Your Home Is Affecting Your Health and You Don't Know It

A couple of years into running Lawless Design, my body started telling me something was wrong. I was exhausted and was barely sleeping a few hours a night. My hormones were off, my cortisol had crashed, and I felt like I was running on empty fueled on adrenaline. I was building a business, managing projects, showing up for clients, and quietly falling apart on the inside. My work looked great. I looked fine from the outside. I was fit, I ate well, but the problems went deeper. But I did not feel well, and I had been ignoring it for long enough that my body finally stopped letting me.

I started working with a functional medicine doctor who helped me understand what was actually happening, that years of chronic stress had depleted my cortisol, disrupted my hormones, and left my nervous system in a state of constant low grade emergency. The fix was not a single thing. It was everything. The way I was eating. The products I was putting on my skin. How I was moving, resting, and recovering. And then, almost inevitably, I started looking around at my home.

I had spent years designing beautiful spaces for other people. But I had never fully examined what my own environment was doing to my body. What was in the paint on my walls. What my cleaning products contained. Whether the light in my bedroom was actually supporting sleep or quietly working against it. Once I started asking those questions, I could not stop. And what I found changed not just how I live, but how I design for every client I work with.

I went on to become a WELL Accredited Professional, which is a credential rooted in the science of how buildings affect human health. It formalized what my own experience had already taught me: that your home is not a neutral backdrop to your life. It is an active participant in it. The materials around you, the quality of your air, the way light moves through your rooms, the flow of your space - all of it is affecting how you feel every single day. And most people have no idea.

Here is what I want you to know.

The air in your home may be more polluted than the air outside

This is the one that surprises people most. The EPA has found that indoor air can be two to five times more polluted than outdoor air, and in some cases significantly more. The sources are everywhere and mostly invisible - paint with high VOC content, synthetic flooring, furniture made from pressed wood and adhesives, cleaning products, candles, and even certain fabrics. We seal our homes tightly for energy efficiency and then trap all of it inside.

As a WELL AP, air quality is one of the first things I think about on any project. It shapes material selections from the very beginning - the paints we specify, the flooring we recommend, the furniture we source. Natural materials age beautifully and they do not off-gas the way synthetic ones do. This is not about fear. It is about making informed choices when you have the opportunity to make them.

If you are not in the middle of a renovation, start smaller. Swap your synthetic candles for beeswax or soy. Open your windows when the weather allows. Look at what is in your cleaning products. Add plants that support air filtration. These are not dramatic changes, but they compound over time.