People spend most of their time indoors—inside their homes, classrooms, and offices. Thus, it is essential to always keep a place’s indoor air quality clean and safe for all its occupants, as indoor air pollution is one of the most detrimental environmental factors that could highly affect a person’s health. Toxins, pollutants, and allergens circulating indoors, especially Radon in homes, should be eliminated immediately by installing fresh and clean air systems and ventilation.
Through different methods of indoor air quality improvement, people can lessen the risk of acquiring different health issues associated with it. To encourage more people to improve their indoor air quality, what exactly are the health benefits they can gain? Read more to find out.
Enhances Your Sleep Quality
Even while sleeping, the human body requires a sufficient amount of clean air to breathe. Having great indoor quality, especially inside bedrooms, are vital for easy breathing without having to constrain your nose, lungs, and heart. With humid surroundings, the absence of pollutants, and proper ventilation, people can enjoy and even improve their sleep when the quality of indoor air is excellent.
Inside your bedroom, cool and fresh air is significantly related to comfort and relaxation as it has a cooling effect that positively impacts sleep. Once a person feels comfortable and relaxed in their surroundings, they’ll immediately feel better and sleepy. A drop in temperature from 1 to 2 °C increases sleepiness, as the body feels cooler and more relaxed in this kind of environment. To stimulate your mind and body to sleep better, you can use essential oils that not only provide clean surrounding air, but also fresh scents.
Moreover, breathing fresh air during the day induces greater sleep quality at night. Whenever you inhale clean and fresh air indoors, your stress and anxiety levels significantly decrease. A distracted and distressed brain because of poor air quality can give you a difficult time sleeping at night.
Less Respiratory Issues
Even though pollutants come in different sources and forms, they all cause adverse health effects. Poor indoor air quality can trigger the development of diseases and infections related to the respiratory system, which is one of the body’s first systems to react negatively towards polluted and poor indoor air quality. Among the many sources of air contaminants, here are the most prominent and harmful for human health:
- Ventilation Deficiencies: According to a study, proper ventilation can provide positive impacts to people’s health. There are different factors that contribute to ventilation deficiency like inefficient locations of ventilation devices, lack of maintenance, incompetent design and framework of filtering systems, and the like. These ventilation deficiencies can cause harmful effects to your health, especially suffocation, excessive production of carbon dioxide, and the easy transmission of communicable diseases to other people.
- Chemical Pollution: Inside kitchens, chemical pollution are mostly caused by stoves, heaters, ovens, and other appliances that involve combustion. These appliances release a considerable amount of contaminants such as carbon monoxide, nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide. Low concentrations of these pollutants can cause healthy people to suffer from respiratory issues, as well as worsen the condition of those who already have existing chronic cardiopulmonary illnesses.
- Biological Contamination: Aside from chemical pollutants that exist inside homes, fungi, molds, bacteria, endotoxins, and dust mites can highly contribute to poor indoor air quality. Cleanliness and hygiene issues are the top causes of biological contaminant accumulation. Also, organic materials found in furniture, paint, and fabrics increase the chances of fungi and molds growing inside your home. These can trigger allergies, infection, contamination, and the development of infectious diseases that are dangerous, especially for small children. To make sure that your house is free from these biological contaminants, clean your house regularly.
Reduced Headaches
Volatile organic compounds or VOCs present in indoor air can present short-term or long-term health effects. These compounds consist of a wide variety of chemicals contained in household products that mix with the air when used, or even when they’re simply stored. Inhaling VOCs can cause headaches, irritation, nausea, and loss of coordination. Prolonged exposure to VOCs plus varying levels of exposure can induce more negative health impacts such as visual disorders and memory impairment.
Therefore, great indoor quality will guarantee that VOCs and other pollutants can be immediately eliminated to reduce headaches, dizziness, and other detrimental effects of pollutants.
Conclusion
Even as people spend their time in different places every day, there’s no doubt that they’ll always end up inside their homes at night, so families should make sure that they have superb indoor air quality to guard their household from diseases that can be caused by unclean air. Always make it a point to keep your indoor air quality excellent for a clean and healthy environment.