How to Improve Air Quality in Your Home in 5 Easy Steps
Breathing clean air is very important for your health. You might think your air is clean enough, but there’s actually a lot you can do to improve the air quality around you. Here’s how to improve air quality in your home or workspace in 5 easy steps.
Throw Away Scented Products
The very first thing you should do to improve air quality is throw out any scented products that have phthalates in them. Phthalates are really harmful for health as they disrupt our hormone signaling in the body. They are called endocrine disruptors because they mess up our sex hormones, our thyroid, and other cell signaling inside our body. So they can lower testosterone levels in men and lower levels of female sex hormones in women as well. Phthalates can also commonly disrupt thyroid function and cause a whole host of cell signaling problems that reflect as not feeling well.
Look around your home or workspace for anything with a fake scent or a fake fragrance. We're talking plug in air fresheners, laundry detergent, dishwasher detergent, perfumes, scented body lotion or scented cosmetics, even candles. Most candles have phthalates from the synthetic fragrance.
If you are renting a place or staying at a hotel, call ahead and ask if they use scented products in the room. Or if you arrive at the place and there's air fresheners plugged in, be sure to unplug those and open up the windows when you first arrive.
Open Your Windows
The second thing you should do to improve air quality is open your windows on days when there's good air quality outside. I use the air IQ app to help track whether it's a safe day to keep my windows open all day. But you might be able to tell when it’s a little bit more smoggy outside or whether the air is clear. Of course, never open the windows when there's any chance of water coming in because of the chance of mold exposure (more on that later).
A lot of indoor objects and furniture give off gas chemicals like formaldehyde and so we get a lot of chemical exposure from possible carcinogens inside our home just from items we have inside our house. That’s why airing out your home is super important. You can cross ventilate your home by opening windows on either end of your house, keep multiple windows open at once, or even use a fan to help move air in and out of your home space.
Don’t Buy Toxic Furniture
This leads to the third way to help keep your air cleaner, which is not to buy super toxic furniture items or other items in the first place.You can do this by using the smell test. If something has a strong smell, like that new car smell, they typically have harmful chemicals. The less smell something has, the better.
One way to get around this is to buy used furniture items. However, with porous items like a couch, that can introduce a little bit more difficulty because you don't know the status of the air that was in the previous home that you're buying that furniture from. Think about buying used solid furniture items like bed frames, desks, dressers, and nightstands.
Clean Away Dust and Mold
And fourth way to help keep the air inside your home cleaner is to keep your home clean of dust and mold as much as you can. To thoroughly clean dust you’ll need a sealed high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) vacuum. Handheld and portable vacuums that don’t need to be plugged into a wall are oftentimes not sealed. Typically a bag system is going to be better for allergens and dust than a bagless vacuum system.
The reason you want to keep dust reduced is because mold spores actually settle out of the air and collect in dust. So by keeping dust as low as possible in our environment, we're also helping minimize our exposure to mold.
Mold exposure can show up as difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, random anxiety feelings, headaches, and so much more. Fatigue, a bunch of weird symptoms, even neurological symptoms like numbness and tingling can show up from mold.
Some ways to help decrease mold exposure are to not overwater plants, remove any excess water from a shower or tub after use, and keep an eye out for any leaks or water sources inside and outside the home.
Mold is not always visible, but it’s super important to take care of the mold you actually do see like in sink drains and toilets. If mold comes back with a vengeance no matter how often you clean it, that's a good sign that you have a high mold spore load in the air. The mold is actually coming from somewhere else. Make sure you don't have mold growing visibly anywhere in your house or any mold growing where there were past water leaks. Keeping humidity in the house below 60% can be really helpful to prevent the proliferation of mold.
Buy a High Quality Air Purifier
And then the last thing that I usually suggest is to buy a high quality air purifier. Unfortunately, HEPA filters are very basic and are not the highest quality (or even sufficient quality) for a lot of people. You want something that filters a hundred times better than HEPA.
High quality air filters will pull the small particulate matter that's found in pollution out of the air as well as pull things like mycotoxins, which are the chemical weapons that mold spores release, out of the air too.
These are particles that are smaller than a fraction of the end of a piece of your hair. But even though they are extremely small, they are still incredibly harmful to health. There are a few air purifier brands that meet this standard. You want to look for brands that have a 0.03 micron size filtration system. Some of the top ones are Air Doctor and Austin Air.
If you already have an air filter, check the rating. If it's not filtering 0.03 micron particulate matter, then it's probably not pulling a lot of the harmful contaminants out of your air so that you're not breathing it in.
Improving the air quality in your home is just one of many different ways you can take a hands-on approach to your health. I would love to stand by you on your journey to health and healing. If you'd like to schedule a complimentary consultation with me, click on the link below!
