Understanding preventative measures for health and being prepared with practical tools can greatly enhance our lives on many levels. It is truly incredible what we can change with the right knowledge and a little creativity. There are many factors that influence our respiratory health, which in turn can lead to other health ailments. Being sure that your home air is clean and that you are getting enough oxygen into your body through proper breathing techniques can be a profound way of averting potential issues.

Airborne contaminants have been associated with lowered IQ and cognitive impairment.  Cleaning the air in classrooms as well as a home can make a big difference. Improve the air circulation in your home and classrooms for less than $100. You can even have some fun with this and teach a child how to make something useful.

The Corsi-Rosenthal box is a HEPA unit made from box fans and MERV 13/14 filters. These are much less costly than most HEPA units and quite effective. I have had two box fans with MERV 13 filters running in our Arizona room for years. During our wildfires, the filters were extremely black and laded. They looked like a dryer filter you hadn’t cleaned in 6 months! I believe they took an enormous load off the better and much more expensive air filters we run in our HVACs and throughout the home. These are now being used in classrooms throughout the country to help with improving air quality.

Recent research compared commercial air purifiers to DIY air cleaners.  They found that a DIY air cleaner prepared by attaching a single 2-inch MERV 13 or 4-inch MERV 14 HVAC filter to the back of a 20-inch Lasko box fan had an estimated CADR of 243 cfm with the 2-inch filter or 343 cfm with the 4-inch filter. That is comparable to a commercial air purifier such as the Coway Airmega 300 run at a speed of 3. The cost is about $50 to $500. Perhaps a local Home Depot would donate fans and filters, and a group could make and distribute them fast to address air quality in the face of natural disasters. Creating this “deluxe” 5 filter model is on my fun project list but seems the one filter models I use are pretty good.

Click here for an instructional DIY video by This Old House.

Ensuring your indoor air is clean will improve your health in numerous ways. However, it is just as important to be sure you maintain a strong connection to your breath itself. Breath is a way to connect to our body through the autonomic nervous system. Most of us are on autopilot when it comes to communicating with our bodies. That changes when the body starts acting up with pain and dysfunction. However, it’s a good habit to say hello to your body at least once a day by focusing on breathing, rather than making our body shout to get some attention.

Medicine focuses on the presence of a breath or not. However, attention to how you are breathing allows the discovery of an incredible tool that we all have to improve our health and energy. The videos below provide fundamental knowledge on breathing as well as exercises for getting in touch with your breath and strengthening that connection over time.

The Right Way to Breathe by Patrick McKeown

Coronavirus (Covid19) Recovery Breathing Exercises by Patrick McKeown

With all that’s going on in the world, it is important for us to remember the immense healing potential of the body and that there are countless tools for health and wellbeing we can implement in our day to day lives. These are just a few tips related to respiratory health that can enhance both your physical health and mental clarity. I’ll be sharing more tools for your wellness toolkit in coming months through newsletters and my YouTube channel. Have a happy, healthy month ahead and stay tuned for more suggestions on ways to reclaim greater states of wellbeing!