Hello there,

What a difference one short week makes, in my last newsletter I was talking about the joys of curling up with a good book in the cold, wintery weather (you can read about it here) and now it feels positively spring-like again!

How’s your week been going? Has it been smooth sailing or a bit more up and down – like the sunshine and showers we currently have going on?

I’ve been musing about why my youngest and I both had migraines last week and why my husband and oldest also had on and off low-level headaches. Now of course we are all on computer screens a lot during our waking hours, so this is undoubtedly a factor. However, we have also all been indoors with the heating on for several weeks during the cold spell. And this reminded me about something simple we can all do now that the weather is warmer again: fling open the doors and windows and bring in some much-needed fresh air.

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Out with the stale air, in with the fresh air

When the weather is bitterly cold, it is hugely important to keep ourselves warm, so we batten up the hatches - heating up our homes and avoiding letting any cold air in. However, because our houses are constructed to keep out all the draughts, this also means that stale air containing carbon dioxide can start to build up. And research has shown that this increase in CO2 can lead to headaches, a feeling of lethargy and a decrease in our cognitive function – in other words that meh feeling! Plus it can affect the quality of our sleep, no wonder we might not currently be feeling at our best!!

Whereas letting some fresh air in, in addition to increasing the quality of our indoor air (mostly - unless we live on a busy road or in a highly polluted area), also helps us feel more energised again and with that comes more inspiration and less sluggishness, so what’s not to love about that.

Now at this point you can decide to simply open a window and move on with your day, or if you’d like to know more about the science behind this then just read on.

The common sense thinking on this subject is backed up by science and I first came across the research on indoor CO2 levels and the link to our health and mood, when I was thinking about the ventilation in my treatment room. Ventilation actually became a bit of an obsession for me last autumn, as I was thoroughly airing out my room between clients in all weathers (and then heating it back up!) I then bought a CO2 monitor after learning that this was a good way to measure ventilation in a room. This fab little monitor allowed me to experiment with how much to open the windows while with a client, to ensure we had optimal ventilation while not feeling too chilly (and I could justify buying one as a business expense!)

And while this newsletter is in no way government sponsored (for one thing all chattiness and most of the common sense would have to be removed!) CO2 did also get a mention in the SAGE recommendations last December: “Measurements of elevated CO2 levels in indoor air are an effective method of identifying poor ventilation in multi-occupant spaces.” Taken from SAGE-EMG document on the role of ventilation in controlling SARS-CoV2 transmission.

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Carbon dioxide levels

I always love trying things out for myself (once a scientist, always a scientist!), so the arrival of the new little CO2 monitor led to experiments around our whole house and all the findings did indeed back up taking a common sense approach to ventilation and fresh air. I’ll share what we found below, and the whole family got involved as there is something about seeing the numbers go up and then down on the monitor that is engaging and interesting, so it helped me get everyone onboard and not think this was another air-fairy hippy idea (they are a tough audience my family!)

Let’s first spend a few minutes going back to the basics (call it a brief biology lesson).

Carbon dioxide is a gas generated from metabolic activity. All humans and animals exhale carbon dioxide, therefore indoor spaces with multiple occupants (people and pets!) without much ventilation, will contain higher levels. However we also need to remember that carbon dioxide is plentiful in the atmosphere, and typical outdoor levels are around 400-500 parts per million (468ppm outside my house as I write this), so we would not expect to get our indoor levels below this.

Therefore because we are living, breathing creatures who have spent much of our time in our homes during this winter lockdown, it’s likely that our indoor air is currently a bit stale, especially if we share rooms with other household members for hours at a time. Now, there is certainly no need to be alarmed, the CO2 level is generally likely to be just slightly higher than is optimal and this can easily be remedied by opening a window just slightly.

Here are some suggested general guidelines for optimal (green), sub-optimal (amber) and high (red) levels of carbon dioxide in the air, measured in parts per million (ppm):

Green (optimal) : ≦700ppm

Amber (sub-optimal) : 701-1,500 ppm

Red (high) : > 1,500 ppm

Small, closed, poorly ventilated spaces often have carbon dioxide levels greater than 1,000 ppm. Unventilated bedrooms for example, often have high concentrations of CO2, especially when there is more than one occupant using the room. Typically, carbon dioxide levels rise during the night when people are sleeping, especially if the door and windows are closed. The concentrations then fall during the day if the room is unoccupied (an important consideration if your work desk is in your bedroom).

Studies have also shown that classrooms and offices often have elevated carbon dioxide levels that sometimes exceed 2,000 or even 3,000 ppm.

I’m going to just re-iterate that most of our rooms are likely to be at the higher end of the optimal level (green) or at the lower end of sub-optimal (amber), so not a big cause for concern. However, it can be helpful to identify spaces that are at the higher end of the amber zone or in the red zone as these could definitely do with an airing off and some ongoing regular ventilation.

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Testing, testing

Here is what we discovered in our own home experiments:

- Rooms that are more open plan and have air flow into other spaces have typical readings of 580 – 700 ppm e.g. my treatment room (yippee!) as it has air flow into the kitchen and dining room.

- Bedrooms of teenagers who spend a lot of their time in this space and tend to have an aversion to natural light and open windows, are typically 900-1,200 ppm (so in the amber, sub-optimal level). The solution is to get them to open their windows for 20-30 mins when they are not in the room once a day and if they are studying in their room, to pre-air it or leave the window open just a small amount while they are in there.

- Smaller, closed spaces like our living room, often start the day at around 700-800ppm and this can increase to 1,200 -1,400 if all 4 of us are watching TV together in the evening. Solution: air the room while having breakfast to prepare it for home-schooling and then keep the door open slightly into our somewhat draughty hall to help improve the ventilation.

- Well-insulated, smallish multiple occupancy spaces such as our garden cabin have the highest levels, reaching 2,200ppm yesterday when my husband and youngest were both in there on headsets talking to colleagues and friends. Solution: crack open a couple of windows in the morning and then fling them open (weather permitting!) during lunch breaks. Just by opening one window very slightly, the CO2 came down from 2,200 to 970ppm over the course of yesterday afternoon, when just my husband was in there.

- In conclusion, it doesn’t seem to take much to get the air circulating between indoors and outdoors, just opening a window slightly can be all that’s needed during the time we spend in the room. Or we can choose to fully open a window before and then after spending time in a space.

We’ll be experimenting with ventilating our entire house more over the next few months and seeing if this simple habit has any impact on feelings of sluggishness, general mood or household headaches and I’ll let you know what we observe!

There is absolutely no need to rush out and buy a CO2 monitor, you can simply open a window or door. However if you live in a household where no one takes any notice of your nuggets of wisdom, you may well find that this little monitor does all the talking for you. There are plenty of options should you want to get one, but they’re not cheap at around £70-£100. Here’s the link to the one I ended up buying which I’m very happy with.

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Now there is obviously far more to air quality, both indoors and outdoors, than just CO2 and pollen is also a factor to those of you with hayfever (although hopefully not a big issue in these winter months). So as ever, you need to weigh up the pros and cons before opening a window. However as we continue to do everything possible to drive Covid infections down, ventilation will play a big part in the coming months in homes, offices and schools. So knowing the other benefits of fresh air whenever you’re feeling a bit cold or resentful may also help reduce compliance fatigue.

I would love to see fresh air and good ventilation getting the same prominence as ‘hands, face & space” in public health messaging going forward, especially as it’s such an easy measure for us all to implement.

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Self-treatment suggestion: holding the RING FINGER

“A breath of fresh air is a great thing to take and even better thing to be”

By simply adequately ventilating our houses we can help keep them happy and healthy environments to live in.

However, we also need to consider properly ventilating our own bodies. After all we are living beings, constantly breathing in and out and we know that the CO2 level in our bloodstream plays a huge role in our own health and wellbeing.

We know for example that fast, shallow breathing makes us feel very different to slow, deep breathing and there are a plethora of breathing exercises to help retrain us – now don’t worry I’m not going to cover our breathing in this newsletter – it’s a subject that I could write an entire thesis on and we need to get on with our day! However here are a few general observations we can bear in mind:

· If we have a tendency towards fast, shallow breathing, we will still be helping ourselves feel better if each small breath contains fresh air, than if those small inhales contain stale air with higher levels of CO2.

· When we are mediating, doing a breathing practice or any type of indoor exercise, we will also help our bodies and brains perform better when we are breathing in fresh air with lower levels of CO2.

With that in mind, my self-treatment suggestion for this week is to hold your ring finger whenever your hands are free.

The ring finger helps with breathing, it helps us to release everything that we no longer need (including CO2) as we exhale, all the better to receive fresh clean air on the inhale. This finger also helps the energy centre on the occipital bones of our skull – this area is called SEL 4 in Jin Shin and is the energetic window of our body. So by holding our ring finger we are also helping to fling open our own internal windows, releasing the old and receiving the new.

So go on, do yourself a favour and fling open the windows to your house and the windows of your body and allow all the stale air, the stale thoughts and ideas, yesterday’s stale old news, to float away in the breeze. And then allow yourself to feel the benefits of the cool, fresh air - full of potential, bursting with new energy, new ideas and creativity! Popping on a hat, gloves and extra jumper is optional!

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And hold on to your hat as I have another simple challenge coming your way in next week’s newsletter, that will get our positivity and creativity flowing even more – you have been warned!

Wishing you a dynamic end to the week and a wonderful weekend.

Rosanna x