How to Make Your Home a Haven of Health and Tranquillity

Mar 30, 2020

Protective shell, safe sanctuary, calming retreat, cosy nest. Tasked with cocooning us from the threats of the outside world, in recent months our expectations of what a home needs to offer have been exalted to great heights.

Whilst we experience this collective pause, there’s perhaps never been a better time to slow down, tune in and reconnect body and mind with their surroundings.

With horizons temporarily shrunk and all attention focused indoors, we’re here to guide you on how to create a space that will support your health, calm your mind and boost your immunity.

Featuring tools and ideas to nurture wellbeing from the comfort of your home, here’s 5 ways to make your days indoors as revitalising and uplifting as possible:

Create an at-home spa experience

How to Make Your Home a Haven of Health and Tranquillity

With actual spas shut for the foreseeable and social distancing making massages a no-no, now’s the time to administer a dose of at-home pampering. Using non-toxic, natural ingredients and soothing self-care rituals, here’s how to create a rejuvenating spa experience in your own space:

Give yourself a facial. Brilliant Brit skincare brand Oskia makes some of our favourite clean beauty products, so it brightened our day to discover their IGTV channel, ⁽¹⁾ which includes how-to videos on easy at-home facial, lift and lymphatic drainage massage techniques. No beauty therapist required!
Incorporate glow-inducing oils into your routine. Try: avocado oil to encourage collagen production, Rosehip oil for glow (thanks to its high content of vitamin C and A), Tamanu oil for scarring, Chia seed oil to build a stronger skin barrier, Grapeseed oil as an antioxidant and multi-tasking Marula oil for just about anything.
Make a dreamy natural body scrub. Try adding Dead Sea Salt or brown sugar to organic coconut oil for a deeply exfoliating experience that will leave your skin radiant. The glycolic acid in brown sugar removes dry patches, whilst mineral-rich Dead Sea Salt helps to detoxify and cleanse.
Unwind with scent. Mark the evenings by lighting a scented candle – but make it natural. Many candles are made from paraffin wax, which is toxic to inhale and creates wall-staining black smoke. Opt for clean-burning, sustainable soy or palm instead. Essential oils are another great alternative and can be used in an oil burner or doted on radiators to fill your home with fragrance.
Try a Manuka face mask. Packed with antibacterial properties, Manuka honey makes an incredibly effective facemask. Simply apply the honey, relax for 30 mins, and rinse with warm water to reveal baby-soft skin. For added glow, remove the mask using a muslin cloth.

Bask in the healing heat of a portable, at-home Sauna

How to Make Your Home a Haven of Health and Tranquillity

How would you like to have your own personal wellness sanctuary, to retreat to whenever you want?

With a SaunaSpace near infrared sauna, you get to enjoy all the benefits of natural thermal light therapy from the comfort of your own home. Bask in its radiant warmth as often as you like, and relish being able to hop into your own shower when you’re done.

Portability is not something people usually associate with a sauna, and yet each component of a SaunaSpace sauna – from the wooden stool to the canvas cover – is lightweight, meaning the whole thing can be set up quickly in almost any location you choose. When you’re ready to get your glow on: simply turn your sauna on, jump in, and enjoy.

We firmly believe that SaunaSpace make the best near infrared saunas on the market today, which is why we’re so excited to bring you their Faraday and Luminati models in the Conscious Spaces shop.

Here’s just some of the health benefits associated with a sauna (which you could be enjoying from your own front room):

Boosted immunity & increase in infection-fighting white blood cells
Improved sleep quality
Superior relaxation and stress relief
Increased fat burning and reduced cellulite
Skin purification and rejuvenation
Full-body detoxification
Accelerated wound healing and tissue repair

Owning a sauna may sound like a luxury, but, if now isn’t a good time to invest in your health – well – when is?

Catch up on sleep (guard your sleep too)

How to Make Your Home a Haven of Health and Tranquillity

A tired body means a body that is more susceptible to viruses.

One study ⁽²⁾ last year found that lack of sleep impaired the disease-fighting ability of certain specialised immune cells, called T cells. By contrast, a good night’s sleep boosted the T cells’ effectiveness.

Prof. Arne Akbar, president of the British Society for Immunology, explains that ⁽³⁾ our “natural biorhythms are, to some extent, dictated by sleep”. “If you’ve got a regular sleep pattern”, Akbar says, “you have natural body rhythms and everything’s fine. If they go out of kilter, then you’ve got problems”.

One thing that’s guaranteed to mess with your natural body rhythms? Blue light.

Emitted by our phone, TV, laptop and iPad screens (which we’re all guilty of staring at for longer than usual right now), blue light disrupts melatonin production, leaving us artificially stimulated ⁽⁴⁾ and awake.

To protect yourself from blue light exposure at home and guard your precious sleep:

Use dim red lights as night lights. Red light has the least power to suppress melatonin and to affect circadian rhythm. You can find calming incandescent red bulbs in the Conscious Spaces online shop.
Avoid looking at screens for minimum one, ideally two, hours before bed. Instead of flooding your eyes with blue light (and filling your head with unsettling thoughts) by watching the 10 o’clock news, curl up with a good book instead.
Consider wearing blue-light blocking glasses. Swanwick make great glasses for both kids and adults which are ultra-effective at blocking out blue light and preventing all the associated negative health effects. Find them in the Conscious Spaces shop now.

Feeling stressed? Soak your worries away

How to Make Your Home a Haven of Health and Tranquillity

Stressful times take a serious toll on wellbeing, leading to an overstimulated nervous system, agitated mind and disturbed sleep. In fact, elevated levels of stress hormones such as cortisol can compromise immune function, ⁽⁵⁾ leaving us more vulnerable to viruses.

When it comes to alleviating anxiety, nothing much beats a soak in a steaming-hot bath.

Dr. Barbara Kubicka, author of The Bath Project — The Art And Science Of Bathing ⁽⁶⁾ describes baths as “something easy, inexpensive and pleasurable”, which can be “brought to life with modern science”.

Rather than filling your tub with the synthetic chemicals which lurk in most mass-produced products, why not look to mother nature for inspiration instead? Here’s three of our favourite concoctions to sink into and feel our worries soak away:

Soothe a frantic mind by steeping 2 bags of chamomile tea in 100ml of hot water. Add the chamomile infusion to your bath with 200g Epsom salts and a few drops of bergamot, juniper berry and peppermint aromatherapy oils.
To boost low mood and banish negativity, try a few drops of rose Bach flower remedies along with a handful of Dead Sea salt and some ylang-ylang and orange aromatherapy oils.
For a blissful night’s sleep, soak in a tub that’s been sprinkled with organic lavender, rosemary and marjoram aromatherapy oils plus a generous handful of magnesium flakes.

Protect your body from electromagnetic radiation at home

How to Make Your Home a Haven of Health and Tranquillity

Being stuck at home all day, every day means our use of digital devices has skyrocketed.

Whether staring into a laptop screen for a work video conference, glued to news updates on our phones, going square-eyed from series-binging on Netflix or catching up with friends via video call, we’ve never been more reliant on technology to keep us connected.

But what effect is this increased exposure to electromagnetic radiation (which is emitted by all wireless devices) doing to our health?

We already know that electromagnetic fields can cause us serious harm (take a look at our articles on EMFs here), with scientific research demonstrating the damage EMFs can do to our brain function, ⁽⁷⁾ cells, ⁽⁸⁾ organ systems, ⁽⁹⁾fertility, ⁽¹⁰⁾ liver ⁽¹¹⁾ and memory. ⁽¹²⁾

Here’s 4 ways to protect yourself from electromagnetic radiation at home:

Create a true sanctuary by reducing the harmful effects of EMFs with Qi-Technologies protection devices. Sold in our Conscious Spaces shop, Qi-Tech products have been scientifically proven to protect against the effects of EMF, Wi-Fi and 5G, and are recommended for the improvement and maintenance of wellbeing. For personal protection to carry between rooms, we recommend the Qi-Shield. If you want a device to protect your whole family and home, we’d go for the static Qi-Home Cell.
Lay off the unnecessary appliances or smart tech. Do you really need to send messages from your smart watch, or make to-do lists using your Alexa? Limit your use of ‘nice to have’ but non-essential gadgets that pulse your body with EMF radiation.
Think carefully about where you keep your router. Store it as far away as you can from where you spend the majority of your time, avoid keeping it in your bedroom and always turn it off at night.
Move from wireless to wired. The more wires you use with your equipment, the more EMF radiation will be contained; preventing it from infiltrating your space. Where possible (e.g. keyboard, mouse, speaker, home phone) swap to wired options.

You can find all of the products mentioned in this article in our online wellbeing store:

Browse SaunaSpace home saunas and light therapy products here

Discover Swannies blue light blocking glasses here

Shop Qi-Technologies EMF protection here

Need some expert attention?

Receive personalised solutions and advice on how to create revitalising living environments with our tailored home consultancy service. Placing your health and home at the forefront with our exclusive, bespoke approach, we endeavour to really get to know you and understand your individual concerns, needs and aspirations.

Learn more about Conscious Spaces home consultancy services here

How to Make Your Home a Haven of Health and Tranquillity