Most of us have been taught to look at our homes as static boxes—collections of walls and windows where we store our belongings and sleep between shifts at work. We think about them in terms of square footage, decor, or the monthly cost of the mortgage. But a home is never truly static. It is a biological extension of your nervous system. Every lightbulb, every fabric, and every muffled sound in your environment is sending a constant, unrelenting stream of data to your brain, telling it whether to feel safe or threatened, vibrant or exhausted.
If you have ever felt a sense of ambient anxiety—that low-level, persistent hum of stress that you can’t quite name or pin down—it might not be coming from your job or your bank account. It might be coming from the very walls around you.
We have spent the last few decades building modern homes that are efficient for the electrical grid but often toxic for the human animal. We live in spaces filled with recirculated air, synthetic materials that quietly off-gas chemicals, and lighting that mimics a mid-day sun even when the world outside has been dark for hours. We are trying to find a sense of peace inside environments that are fundamentally designed to keep our biology in a state of high alert.
