Healthy Living Tips

Nothing is more important than our health, but how many of us can honestly say that we consistently make healthy lifestyle choices?

This is especially true at home, where the gravity of Netflix, games, takeaways, sugary drinks, and chocolate pulls us in like a supermassive black hole.

However, we spend around half our lives at home, so we must look for ways to live healthily. From your diet and bedtime routine to the air you breathe, you can do plenty of things to improve your health.

Here are our best healthy living tips for your home:

Get a natural mattress

Natural mattresses are free from chemicals and synthetic materials that emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs) after manufacturing, so they do not contribute to air pollution in your home and have a lower carbon footprint.

While VOC emissions from memory foam and other synthetic materials are low, you might want to eliminate them.

Our article on what makes a mattress eco-friendly has much more information, with a few mattress recommendations.

You can also find more eco-friendly home tips here.

Follow a bedtime routine.

During sleep, your body has a reduced metabolic rate, where resources are allocated to repair, restore, and re-energise your brain and body.

Without sleep, many nocturnal processes, like cerebrospinal fluid oscillations and neural pathway maintenance, cannot occur. Protein synthesis is slashed, and your immunity is compromised, making you susceptible to sickness.

Sleep is necessary for survival, and following a bedtime routine is the best way to ensure you get a good night’s kip.

Our article on how to fix your sleep schedule has you covered. Most adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep every night.

Purify the air you breathe.

Purifying air means removing volatile organic compounds (VOCs), odours, and other gaseous pollutants like traffic emissions from the air.

Breathing clean air slashes the risks of allergies and asthma, with people in heavily polluted cities having a shortened life expectancy of up to ten years.

The best filter for the job is an activated carbon filter found on some air purifiers and filtration dehumidifiers. Activated carbon deals with VOCs and things 1,000 times smaller than what HEPA filters can catch.

Switch to natural cleaning products

Speaking of air purification, do the cleaning products make you sneeze? Many of the chemicals in household cleaning products pollute the air we breathe, masked by powerful scents like lemon and lavender.

Cleaning sprays and air fresheners are the biggest offenders – studies show that chemicals in these can trigger asthma and allergies.

Try switching to natural cleaning products, which are made with natural, plant-based ingredients and contain no chemicals. Probiotic cleaning products are another option, with ‘good’ bacteria acting as a bio-detergent.

Cut your plastic waste (and recycle what you use)

Microplastics are so prevalent they are found in our bodies. Sadly, there is nothing we can do because our world is heavily contaminated, but we can cut our plastic waste to minimise our contribution to the problem.

Here are some quick wins:

• Use your bottle
• Ditch cling film
• Buy loose fruit and veg
• Say no to plastic bags/packaging
• Give up plastic coffee pods
• Insist on aluminium takeaway containers

We recommend reducing plastic usage as much as possible because recent surveys show that recycling plastics does not work.

Eat a healthy, balanced diet.

What’s in your fridge and cupboards? While everything is fine in moderation, it’s easy to consume more calories than you need, and it can also be impossible to resist quick sugar fixes and empty calories from junk food.

We recommend changing to whole foods in your fridge and cupboards so that you are forced to prep and eat healthy meals and snacks.

You can try the Keto diet (low carb, high fat), which helps you lose weight with healthy proteins and fats.

Related pages

• How Can Sleep Affect Your Health?
• How to Make Your Bedroom the Healthiest Room in Your House