursing home care, found that familiarity was consistently associated with reduced agitation, reduced fear, and greater independence in daily activities. The review identified three interlocking components: a homelike environment, connection to personal wellbeing, and multisensory integration of design. Familiar sounds, familiar furniture arrangements, familiar visual anchors, each of these works together to create an environment that the person with dementia can recognise and navigate with confidence.

When those familiar cues are disrupted, even in small ways, the effect can be significant. A systematic review of how the physical environment supports daily activities for people with dementia found a direct positive correlation between environmental quality, including familiarity, and residents' ability to perform activities of daily living. In other words, a familiar, predictable environment does not just feel better. It enables people to do more for themselves.

The "my chair" moment: what is really happening

Let us return to the specific scenario that prompted this blog, because it is worth unpacking carefully.

A resident comes downstairs to find their usual chair is occupied. They become distressed. A care worker interprets this as being difficult or fussy. The resident's distress is minimised or managed rather than understood.

What is actually happening in that moment?

The resident is not being irrational. They are experiencing a genuine violation of something that, to them, carries the weight of psychological ownership. Environmental psychology classifies this as an intrusion into secondary territory, and the emotional response it generates is entirely consistent with how human beings respond to territorial encroachment. The fact that the chair is technically communal property is irrelevant to the emotional experience.

For a person with dementia, however, the distress is compounded in ways that a care worker who has not received good dementia education may not fully appreciate. That chair may be the one fixed point in a disorienting morning. The resident may not be able to fully articulate why they are upset, only that something is wrong, that their world has been disrupted, that the safety of the familiar has been taken away. The emotional response can feel disproportionate to an observer who does not understand its roots. But it is entirely proportionate to the experience.

Research on autonomy and decision-making in people with dementia is unequivocal that even small, regular losses of control over daily life have a cumulative impact on wellbeing. A study published in 2025 in a Taylor and Francis peer-reviewed journal found that decision-making involvement, including the smallest everyday choices about how to spend time and where to sit, is strongly associated with quality of life in people with dementia, mediated through psychological needs for competence and autonomy. It is not just big decisions that matter. The small ones, repeated every day, are what build or erode a person's sense of self.

Dismissing a resident's distress about their chair as fussiness is not a neutral act. It is a small but real act of depersonalisation. It tells the person that their feelings are not valid, that their preferences do not count, that they should simply adapt. For someone who has already lost so much, that message lands heavily, even when the words are gentle.

The same applies everywhere: table, chair, window, routine

The principle extends far beyond a single chair.

Where people sit at mealtimes matters. As research into care home dining experiences has shown, residents sit in the same place for each meal, with the same table companions, and that consistency is a key source of the emotional and social grounding that makes mealtimes meaningful. The table is not just where food arrives. It is a social context that is built over weeks and months of familiarity. Disrupting it, even occasionally, introduces uncertainty that residents did not ask for and may not be able to manage gracefully.

Which chair is by the window matters. Light, view, position in the room: these things are not decorative preferences. They are part of how a person with dementia orients themselves in space and time. The resident who always sits where they can see the garden is not being precious. They may depend on that visual anchor to understand where they are and what time of day it is.

Which side of the room they walk down matters. Research on wayfinding in dementia settings consistently finds that residents navigate most successfully in environments where the layout is predictable and consistent. Unexpected changes to furniture arrangements, even small ones, can transform a familiar route into a confusing one.

Who they sit next to matters. The resident who always sits next to the same person at the table has probably formed a relational anchor around that arrangement, even if neither of them could fully articulate it. Moving both of them to different places may seem trivial to a staff member. To them, it removes a small source of security that they had quietly built.

None of this is demanding behaviour. All of it is deeply human.

The challenge of maintaining familiarity in a care home: real, but not insurmountable

It would be dishonest not to acknowledge the practical challenges here. Care homes are communal environments. Residents share spaces. Visitors sit in chairs. Agency staff who do not know the layout of the room may move furniture. A resident may be off their unit for an appointment when another resident or a relative takes their usual chair without realising. These things happen.

The question is not whether disruption can be entirely eliminated. It cannot. The question is whether familiarity is valued enough to be actively protected and, when disruption does occur, whether the response is empathetic or dismissive.

Active protection of familiarity looks like this in practice. Residents' usual seating positions are recorded in their care plans and communicated to all staff, including agency workers. Furniture arrangements are consistent and changes are made thoughtfully, with residents involved where possible. Staff who see someone in a resident's usual place find a kind way to redirect. Mealtimes have consistent table assignments. Where possible, residents have personal items that mark their preferred spots as their own: a photograph, a familiar cushion, a small personal object that says this is my place.

Some homes also bring personal furniture from residents' previous homes into communal areas where safe to do so. A familiar armchair in the lounge is not just sentimentality. It is a therapeutic intervention. Research on habitual activities for people with dementia has found that when a person's familiar chair or familiar objects are present in a new environment, habitual activities associated with those objects can be reactivated without conscious effort. The body simply knows what to do. That has implications not just for comfort but for independence and functional ability.

The microethnographic study of three care home residents referenced earlier found that the care homes which best supported habitual activity were those that organised their interior environments deliberately and consistently, that understood the relationship between familiar objects and the activation of bodily memory, and that treated the maintenance of that familiarity as a professional responsibility rather than a nice-to-have.

This is not small. Loss of autonomy is one of the things people with dementia fear most.

Research published in The Gerontologist in 2025, drawing on decades of psychological and empirical literature on autonomy in dementia, states clearly that people living with dementia see autonomy as central to their wellbeing, and that loss of autonomy is one of the things they fear most following diagnosis.

It is easy to think of autonomy in grand terms: the right to make medical decisions, the right to determine where you live. But autonomy is also experienced in the smallest moments of daily life. The right to sit in your chair. The right to have your preferences remembered. The right to have someone take it seriously when you are upset because your world has been rearranged without your consent.

A person-centred framework, which is supposed to underpin all good dementia care, understands this. Tom Kitwood's formulation of personhood in dementia, which has shaped care philosophy in the UK for decades, placed the maintenance of self and identity at the centre of what good care means. The psychosocial environment around the person, including the predictability, familiarity and personal meaning of their physical environment, is as important as any clinical intervention.

When we honour a resident's attachment to their chair, their table, their window, their routine, we are not indulging fussiness. We are enacting personhood. We are saying: you are a person with a history, preferences, and a self that deserves to be respected. We know you. We remember what matters to you. This home is shaped around you, not the other way round.

That is what outstanding dementia care looks like. Not in the grand gestures, but in the ten thousand small moments when someone's preference is either noticed and honoured, or brushed aside.

The chair is never just a chair.

What this looks like in practice: a quick guide for care teams

Record seating preferences from day one. Where does this person like to sit in the lounge, the dining room, during activities? This belongs in the care plan alongside medication, personal care and dietary needs. It is equally important.

Communicate to all staff, including agency and bank. Familiar seating arrangements only work as a comfort if they are consistently maintained. A bank worker who moves furniture or directs a new resident to the wrong chair is not acting maliciously, but they need the information to do it right.

Bring personal objects into shared spaces where possible. A familiar cushion, a named throw, a small personal photo: these act as markers of secondary territory, exactly as they do in the outside world. They tell the person, and everyone else, this is my spot.

Respond to distress about seating with curiosity, not dismissal. If a resident is upset because someone is in their usual chair, the response is not "never mind, this one is just as nice." The response is to understand what has been disrupted and gently restore it. A kind word, a redirect, a little patience.

Make familiarity a team value. The culture of a care home is built from thousands of small attitudes and decisions. A team that collectively values familiarity, that sees the maintenance of routine as skilled care rather than pandering, will create an environment that genuinely feels like home. One that subtly dismisses these things will not, no matter how good the food or how bright the décor.

Think about transitions. The move into a care home is one of the most destabilising events in an older person's life. Building familiarity early matters. Consistent staff, consistent routines, consistent spaces: these are not administrative conveniences. They are therapeutic priorities.

The research is clear. The human psychology is clear. The only thing that sometimes needs to shift is the attitude: the quiet assumption, held by some care workers and not always examined, that a person with dementia who is upset about a chair is being difficult.

They are not being difficult. They are being human. And it is our job to understand the difference.