Have you ever heard someone you know talk about how their home was the cause of their migraines? chronic cough? chronic anything really?

Did you maybe dismiss it? I mean, really, how can your home cause your health to go down the drain?

It’s an often overlooked source of illness but it’s real. It can be a root cause of illness or just a contributor to symptoms.

Here are my three big tips on detoxing your home to support your vibrant health.

Molds

A neighbor of mine had been having health challenges for a couple years. She used to enter fun runs and be pretty active but now she had asthma and chronic migraines. At the time, I was working as a sustainable building expert and knew about toxic molds. So, I asked if she had any mold in her basement. Oh boy, did she ever. I was surprised at the amount too, some of the walls were visibly fuzzy! Yuck right?

Could there be a correlation? You bet! Toxic molds can cause a variety of chronic health conditions. The challenge in identifying it though is that one person won’t necessarily have the same symptoms as another person in the same home. So the illnesses will seem unrelated. Part of this is because we’re all different and we all have different toxic load capacities. Always listen to your body and do a little investigation yourself. Are you exposed to toxic mold?

You can read a more about how to identify and clean up mold and how to detox from it here on this blog post.

Electromagnetic Frequencies (EMFs)

My previous career was as a sustainable building expert and I have to tell you, that world is all about LED lighting, Smart Building systems and solar panels. This is all for the sake of energy efficiency.  As I continue to dig deeper into reversing autoimmune diseases I’m constantly running into conflict between the sustainable building world of my past career and my quest for vibrant health today. It’s unnerving really!

You might have seen Elana’s story about her smart home? If not, you should read it. In it she shares her “Green” home horror story. Everything in her newly remodeled 100 year old home was “smart”. That meant everything had WiFi – her appliances, her heating system and lighting systems.  This overload of unhealthy electromagnetic frequencies caused her to have a serious relapse in her MS symptoms.  She paid quite a bit to dumb down her home again and now she’s back to her vibrant self.

When it comes to unhealthy frequencies, it’s important to also look at power lines, cell phones and bad house wiring because they all play a role in your own body’s electrical system. And yes, we are electrical beings, not just material beings. What that means is that we have our own natural electrical frequency which is works in harmony (so to speak) with the earth’s natural frequencies. Sadly, technology is on a different and conflicting frequency and wave length which disturbs our cellular function, causes DNA damage and increases our risk for chronic disease. I’ve written a bit about EMF’s and cell phones in previous blog posts.

A few easy steps to reducing your EMF exposure is to turn your WiFi off at night, turn your phone to airplane mode when you have it on your bedside table or in your pocket, turn off your newer appliance’s “smart” function and recycle your baby monitors (nobody should have these).

Air Quality

When was the last time you opened your windows to let some fresh air in? If you can’t remember, stop what you’re doing now and open them up!

CO2 levels in our home can creep up to unhealthy levels (800 ppm) or more pretty quickly. This can cause headaches, coughing and fatigue. If it goes above 1000 ppm it can cause more serious illnesses which, like mold, can vary greatly from person to person.  The outdoor CO2 level is lower typically in the low 400 range (which is too high as far as climate change is concerned) which is much better than our typical indoor levels. Open up those windows to let that out and let in some fresh air.

When my husband and I lived in San Francisco, we lived in a live-work loft with big windows opening up onto the street below. This street lead to an on-ramp to a couple of freeways and so trucks would go by pretty often. Our window sill was covered in black dust made of heavy metals and petrochemicals. We had to wipe these down every day! What a pain.

These particulates, when breathed in, increases our toxic load which impacts our body’s ability to repair itself. Toxins down regulate our immune system making it difficult to fight off viruses and other pathogens that we come into contact regularly.

We don’t live there anymore. We’ve since moved to a beautiful island in the Puget Sound and there’s no more black dust on our window sill. But with the frequency of wildfires that’ve happened over the past year, having an air filter really helps which is what I was getting too.

We have an AirDoctor that we’ve been happy with. This includes a carbon filter as well as a HEPA filter so it works well with both the particulates as well as mold.

Tackle these three things to see how you begin to feel. Do you see an improvement in your sleep? Perhaps fewer headaches? Keep track of the changes you make and your symptoms to see what the impact is.

Because there is such a strong connection between autoimmune disease and toxins, I’m launching an 8 week FB live series here that you can take part it. Just got to my page, like and follow me and you’ll be notified when I’m about to go live. I’d really love to see you there!