How To Stop Your Bedroom From Making You Sick

Got this arti­cle from Re​-Nest​.Com. I think you’ll find a lot of use­ful stuff there so be sure to check it out.

We sleep, on aver­age, about 7 hours a night — which means that we spend way more time in our bed­room than we do in any other room of the apart­ment. And, nat­u­rally, we spend more time in our bed than on any other piece of fur­ni­ture. It fol­lows then that the bed­room can affect our health more than any other room.

So, when we started wak­ing up every morn­ing with a stuffy nose and a sinus headache, we knew some­thing was wrong.

Start with the basics and take a peek under the bed. Is it clean down there? It’s easy to for­get about sweep­ing, vac­u­um­ing, etc. under the bed. But you’ve got to do it. Pull out all the stor­age bins, clean them, and clean the floor under your bed regularly.

• Your sheets. A) Are they organic cot­ton? B) Are they clean? If they aren’t organic, con­sider buy­ing organic fab­ric the next time you need to pur­chase new sheets. (Tar­get car­ries fan­tas­tic, afford­able organic cot­ton sheets). Now, ask your­self: How often do you put fresh sheets on your bed? You should be doing it once a week. Do you? We know we weren’t, but we’ve started and it’s helping!

• Your pil­lows. Think about it: If you sleep on your stom­ach (like we do) you are lit­er­ally breath­ing your pil­low for 7 hours a night. So, obvi­ously, it’s a good idea to wash it! Then con­sider what your pil­low is stuffed with. A lot of us are aller­gic to down, so con­sider a nat­ural, hypoal­ler­genic fill­ing — like wool. Or, invest in some hypoal­ler­genic pil­low cov­ers — they’ll keep the bad stuff (dust mite feces and other gross­ness) in your pil­low and out of your nose. But remem­ber, they need to be washed reg­u­larly too! A more expen­sive, but pos­si­ble, solu­tion is a nat­ural foam pil­low — we like Keetsa’s Down Alter­na­tive Mem­ory Foam Pil­low ($69.99)

• Now, the heart of the mat­ter. Your mat­tress. A nat­ural mat­tress is always the best way to go. But a lot of us already own an expen­sive mat­tress and don’t intend to swap it out any­time soon. If you fall into that cat­e­gory, treat your mat­tress just like your pil­lows and invest in a hypoal­ler­genic cover. This Clean­Rest Mat­tress Cover gets great reviews at Brookstone.

• Lastly, some­thing we con­tin­u­ally fail to do: Keep­ing pets out of the bed can be a crit­i­cal step, espe­cially if you strug­gle with allergies.

Do you already do all of this? What else do you do to keep your bed­room healthy?