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The Top Five Places to Start
These are the top five things you can do to improve the health of your home. This is the best place to start if you want to understand healthy home concepts better, or are looking for free and low-cost strategies. They’re mostly all invisible— so this is also a good place to start if you don’t want to change the aesthetic of your home as you make it healthier.
Here are shortcuts to the top five, if you’re not in the mood for reading. Or, keep scrolling for alllll the details on each.
Indoor Air Quality
Tap Water Quality
Dust Reduction
Pillow
Circadian Light
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.
Pillow
Why is your pillow so important?
For a long time, I had foam listed here, because we spend so much sleeping and relaxing on it (mattress, pillow, and couch) and foam is full of unsavory additives. However, I’m refining this focus to your pillow, for two reasons. First, because you spend 8 hours every night with your face directly in contact with it— the closest contact of anything in your home, even your toothbrush. Second, I wanted everything in the Top Five to be a clear, accessible starting point. Foam was too broad, and mattresses and couches are not always accessible, as they can be big investments.
Memory foam pillows have long included hormone-disrupting flame retardants, UV stabilizers, anti-static agents, plasticizers, endocrine-disrupting antimicrobials, and more. Until last year, even CertiPUR foam contained stannous octoate (which harms fetal development). If you have a memory foam pillow, I highly recommend choosing something safer.
How to Choose a Healthier Pillow
I have healthier pillows listed here, and you can compare them side-by-side for their level of material health.
A molded latex pillow feels the most like memory foam, especially one made with soft Talalay latex.
An adjustable pillow can be nice if you like to customize your pillow with just the right amount of poof- they come in many mixtures of natural materials, like kapok, cotton, latex, and wool.
Finally, an OEKO TEX certified polyester pillow will be your least expensive option. Polyester is more safer than foam (fewer ingredients and additives that fall out over time) and an OEKO TEX one ensures it is safer for people to use.
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.
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— you can use electrical tape or objects. 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 healthy light bulbs throughout the day — full-spectrum ones in the morning, amber ones in the evening, and no-blue or red ones at night. See what I mean here.
