Last week, you discovered the concept of the “ancestral mismatch,“ and how to battle that mismatch via the weapon of strategically timed “hormesis.”
This week, I’ll focus on another easy-to-understand health optimization tool that equips you to fight the uphill battle of living in a post-industrial era: your environment.
Yes, your environment matters—more than you might think. Variables such as air, light, electricity, and water have modernized and evolved in ways that can dramatically affect your health.
Plummeting indoor and outdoor air quality; bright, flickering overhead and screen LED lighting; polluted water; and life immersed in a soup of high-intensity electromagnetic fields (unlike anything humans experienced for most of our existence)—paired with less fresh air and water, sunshine, nature—can result in troubled sleep, early afternoon brain fog, and an eventual accumulation of toxins.
If you were to come visit my home in North Idaho, you’d see an extreme example of a living and working environment transformed for optimal health.
The HVAC system is equipped with recirculated air, HEPA air filtration, and air scrubbing technologies. The lights are a mix of incandescent and flicker-free LED bulbs for optimized daytime energy and nighttime relaxation. The water passes through a 14-stage reverse osmosis filtration system (and is then oxygenated and remineralized, because I’m an overachiever).
There is no WiFi. Instead, every room in the house is hardwired with Cat 8 metal-shielded Ethernet cable, and you simply plug into a port when you want internet access.
You can see a full video tour of my house here.
But before you put on a welder’s bib and rent a jackhammer for a full home demolition and upgrade, you should know that there are simpler, budget-friendly steps you can first take.
For example, you can mitigate poor air quality with a standalone HEPA air filter for your bedroom.
Use incandescent lightbulbs and modified LED bulbs instead of standard fluorescent lights, and introduce natural sunlight wherever you can.
Grab an affordable countertop reverse osmosis filter (like you can buy at Walmart or Home Depot), and a glass or stainless steel water bottle for daytime use.
Put your phone in airplane mode if it doesn’t need to be on, and when it is on, disable the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth if you aren’t using them.
You’d be surprised at the host of health benefits you can reap from a basic environmental audit.
In my book Boundless, I take a much deeper dive into these types of environmental considerations and modifications, but the list above gives you a handful of tactics to start making your environment more “ancestral.”
Next week, I’ll give you a third and final tip for battling the ancestral mismatch (hint: it has to do with food), but in the meantime, leave your questions, comments, and feedback below. I read them all!
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3 Responses
Thanks always for the great info Ben. We got a 6 stage counter top RO system. it hasn’t got the capability for re-adding minerals, so we purchased a bottle of the brand Aussie Trace Minerals/electrolites.
1) We’re just not really sure how much of these drops we should be adding to our drinking water?? At the moment we add 10 drops to every 500ml glass we drink. Can’t find any guidance online.
2) Also do you think we should purchase a shower head filter? The water in our area is poor quality, and since we’re in Ireland, it also has added fluoride. Thanks for your time.
We are 3 for 4 of your simpler budget-friendly steps in optimizing our environment. We just purchased our 3rd air-scrubber (JASPR), 1 in each bedroom. We are planning the 4th sometime this year for the living/kitchen area. We have a whole house filtration system w/a vortexer to balance the naturally occuring minerals in our well water with an under-the-sink reverse osmosis filter. We remineralize our first glass of water of the day with Beam Minerals. It’s all stainless steel to go water bottles the rest of our day. We have all incandescent lighting throughout our home– all lights off during night time hours. Me (not my hubbs) don the BLB glasses (Ra Optics) after sundown most of the time–definitely during any evening screen time. Wi-Fi is an issue with our young adult children still in the home. I do use our ethernet cable for my home lap top. Phone is always in airplane mode while on my walks, otherwise placed at least 5 feet away from me when not in use. I have implemented these environmental steps little by little over the last 6 years. There is always room for improvement. Thank you Ben for all of your tips on health optimization. Balancing this health journey without overstressing is key–or else the pendulum can certainly swing in the opposite direction than what we are trying to accomplish.
Hi there, I see you remineralize your first glass of water. Do you just drink pure RO water for the rest of the day? We have a RO system that doesn’t add back minerals, and we’re really unsure of how much or what minerals we should be adding to our water. At the moment we’ve just been adding the brand Aussie Trace Minerals to all the water we drink. Even then, we are unsure of dosage. Not sure if this has us adding too much minerals to our water!
Like you I wear BLB glasses but my wife doesn’t!
Any tips? Thanks!