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Invisible Five
These are the top five things you can do to improve the health of your home— and they’re all (mostly) invisible. This is the best place to start if you want to understand healthy home concepts better, are looking for free and low-cost strategies, or don’t want to change the aesthetic of your home as you make it healthier.
You can click the bolded statements for links to research articles. A heads up, there are some uncomfortable facts here— the purpose is not to generate fear, but to convince skeptics that this stuff matters, to spread awareness, and to empower and motivate anyone to make even small changes.
Improve Your Indoor Air Quality
Why does this make the top five?
Simply because you are constantly exposed to it— you breathe in around 2,000 gallons of air every day, which is about the size of a swimming pool.
Indoor air is 2-100 times (!) more polluted than outdoor air, even if you can’t smell or see it. If you’re like most people, you spend around 90% of your time indoors, and a lot of that at home.
While you can’t control the outdoor air quality, you can control your indoor air quality, reducing your exposure to radon, carbon dioxide, particulate matter, and VOCs.
How to Purify Your Indoor Air
Free Methods
Minimize use of artificially scented products and candles.
Ventilate: open your windows daily to let polluted air out, and fresher air in. Crack the windows while you’re sleeping at night to let carbon dioxide escape (it builds up quickly, and high levels can disrupt sleep.)
Use the exhaust fan every time you cook to remove harmful particulate matter (PM 2.5) and VOCs (watch how fast indoor levels rise here).
Easy Methods
Use a high quality air purifier to remove dust, pollen, PM 2.5, microbes, and VOCs.
Bonus Methods
Use an indoor air quality monitor so you know exactly what’s in your air, and when you need to ventilate more, or turn the air purifier up a notch.
If you’re doing HVAC upgrades, consider fresh air intake.
If you’re doing kitchen upgrades, consider an electric or induction stovetop so you’re not combusting gas indoors.
Purify Your Tap Water
Why is water quality a top 5 priority?
Just like air, water makes the cut because it’s something you’re exposed to constantly, through drinking, cooking, and bathing. Even Portland, Oregon’s water — considered some of the cleanest and best tasting in the US — contains hexavalent chromium, the “Erin Brockovich chemical”. PFAS chemicals are in the tap water of most homes in the US. And so on. It’s shocking, but in many cases it’s simply because it’s expensive for public water facilities to remove everything. Luckily, it’s easy to filter it yourself, and even easier to understand exactly what is in your water.
How to Improve Your Water Quality at Home
Free Methods
Start with knowing what’s in your water, so you know if, and how, you want to filter. Look up your city’s water data using your zip code on the Environmental Working Groups’s website.
Easy Methods
Use an NSF-certified kitchen tap water filter for cooking and drinking water.
Install a shower filter that’s verified to remove chlorine.
Bonus Methods
You can test your home’s tap water with an easy kit. This offers for a more complete picture of your water quality because it will also include anything from your pipes (like lead, microplastics from PVC pipes, microbes).
Use a water bottle with a filter on trips outside of the house.
Reduce Household Dust
Why is dust reduction important for a healthy home?
Dust contains both allergens and chemicals that are too “heavy” to float in the air. These heavy sVOCs, or semi-Volatile Organic Compounds, include flame retardants and phthalates, and can be absorbed through our skin.
Harvard Healthy Building researchers describe hormonally active dust as “a stew of dozens of chemicals that migrate out of furnishings and that can interfere with sperm counts, fertility, successful birth, and the timing of puberty and menopause.” Yipe! This is why I take dusting seriously.
Best Ways to Reduce Household Dust
Free Methods
Take off your shoes when you get home to prevent bringing in outdoor sVOCs (pesticides, soot), decreasing your overall indoor load.
Dust furniture surfaces weekly: I recommend wet-dusting with a healthier fabric cloth.
Vacuum and/or mop floors weekly: I recommend using an allergy-sealed HEPA vacuum and/or steam mop depending on what surface your floors have (carpet, hardwoods, etcetera).
Wash your sheets weekly on the hottest setting available.
Wipe down your ceiling fans and blinds monthly.
Easy Methods
Use an air purifier to capture dust— they don’t get 100%, but do reduce the overall dust load you have to deal with weekly.
Bonus Methods
When its time to upgrade furniture, choose pieces made without flame retardants and phthalates, minimizing the overall toxicity level of the dust.
Upgrade Your Foam
Why did better foam make the cut?
Foam is synonymous with sleeping and relaxing. We spend 8 hours every night on our pillows and mattresses. And, the place many of us spend the second-most amount of our time at home is on the couch. So like air and water, foam makes the cut partly because you’re exposed to it so often. But, it also makes the cut for a second reason.
Regular polyurethane foam and memory foam contain arguably the most concentrated dose of toxins of all the products in the home, and these contents are rarely disclosed. Even CertiPUR foam contains stannous octoate (which harms fetal development), and regular foams have long included hormone-disrupting flame retardants, UV stabilizers, anti-static agents, plasticizers, endocrine-disrupting antimicrobials, and more.
How to Tackle a Foam Problem
Free Methods
Dusting, mopping, and vacuuming weekly can pick up any sVOCs that come from mattresses invisibly shedding over time.
Ventilating: opening windows daily will help release any VOCs off-gassing from foam.
Easy Methods
Start with your pillow. If it’s made of memory foam, this is both a high-exposure and more affordable place to make a swap for one made with a healthier material. See the ones I recommend here.
Second step— choose a healthier mattress: every natural and organic mattress from healthiest to least healthy here, so you can compare brands, features, and prices with health as the primary focus.
If you’re allergy-prone, I’ve also listed organic mattresses for allergies here.
If you’re not in the market for a new mattress right now, consider an organic mattress pad, which may help protect you from anything nasty in the mattress underneath. And, stick with the Free Methods above.
Third step— invest in an organic (or mostly organic) couch made with natural rubber latex, organic upholstery, and minimal glues. Options I’ve vetted are listed here. This is listed as the third foam priority because you spend so much time sleeping, and likely a little less on your couch.
Use Sleep-Supportive Lighting
Why is sleep supportive lighting so important?
Your body’s 24-hour cycle, also called its Circadian Rhythm, is a delicate and orchestrated set of signals that tells your body what to do at the right times. It’s synced with the sun and moon, and light is the biggest way these signals are released— for example, low light in the evenings tells your body to start releasing melatonin so you get sleepy. Bright light wakes you up. You can read more about it here.
If you use blue light -blocking glasses, or have your cell phone screen set to “evening mode” to protect you from excess blue light, make sure you also pay attention to your light bulbs and TV screens. Because sleep underpins all other aspects of your health, this is a major priority worth addressing.
Circadian Lighting Strategies
Free Methods
Change your TV display settings to a warmer (more yellow or red) tone. It is barely noticeable, and can help reduce sleep-disruptive blue light exposure when it matters most.
Easy Methods
Cover up any small blinking lights in your bedroom— Amazon even has inexpensive stickers just for this purpose.
Use blackout curtains to reduce the amount of artificial street light entering your bedroom. I recommend these options, which are not only good for blocking light, but are also safer from a material health perspective.
Use a totally dark alarm clock without LED indicator lights, or a sunrise alarm, instead of your phone, which can light up the room.
Bonus Methods
Use different kinds of light bulbs intentionally: brighter, bluer light in the morning— a high wattage and a high Kelvin temperature (up to 6000K) will help set your circadian rhythm and improve focus. Use softer, yellower light in the evenings in the form of no-blue light bulbs, and use completely red light bulbs at night.
