How to Make Your Home Healthier at Any Budget with Dom Francks

**Chris Hutchins** (0:00)
Sleep, diet, and exercise all require you to make the right call over and over again, every single day, forever. But the air you breathe, the water you drink at home, the light you live under are different. You can fix them once, and they keep paying you back for years without you ever having to think about it again. The problem is, there is just so much bad information in this category, so I wanted to look at what the data and science actually says, and to do that, I brought in Dom Franks, one of the few people I've met who I trust in this space. We go room by room through what actually matters in your home, what to prioritize at different budget levels, starting with just $500, what to do about your drinking and shower water, what really matters for indoor air quality, and a lot more. Along the way, I'll share what he found when he showed up at my house with a bunch of equipment and tested every single room, including something that happened in my bedroom every night that I was able to fix for free.
I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoy this episode, please leave a comment or share it with a friend. And if you want to keep upgrading your money, Points & Life, click follow or subscribe.
Dom, I think we all know sleep, exercise, diet, they're really important to our health. Where does what's going on inside of our home stack up against those?

**Dom Francks** (1:15)
Well, you're totally right. Sleep, diet, exercise, those are incredibly important things. And in no way are we going to diminish the importance of those things.
However, those are things that you need to pay attention to every day. You need to pay attention to when am I going to sleep? What am I eating? How am I exercising? And yeah, you can put in place systems to make that easier, but that's a decision that you need to continue to be making day after day. However, a lot of the interventions and things that we're going to talk about, they relate to creating a healthier home. Our decisions are actions that you take once and then those benefits compound for years and years into the future.
So the cumulative decision fatigue or decisions required or behavioral change is essentially zero. And so we think these are really high leverage things to be able to do in addition to sleep, diet, exercise, all those other things.

**Chris Hutchins** (2:01)
At one end of the extreme, like how unhealthy could a home be? Like would that be the equivalent of not eating a vegetable or like eating 100 Big Macs every day for breakfast? You know, like I'm trying to think like, from what you've seen, are there circumstances where this could be pretty bad and detrimental to your health?

**Dom Francks** (2:18)
Absolutely. I think as you're thinking about the categorization there, there are absolutely homes out there that are gonna have that 100 Big Macs every day if that were even possible effect on your health. Things that would fall into that category are severe, really chronic mold exposure in a home. We'll talk a little bit more about mold and sort of what is appropriately stated out there about mold versus what is maybe a little bit overblown. But at the extreme, if you have a severe mold problem in your home, it can be causing a lot of problematic health issues. There's also pieces around carbon monoxide issues. Radon can be a big problem. Lead in your paint, as well as other areas in the home, as well as severely polluted air, things like that. Those issues I would say are rare, but not unheard of. We have certainly found homes that have severe acute health issues that could be created from what's in the home. And then there's a very, very, very big spectrum down to, okay, maybe I should be eating slightly more vegetables. And what we've found in testing hundreds of homes at Lightwork is that every home has areas for improvement. Some start from a healthier baseline than others, and it also is dependent on particular people's sensitivity and how they feel in their home. But it certainly can be quite bad, but the majority of the time, there are significant areas for improvement.

**Chris Hutchins** (3:30)
And what do you hear from people that you've worked with as the result of that improvement? Is it better sleep? Is it more energy?

**Dom Francks** (3:38)
Yeah, we get a few different things. We focus a lot of our energy, not all of it, but a lot of our energy on the sleep environment. And we have absolutely had clients that have come back to us saying something like, after you took care of some of these issues in my sleep environment, I'm sleeping through the night for the first time in six or seven years. And I spent thousands of dollars on sleep therapy and all these other issues and taking meds and all these problems. And whatever you folks changed in my environment, whether it was light or air or we changed a lot of things in this person's environment, so it's hard to identify exactly what it was, was extremely beneficial for their sleep. We also hear from folks around the benefit that they feel from other issues, particularly lighting. I think that we often spend times, especially in the time that we do a lot of our work in, under lighting environments that are really harsh, can be very unhealthy, at the very least just unpleasant to be in, but can also have negative impacts on our cognition and our performance. So we hear a lot of people reporting that they feel less tired at the end of the workday, they feel a little bit more creative and find that their ability to stay focused is a little bit easier.