Optimize Your Home Environment for Nervous System Health
About the teacher
Dom Francks & Andy Bromberg
Dom Francks and Andy Bromberg work with Lightwork Home Health, a data-driven home health assessment company focused on how lighting, air, water, EMFs, materials, and other environmental inputs shape wellbeing. In the Nervous System Mastery Masterclass Vault, they teach the home as an active nervous-system context.
Learn more →Your home is always sending cues
The first thing I would say is you may not need to do any of this if you're feeling great in your home. There's no better detection system than our bodies out there.
The simplest test is whether your body feels easier, calmer, and more able to sleep and focus after one small change. If it does, keep that change.
A lot of these 8020 fixes, you sort of do it once and either you don't have to think about it again, or you set a reminder for filter changes once every six months or a year.
Practical wins are usually one-offs or low-maintenance swaps.
Start where the body spends the most time
Begin with the bedroom, because small frictions accumulate over hours.
So when you sit down, take it out of your pocket, put on your on the table, do these little things that makes a big difference.
Move alerting devices away from your head and off your body while you sleep.
Ideally, turn your Wi-Fi off at night, go all Ethernet if you can. We did it. Feels great.
If you want a single low-effort change that cuts a lot of exposure, try that first.
Practice
Circadian light and wind-down routine
Simple evening steps taught in the session.
- Use warm incandescent or amber bulbs in evening spaces, Andy recommends incandescent, especially amber colored bulbs for evening use.
- Reduce blue-rich and bright sources before bed, move devices away from the bedside and reduce overhead LED usage in the hour before sleep.
- Use a small clip-on reading lamp with a good spectrum when you need light for reading, and leave bright overhead LEDs off.
- Put phones on airplane mode or turn Wi-Fi off overnight, and keep phones several feet away from your head while sleeping.
EMFs, small distance wins
Distance is one of the most powerful, low-effort levers against radio frequency and similar exposures.
The level of exposure of the EMF decreases with the square of the distance. That means, if your phone is one inch away from you versus 10 inches away, it is 100 times less. If your phone is three feet away from you, it's 10,000 times less than if it was one inch away.
Keep devices off your person, prefer wired peripherals, and use speaker phone when possible.
Use wired headphones and speaker phone instead of Bluetooth headphones.
These are practical behavior changes that reduce exposure without giving up connectivity.
Light, circadian timing, and flicker
Light quality matters for both circadian timing and acute nervous-system comfort.
Pretty much all modern LEDs are actually blue light. We put this layer on top of them, this chemical layer called a phosphor. It's actually blue under the hood.
LED design choices create a blue spike that signals daytime to our melanopic system, so evening lighting matters.
My preference, what I have in my home is incandescent lights. I strongly strongly strongly recommend incandescent especially amber colored ones.
If you cannot use incandescent bulbs, choose high quality LEDs with good power supplies and minimal flicker, and use targeted warm reading lights when needed.
There are these little things you can get on Amazon for like 14 bucks, clip-on reading lights that have great overall spectrum profile and I travel with those all the time.
Air, ventilation, particulate matter, and mould
Fresh air and filtration are immediate nervous-system inputs.
Open your windows. Turns out opening your windows is really great for ventilation.
If ventilation is limited, use an air purifier sized for the room so you achieve meaningful air changes per hour.
Mould is a different category, it is common and it can be serious.
Killing mold is not an acceptable way to deal with mold, because it will actually continue to release things even when dead. The only acceptable way is to remove it, physically remove the material that the mold is on.
If you suspect mould in your home and have symptoms, get a rigorous inspection. Quick fixes can miss the source.
Free assessment
Map your nervous system patterns.
Take the Free AssessmentContinue exploring
- Browse the Nervous System Mastery masterclass guide library for more masterclass teaching sessions.
- Try Reset Your Nervous System for a low-tech downshift before bed.
- Explore Practical Tools for Improving Your HRV for a complementary measurement lens.