Learn ➜ Top Five
The Top Five Places to Start
The top five ways to start making your home healthier, including free, easy, and bonus options.
Jump to: Indoor Air Quality | Water Quality | Dust Reduction | Pillow | Circadian Rhythm -Supportive Light | Fun
Improve Your Indoor Air Quality
Why is improving your indoor air quality a top priority?
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. 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 (you can watch how fast indoor levels rise in my house here).
Easy Methods
Use a high quality air purifier that has been tested to remove dust, pollen, and PM 2.5 — all big particles captured by a HEPA filter— in addition to odors and gasses, which are captured by adsorbents like carbon or other minerals. Read more at the bottom of my air purifier page here.
Test your home for radon— a radioactive particle that’s too small to be captured by air purifiers but is the second leading cause of lung cancer. Testing is easy (and free in some states!) and can save a life. Read more on my radon page.
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 purifying your water a top priority?
Just like air, water makes the cut because it’s something you’re exposed to constantly, through drinking, cooking, and bathing. You can check what’s in your water here— in many cases it’s not as clean as you’d expect simply because it’s expensive for public water facilities to remove everything — they have to prioritize the worst contaminants, and balance that with taxpayer costs. Luckily, it’s easy to filter it yourself.
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.
Use a shower filter with a hose or vitamin C powder when you take a bath
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.
Reduce Household Dust
Why is dust reduction a top priority?
Dust contains both allergens, like dust mites and mold spores, 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. Non-toxic boot trays that won’t off-gas are listed here.
Wet-dust furniture surfaces weekly: use a water-dampened rag.
Vacuum and/or mop floors weekly: I recommend using an allergy-sealed HEPA vacuum and/or mop depending on what surface your floors have (FYI, these two pages are paywalled as part of Look Inside— just click to join, if you’d like).
Wash your sheets weekly on the hottest setting they can tolerate.
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. You can read more about that in my blog here.
Bonus Methods
When its time to upgrade furniture, choose pieces made without flame retardants and phthalates, minimizing the overall toxicity level of the dust.
Sleep on a Healthy Pillow
Why is a healthy pillow a top priority?
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 — and it’s an accessible easy starting point to making the materials you come into contact with healthier. You can read my guides to the foam and fabric in your pillows here.
How to Choose a Healthy Pillow
I have organic, non-toxic, and healthier pillows listed here.
A molded latex pillow feels the most like memory foam, especially one made with soft Talalay latex. This is what I use and love it so much.
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 safer than foam (fewer ingredients and additives that fall out over time) and an OEKO TEX one ensures it is free of the most harmful chemicals.
Use Circadian Lighting
What is circadian lighting and why is it a top priority?
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 your internal clock and sleep underpin all other aspects of your health, this is a 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.
Do your morning activities in rooms that get sunlight. Open the blinds!
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 — most other conventional blackout curtains are made with PVC or other plastics that can off-gas in the heat of the sun.
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 the ones I recommend here.
Do Whatever You Think is Fun
Ultimately, any route to a healthier home is a good route. If getting a healthier, pretty-colored duvet cover is more motivating to you than an under-sink water filter, that’s great. This journey looks different for everyone!
