If you or your family has ever faced a health scare from mold, Lyme disease, or other chronic illness, it’s likely shaken your sense of safety. You might feel blindsided by new discoveries like toxic load, and if you’ve turned to friends and family for support, you may feel like they think it’s in your head or you’re overreacting, even if they didn’t say so.
If this is you, it’s not your fault.
The truth is, there’s always something affecting your health, and it’s not possible to fix it all. To try, it’s just overwhelming, not to mention costly. That’s why in this blog post, I’m going to show you the three things to make smarter decisions.
1. Get buy-in by focusing on a few things
The number one problem I see when someone learns their home is affecting them is that they immediately start worrying about their spouse and friends and how they’re being impacted and try to educate and convince them to make a hundred changes at once. Unfortunately, it’s not well-received, and they’re looked at as if they’re crazy, making it clear they’re not going to get any support or buy-in from their spouse.
Before you go any further, I want you to know you’ll never be able to fix everything, and if you think you can or even try, you’ll come across as a crazy person and get overwhelmed. It’s usually one or two major things that make the biggest difference, so look for quick wins with the biggest impact. If your family and friends see a positive change in you, they’re far more likely to support or buy into anything you recommend to them, especially if you’re only recommending one or two changes for them as well.
There is no better example than Alana. She came to me feeling hopeless about ever getting better as she watched her health deteriorate and feeling helpless to do anything about it. She had been diagnosed with MS twelve years earlier and had come back full force as a beloved New York Times bestselling author, entrepreneur, co-founder of a non-profit with her husband supporting underserved communities, and mother to two high schoolers. She was on a mission to make things better. Minor symptoms, including tiredness, dizziness, brain fog, and just feeling “off,” had spiraled out of control, affecting her time with family, business, and charity work she was so passionate about, and she couldn’t ignore them. She investigated all the possibilities, running tests, consulting practitioners, and trying treatments, yet everything appeared “normal” even though she knew things were NOT normal. One of her doctors even suggested seeing a psychiatrist! She was ready to overhaul their home completely. Luckily, was around the time we started working together, and I said that sometimes, the simplest things make the biggest difference. We started searching and found a security camera near the bedroom, and she would never have guessed that it was causing this effect. And yet it was. For many people, it can be something as simple as that. You may not have a camera, it could be a speaker or a forgotten tablet, which is very simple. And that is why you may not need to fix everything.
So while I absolutely believe you could fix everything in your home, the most important thing to do, like Alana and I did, is identify the biggest issues and attack those first. Nine times out of ten, there’s usually one or two major factors that are drastically affecting you, and that’s what you need to focus on first. This simplifies it for everybody. Your spouse can get on board, it’s easier for your friends to understand, and it helps you stay laser-focused on only a few issues.
2. Focus on reducing your exposure
You might be wondering, okay, but which few things? Not knowing is what causes most people to take a scattered approach because they don’t know and try to fix everything. And the ones who decide they’re not willing to guess and want to let the data decide buy meters, which is worse because they walk around their house, watching the numbers, terrified and more confused than when they started.
The solution is to understand that the main goal is to reduce your exposure and there are many ways you can achieve this using different data points besides the meters. For example, if your laundry room has wireless appliances with high readings, it’s less concerning than a security camera near a bedroom window with much lower readings. The reason is that exposure time in the laundry room will be less than in the bedroom, where you would be constantly exposed for at least eight hours per day.
Kaci is a great example of this. She and her husband had experienced a devastating mold experience in their previous home and her health had deteriorated with dizziness, headaches, increased sensitivities, and months of testing and treatments before feeling better. They were excited for a fresh start, determined not to repeat the same experience. Within a few months of moving in their new home, she noticed minor symptoms, and as they worsened, she realized they were in certain areas of the home and affecting her in different ways. To make matters worse, she stumbled upon a bit of mold under the eaves, and decided to be proactive. Because of her previous experience, she was determined to be smarter and use data to show her what was happening. She and her husband purchased meters, but when they saw them, they panicked and felt more confused than before. We got to work, and she quickly realized that she had panicked over the readings without considering all of the data points and thinking through her symptoms, how she spent time in the areas she felt sick, and how often she felt triggered. Once she categorized all that information, she was able to prioritize the different areas and fix her home, and use data from her meters and her symptoms to compare before and after her adjustments. While her husband was supportive and on board, he felt better about investing in fixes that were clearly issues and based on data.
If you think you need to go out and buy meters, keep in mind that they only provide one piece of data, and you should consider multiple data points to decide on the best solution. Take a moment and think about where you’re spending time, how you feel, what you think the problem is, and then think of different ways that you can reduce your exposure and choose a solution.
3. Break it into phases
The third problem I see is that people create a massive list and become fixated on checking off every single item, leading to unnecessary costs, feeling overwhelmed, and most people won’t tell you a lot of this isn’t even necessary. Meanwhile, new exposures quietly show up, like a wireless speaker or picture frame in the living room a family member installed, creating hidden risks because the attention is on the original list.
The solution, borrowing from the tech world, is to adopt an agile approach, which means working in small, focused steps instead of tackling everything. You prioritize the list, handle the highest-impact items first, and then revisit and reevaluate. Between each phase, you confirm the goal, what has changed, what no longer needs attention, then reprioritize and identify the next items to address. In your case, this includes new things in your home. That’s the approach I would suggest for you and why it’s so important to learn how to reassess at every phase, rather than committing to an entire list.
Melissa is a perfect example of this. See, she had, over the years, developed a significant chronic condition that kept her from working. As she recovered, she returned to work as a consultant and quickly noticed she was getting completely drained at work and exhausted at home, and it was becoming too much. Her husband was always incredibly supportive and wanted to help, but didn’t know what he could do. Once we created her report and plan with all the data we collected, it was an intimidating list that would have taken weeks to fix every single item, and she felt completely overwhelmed at the thought of tackling it all. Armed with an agile approach, she and her husband quickly identified the key items to address for the first phase, and since he was part of the decision-making process, he was fully on board with the changes. After the first phase of changes, she felt so much better with more mental clarity and energy throughout the day; they felt confident scaling back for the second phase. Within a week after the second phase, her energy levels and sleep drastically improved, and even her husband’s sleep tracker showed his sleep improved! She felt confident holding off on the remaining items, knowing from the data that they had prioritized and addressed the most important issues without spending weeks on implementing everything on their original list.
If you have a long list and feel like you’re not done until every single thing is done, you can let go of those feelings of guilt and obligation. That massive list is going to burn you out, and let’s face it, there’s always something changing or something new coming into your home. Breaking this into phases keeps the scope small, ensures you’re always focusing on the top priorities, and makes it easier to get buy-in from the rest of the household. And, you can stop when you feel you’ve done enough, even if you’ve only completed one phase.
This is how you can keep toxins from making you crazy!
Here’s a quick recap of what you’ve learned: First, there’s usually some obvious culprits, and you should focus on fixing those first instead of spending a whole bunch of money, if there aren’t some obvious culprits, then identify the data you need and spend some money on some meters, and lastly, now that you know how to interpret the data and use the meters to don’t get terrified and create a triage plan.
If you’d like a little bit of free guidance on how to hit the ground running to get rid of these things with customized advice and steps you can take immediately, then feel free to schedule a call with me here.
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