148: Ryan Blaser, Founder and CEO of Test My Home: Building Biology - How Your Home Enviroment Might Be Sabotaging Your Sleep!

Welcome to the sleep as a skill podcast. My name is Mollie Eastman. I am the founder of sleep as a skill, a company that optimizes sleep through technology, accountability, and behavioral change. As an ex sleep sufferer turned sleep course creator, I am on a mission to transform the way the world thinks about sleep each week.

I'll be interviewing world. class experts ranging from researchers, doctors, innovators, and thought leaders to give actionable tips and strategies that you can implement to become a more skillful sleeper. Ultimately, I believe that living a circadian aligned lifestyle is going to be one of the biggest trends in wellness, and I'm committed to keep.

You up to date on all the things that you can do today to transform your circadian health and by extension, allowing you to sleep and live better than ever before.

Welcome to the Sleep is a Skill podcast, building biology,  an entire industry that I predict is going to be huge in the very near future. It's here. It's certainly here to the point that we are doing an entire episode about exactly that. And I will say I had the privilege and honor of having our guests come in and go through my own home and give me a whole wild assessment and rundown of basically every square inch of where I reside.

And as you'll remember, we've spoken about this a lot on this podcast, our environment is key to optimizing our sleep. And to the point that it can be really problematic. What I mean by that is we know that the average American is spending over 90 percent of their time indoors actually kind of breaks down to around 93 percent inside split into an automobile as well.

And all those indoor environments can really mess with our circadian rhythm. So we want to be really aware of our environment and be intelligent and smart about it because we're spending so much time in these spaces. to the point that we really shouldn't be. So quick aside, like get ourselves outside more often, don't be part of that norm, but I get it.

We're inside a lot. So we want to do our due diligence. Now our guest is going to help guide us in the many, many aspects of what it takes to have a great indoor environment. Like what that looks like. What does that entail? We get into topics like mold, Seas, formaldehyde, you know the candles you're using, the lighting that's in your space, the air flow, the whole world of it is really, really fascinating.

Of course, since this is The Sleep Is a Skill podcast, he does a tremendous job of particularly honing in on the bedroom environment. So when he was in MySpace, he went through just about every square inch of. In the bed section around the bed, what kind of EMFs are around there, you know, the air quality, uh, it was incredible.

So we'll talk about that and more, but I want to tell you a little bit more about our guests. So Ryan Blaser is the accomplished founder and CEO of Test My Home, an environmental company dedicated to improving people's health and wellbeing. Ryan uses his expertise in building biology and healthy home consulting to identify and address toxic sources that could be impacting your health.

Ryan's extensive educational background in electrical engineering, environmental toxicology, and electromagnetic radiation combined with years of experience in industries such as mold remediation, construction, and nuclear waste cleanup has given him a deep understanding of the relationship between humans and their built environment.

After a personal wellness journey, Ryan founded Test My Home to help others achieve optimal health. He personally experienced detrimental effects of mold exposure and lead inhalation, which caused unusual and serious health symptoms like fatigue, weight loss, and brain fog. After unsuccessful attempts with conventional doctors, Ryan took the initiative to investigate his home environment and found the source of his health issues.

He cured himself and is now sharing his knowledge and experience with the world. What makes Ryan stand out is his genuine care for people and his commitment to finding real solutions. Whether you are seeking answers or simply peace of mind, Test My Home is a perfect solution and Ryan's expertise will change your life.

Now, a quick aside here, I have no financial affiliation with Test My Home, but I'm certainly very grateful for them. going through my own home environment. And one of the offerings that they have, if you're not in an area that you can take advantage of their services in real life, they do have remote offerings.

So you can walk through your home with your laptop show certain areas and they can help guide you on certain tests that you can run and certain things to be aware of. So lots of different ways to have this. topic of building biology really explored in your own world and in your life and in your home.

Now, without further ado, let's jump into the podcast. But first, a few words from our sponsors  here at the sleep is a skill podcast. We're all about enhancing your sleep. And a cornerstone of that journey often revolves around stabilizing your blood sugar levels. That's precisely where good idea steps in.

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Now invest in better sleep and in turn in a better, more energized life.  As we head into the fall and vacation season winds down, i. e. a time when late nights, irregular eating habits, and indulgence tend to become the norm, it's time to get back on track with our health and of course, our sleep. Just a quick, interesting fact about sleep to mention, drinking more than two servings of alcohol per day for men and more than one serving per day for women can decrease sleep quality by 39.

2%. A sleep foundation survey reports, not even mentioning all the indulgent food and late night effects that often come along with it. And as we know, sleep is the key to your body's rejuvenation and repair process. It controls hunger and weight loss, hormones, boost energy levels and impacts countless.

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This special offer is only available at  magbreakthrough. com forward slash sleep as a skill. I will also include this in the show notes as well.  Welcome to the sleep as a skill podcast. My guest today is Ryan Blazer. Ryan, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. It is such an honor. I have had so much fun, curiosity, fascination, intrigue, all the states with you when you came over.

to my space, went through my home, and completely just turned my world upside down of what's working, what's not working, and how that impacts my biology, my husband's biology, people that come to be in our space, and it just is so, so groundbreaking, so I'm so happy to have you here today to speak more in depth about that.

Yeah, thanks for having me for sure. Oh, thank you. Yeah, you know, I was really struck by just what felt like a personal passion or mission for you. Like it doesn't feel as if it's a job per se for you. It was my experience. It felt like this is something that you feel deeply about and have had benefits yourself in your life is my understanding.

So I'm wondering if you can share a little bit about. how this plays into your life and how you found yourself in this role of the owner and founder of this company Test My Home and how this came to be. Explain what happened there. Yeah, you know, I've always been fascinated about how our bodies interact with the environment around us and I've been somewhat of a biohacker myself trying to get the most out of life.

Live the best life possible and and looking at the environment and having different jobs in different industries. I saw there's really nobody out there. That's looking out for our best interest when it comes to indoor environment. You know, we think about environment stuff. Think about outside the trees, the ocean, the air quality, but a lot of times we're not thinking about the most important environment and that's Inside of our home, we always spend 90 percent of our lives inside of a building.

Either it's our work or a car or our home, but how many of us are really paying attention to that specific environment and how it's interacting with the body. And you know, about 10 12 years ago, I was living in a home that had ended up having a bunch of black mold in it, had some heavy metal toxicity. I got really, really sick and it became a And from a job, it turned into more of a passion, like, wow, this is something that's really affecting people and a lot of people don't know it.

Millions and millions of people are walking around sick as can be, have no idea what it is. And a lot of times it's something simple as a change in their environment can fix it for them. And so we created this company to help bridge that gap and reach out to all these people that are suffering out there, uh, or people that just want to optimize their life.

They just want to level up. Uh, there's so many improvements you can do. just in your home environment, just like what you're doing with sleep. The same thing. There's all these so many improvements we can do to get a better outcome for our life and level up. Ah, absolutely. And this is so crucial. One of the places that I begin in most of my presentations when I speak to this concept of sleep being a skill is I really begin with the fact that what I believe one of the biggest challenges is that I referenced this study out of the EPA back in 2001, where we discovered that the average American was spending around 93 percent of their time indoors.

And with that, we can probably make the assumption that it's gone up, if anything, or certainly at least stayed the same since then. So having said that, part of the problem is the fact that we are in these indoor environments, devoid of the rhythms of nature, the fresh air, being outside. And by bringing ourselves indoors so, so often, this is where we start to see our sleep patterns start to go awry.

And a lot of. deleterious effects. So this is a big deal. And so starting there, you have created a system where you can help support people in basically every square inch of their home, understanding what's there, what's working, what's not working. And my understanding is you have around these six different key categories that you think about.

I'm wondering if you can help, you know, walk us through that. So for those that are new to this conversation can have some understanding of what this would look like. Right. So when we go into someone's home environment or work environment, we're addressing six key things. We're looking at the air quality, the air we breathe in, super important.

We're looking at the chemical exposure, the off gassing of the homes, the chemicals we are potentially putting on our bodies or that we're cleaning with or fragrances. Uh, we're looking at potential mold issues. Mold's a huge underestimated pandemic of our time right now. It's making a lot of people sick and that comes from water damage from leaks.

Then we're gonna address the water that you're drinking inside the home. We get a lot of chemicals. We get a lot of pharmaceuticals. We get a lot of heavy metals that come through the water from the tap. Also, exposure from showering and bathing. Then we're gonna address the lighting. The lighting in your case.

Circadian rhythm is extremely important. We get our cues from when to sleep from the light. Uh, and then also we address the EMF exposure, the technology that we have in our house, the electronics, uh, we assess how much exposure you're getting from those things. So once we go through those 6 topics pretty thoroughly, you know, we do all of the stuff we do is completely science based.

It's all laboratory based. Uh, we send samples into the data, uh, sorry, we take samples, we send those into the laboratory to get the data. And then once we have all the results back, we come up with a comprehensive plan. To help you optimize your home, which in turn optimizes your health. Oh, so good. Yeah.

When you came here, it was fascinating because you gave me an entire packet of MySpace and color coded so I can understand kind of where MySpace fell on those spectrums in those different categories. Really, really fascinating and So in my experience, what my space was like was there were a lot of workable things in certain areas.

And then the one that really stuck out for me was the EMF output being in an urban environment and being in a high rise and just the many things that, you know, want to be mindful of with that and having those numbers or something really helpful to have that thing, the objective measurement tool to, to really point to, and then know what we're dealing with and then what.

items individually are impacting those results. You did a great job with itemizing and helping me to be responsible for different parts in the space that are really high offenders, so that I can kind of adjust those accordingly and certain things I could do. So, Saying that I think that was one of the big takeaways for me was feeling really empowered, not just at the effect of that.

There's lots that we can do. So I'm wondering if you can take us through. So say you get someone that is dealing with sleep difficulties or issues and they've reached out to you. And I'm wondering if you can kind of help us get in your brain a little bit about what are some of the things that you might be considering or really mindful of for them to help optimize their sleep experience.

Because I love what you did with the bedroom. You had like, every square inch was addressed. So if you can guide us on that. Yeah, you know, that's a big part of when we go into the home as we talk about some of the health symptoms that they're dealing with and what is their goals? What are we trying to work on?

And so if sleep is one of those, then some of the things that we address is, uh, air quality is a big one. So if we have allergens in the room, if we have poor air quality, if we have high CO2 levels, we're not getting fresh air. The body's going to respond to that. You're going to be Coughing, sniffling, and stuffy nose and runny eyes throughout the night.

That's obviously, you're not going to get in a very deep sleep state when you're coughing all night long. So addressing the air and making sure that we have pure, clean air to breathe is a really big, important one. Also, lighting. Lighting is a big one. Uh, the circadian rhythm, making sure that We don't have that harsh blue lighting that they're turning on in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom or even before bed.

And, you know, once the sun goes down, we want to make sure we're having those, the amber color, the red colored lighting, also making sure the intensity is down. So making sure they have the proper lighting in their room, um, to, to prep for bedtime. And then also in the morning time, you know, what kind of lighting are we being exposed to right off the bat and also how much natural sunlight are we getting in?

So once we address the lighting and I go through all of that and we give them some good takeaway tips and answers that they can implement. But then also the technology exposure in the bedroom. That's a really big one. So we like to make an eight foot bubble around the bed and make that a technology free zone.

You know, sometimes when we have like the chiller pads or the rulers of those things, we can put extensions on those to where the brain of that the pump is is outside of that 8 foot bubble and it's pumps that water in and cools the bed. So you can still have that good technology. But we want to keep cell phones, lamps, chargers.

Um, you know, Lexus, things like that that have a high E M F output. We want to make sure that that's not in and around the sleeping area. That's significantly impacting our brain patterns and also what's on the other side of the wall. We gotta think about that as well. We have a refrigerator, a washing machine or your power panels on the other side or what's below your bed.

So Looking around the other sides of the rooms as well to make sure we don't have that impact. So like in your case, we did specific readings throughout the room and around the bed at all these different energies to see what's actually impacting the body in those areas. So I would say those are the probably the three biggest things.

Of course, mold's always there, but those are the three biggest ones when we're trying to help people get into that good sleep pattern.  And could you share too, I remember you were mentioning magnetism being something that you consider and that's one of the pieces that you might have people even, so there's so many things that people can do, but certain things that can kind of be deal breakers.

I wonder if you can share more about that consideration too. Yeah, so alternating magnetic fields comes from motors. It comes from high voltage power lines. It comes from your power panel. And what that does, it sends a 60 cycle magnetic wave through the air, positive, negative, alternating, um, polarity, and that interacts with the iron in our blood.

It also interacts with the heavy metals in our blood, and it also creates little micro currents in our nervous system. So, yeah. You know, we don't necessarily a lot of times think of our bodies as electrical beings, but we totally are our heart, our brain, our nervous system. It all works on these electrical impulses.

And so if we overlay that with these artificial frequencies, these artificial magnetic waves that can have a big interference with the body. In fact, the body can sense that. There's something going on and you get in that fight or flight mode when you get in these high magnetic fields. So we want to make sure that our background levels in the house, like we do, we turned all the circuits off and we did a measurement.

We said, okay, what's coming from the neighbors? What's coming from outside? That's impacting your living space. And if you're correct, if those levels are too high, and there's nothing we can do about that, that's okay. Kind of a deal breaker. You might want to look for a different place to spend your time because ultimately if you're in these magnetic fields long enough, you can develop tumors, cancers and some pretty serious neurological issues.

There's a lot of studies that are out on this. It's not like it is a question anymore. There's so many studies that are proving this and the World Health Organization has classified it as a class to be carcinogen as well. Okay, so This is so helpful too, because when we think about our sleep environment, because sometimes we might get pushback from people throughout the rest of their day, things that they want to still have access to the laptop, the phone, the etc.

And it's something that we could address for an entire podcast episode in and of itself. But even just to begin with the sleep environment, I feel that there's absolutely every argument to be made that for that time that you've set aside the seven to nine hours or what have you, that you are meant to be restoring your body and sleeping.

It's a hard argument to win that you require to have all those extra electronics around you and. those added things that could be impairing your recovery. So, are there certain key components that you like to see for a kind of healthy sleep bedroom environment from like the moment you open the door, when you look at a space, are there certain things you're like, oh geez, okay, are there certain things that you see or?

would share for people to make sure unequivocally that they do XYZ. Yeah, you know, compartmentalizing your time in these fields and compartmentalizing the areas of your house is really important. You know, we talked about this a little bit about your home and every area has a specific purpose. And so the bedroom is for sleeping and for adult time.

And so we should only have things in that room that have to do with those two things. And if not, then you're distracting and you're taken away from the purpose of that room. So that shouldn't be a room for doing work. It shouldn't be a room for, um, meals or eating or arguing with your spouse or any of that.

It should be kept more sacred. And so only have things in there that have to do with the, with those. And so. Uh, also the time, like you mentioned, we don't necessarily need to have all this technology while we're sleeping. And some people say, well, I got a job. I got to make sure someone calls her. I got a parents that are older.

I need to keep track of them. Well, you can get a landline and you can set that up out in your living room and set the ringer to high, you know? And so if, if somebody can still get ahold of you, you don't need to be sleeping on your cell phone, so you can turn these devices off and make that more of a sacred area.

Absolutely. And do you suggest to, for people, I know for some people it's still new the concept of say they go to a hotel and just have a certain protocol like unplugging certain things around them or are there certain things that you would suggest for people to just always do whether they're at another, you know, an Airbnb space or a hotel where their own?

Yeah, I mean, first thing I do when I go into a hotel or Airbnb is I open up all the windows and doors and flush out all the air, because it's usually had a bunch of nasty cleaning supplies or fragrances or blade plugins. And so I always flush out the air and we'll start with fresh air. And then, yes, around the bedding area.

If we got the lamps and the alarm, all this stuff, I just unplug them or move them across the room. I can still hear the alarm clock. If it's sitting over in the bathroom, it doesn't need to be right next to my head. Also make sure I'm charging my phone, uh, on the other side of the room. And I'm just keeping that space around the bed, uh, EMF free or electronic free.

Okay, really clever and smart to think about it in that way. The other thing that you did too, which I thought was really interesting, was for the bedroom space, you even had this kind of like diagram of going through every corner of the bed and you're testing. I mean, you're not just like feeling the energy.

You have a lot of gear worth a lot of money that you're bringing into the space. What are some of those things and is there one piece of tech that you would suggest that people might want to invest in to begin for embarking on this journey themselves? Yeah, you know, like we mentioned, we're science based.

Everything we're using meters and equipment is calibrated. It's all professional stuff. And if you're going to start out with a meter, I would recommend the safe and sound pro, um, and it's something you can order off of our website. And that's going to tell you radio frequency energy. It's going to tell you, uh, the devices that, Okay.

Put off wireless energy are going to be all of the fun toys. We like like the Wi Fi and the Bluetooth and the cordless phones and things like that. So you can pull that out and it gives you a number but also gives you a color code. So green is healthy. Yellow is caution. Orange is bad. Red  wouldn't want to stay in that room too long.

So you can pull that meter out and you can see what your exposure levels are in a certain area. Other than that, it's really hard to know. And so that I would recommend would be the first thing again. Yeah, I definitely recommend Ryan's store on his page, tons of really helpful things and a lot of them really pretty affordable and can solve major problems.

Like, so one of the things that I pretty much immediately after you left was went to your store and then got myself hardwired options for my laptop and to start really getting connected to that. Now, I'm still, I need to get better at always doing this. That is something from a. habit change perspective.

I need to always be doing this. But when I do it, it is fantastic. And that was not that expensive of a thing to bring about. And that's one of the many things that's on that store that have you thinking a little bit differently about the ways that you can take action and that you're not at the effect of.

There's many, many things that you have us think about depending on if you're living long term in your space, if you're going to be spending many years there, if it's short term thing, or I think you prefer if we're building from the ground up and actually addressing all these things from the start, which feels like a really important new industry to come that I'm excited that you're on the forefront of this kind of world of building biology.

So I wonder if you can speak to that too. So for people That say, Oh, I would really like to create an optimal sleep environment and begin at the blueprint level. What does that process look like? Is that something that you help people with or how can they kind of be educated there? Yes, we used to do consulting for new builds, but we're trying to focus in on just testing.

It's gotten so big and we're trying not to be too broad and we're really just focused on testing at this point. Um, although I love doing that and maybe in the future once. Everything is set up with testing. I can branch out to another vertical and do healthy home consulting because that is amazing to be able to start from fresh from ground up and build the ultimate sanctuary.

The clients I have done that for have seen so much success with their health. It's probably the number one thing that's changed their health out of everything they've done. And so, you know, I would recommend there's a book called Prescription for a Healthy Home. It's kind of the Bible to go by. Paula Baker Lepore wrote it.

It's super, super good. Also, you know, if you're really serious about it, the Building Biology Institute has a course on healthy building. Um, I think it's 5, 000 and it includes a seminar, a week long seminar and a bunch of online training. Totally worth it. I'd recommend taking that course before you build your home and read that book.

And it's going to give you a ton of direction, uh, save you a lot of money as well. Brilliant. Okay. Fantastic. And to that point, I love that you use the word sanctuary. Additional things from the sleep perspective. Some questions that will get asked are around grounding mats on the top of their bed, Faraday cage, just kind of sleep in different protective sheets for  EMFs or various air purifiers.

So kind of running us through, are there certain things that you like to see in a optimized sleep environment? Now, of course, I understand that this depends on what they're dealing with and their biggest kind of pain points after you've tested for everything, but how do you feel about some of those things?

Yeah, it is. You know, and it's about meeting the client where they're at. Everybody's on a different level and different directions and goals that they want to have. Some people were just trying to get their phone on airplane mode, get things away from the bed. Other people like at our house, we're turning the power off at night to NASA area.

And then my kids, my kids are, all the circuits are hooked up to a relay. We're at nine o'clock, the A whole power shuts off to their side of the house, and then at six in the morning, it kicks back on. It does it automatically every night, um, on our side of the house, my bedroom, we have a remote control switch.

So that when we're done for the night, we hit the button and it powers everything down. Now, during the day, I'm running the air purifiers in the room. I'm purifying the air. Uh, I think you had, uh, Mike from Jasper on. Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Really, really good air filter. I got one of those. Um, but when I go into the room, I'm powering everything down because I like it super quiet.

Some people like the white noise and I prefer everything really quiet. So by the time I've gone in there and that filter has been running all day long, my air is super pure, super clean. And then I'm relying on my home system to continue filtering throughout the night. I run that on, on all night long. So it's continually filtering through my HVAC system.

Okay. And so for most people living in the modern types of spaces that most of us are a part of, you know, newer builds, an air purifier is kind of an essential at this point. Yeah, it's, you know, clean water, clean air, clean food, clean thoughts. Those are my four pillars that I always, it's like the basics.

Those are the must, you have to be doing those things. That's the bottom line. And so most majority of the water that comes out of our taps these days are, is not fit to drink, unfortunately. You know, we heard about the thing with the, in Ohio, with the train derailment that has been going on for the last a hundred years.

That's nothing new. It's been going on. There's always something that's polluting or putting in our water. So you have got to be filtering your water. Uh, that you're drinking and same thing with the air. Unfortunately, our air, it has become cleaner in some areas, but in a lot of places, they're pushing the EPA limits.

You know, I used to work for Department of Environmental Quality, and I'd get on a phone call every morning with a bunch of regulators throughout the state, and they would determine how much pollution could be put into the air every day. Based on the EPA limits, and then we would have to go to the different polluters and say, okay, you guys can do 20, 000 pollution units today, or you only do five units today because there's a fire upstream, but they're always pushing the levels to what the government would consider safe.

And so to have an air filter in your home is a must these days.  Filter your water filter. It's a must. You gotta have that stuff. Oh, fantastic. And unfortunately, one of the things that you were walking me through was that it's not always the solution depending on where people are. It's so contextual because they might not be able to just open the windows or the doors because the air quality might.

not be great outside. And you had some resources. I'm wondering if you have those top of mind that you had shared. There's different websites that you really suggested people utilize to kind of one, check in routinely on the air quality outside. Two, to be able to look at kind of EMFs in your area. There are certain resources that you seem to utilize quite a bit.

Yeah, uh,  Breezometer. com, but there's also an app, Breezometer, it's wonderful, it tells you the pollen levels, it tells you the PM10, the PM2. 5, the pollution levels, puts it on a map, you put in your address, and you can scan it, it's amazing. And then, uh, for EMF levels, you can look at MapRad, M A P R A D dot I O, and then you put in your address, and it will tell you all the cell towers, the 5G.

All the communication towers within your area. And I remember when we looked up yours, you're right in the middle of downtown Austin. So it was pretty, pretty wild. Yes. All the towers you had around you. Oh, man. And then I remember even looking after that, I have a long history of this because then I looked at my old spot in Manhattan and then even more crazy.

So all of these urban environments to be mindful of is really, really important. And you helped us kind of walk through like, what are our options around that? What can you do? What are you really at the effect of and how can you navigate all that? You mentioned grounding mats and Faraday cages. I want to talk on those real quick too.

So, in a situation like you, where you're in the middle of the city, you're in a high rise, you got a ton of neighbors, and you don't really have control, but you love your area, you got a beautiful spot, and you're super sensitive or wanting to sleep better,  sleeping in a Faraday cage, Can be a really good idea to help block out a lot of those radio frequencies that are coming from the outside.

Uh, one thing to keep in mind is you've got to make sure we have some sort of a system that's getting fresh air in there because we can build up CO2 levels. Wondering about that. Yeah, get kind of muggy and hot. So.  So it's kind of a little bit tricky to make all that work because we're trading one problem for another sometimes when it comes to those things.

But if you're super sensitive to EMF and you're in an area that can be a quick fix, quick band aid, just sleeping in a tent. Um, it's not too bad. Another thing with the grounding mats that we need to talk about that a lot of people are using these wrong because there's two different things here that people are talking about.

There's something called earthing and that's the therapeutic. Uh, version. That's when you go outside and you put your feet on the ground. You walk on the beach barefoot and you're physically connected with earth. Okay, that's called earthing. That's really good for you. That's very therapeutic. Now the second thing grounding is something that's in the electrical system of your building.

So the ground of your building is what protects you from shock and from lightning. So all of the devices like your fridge, your vacuum, you plug it in, it has a ground plug that shunts all the electricity to ground. If there was to be some kind of a fault situation. Now, a lot of the grounding systems, especially in the city or in a high rise are not perfectly pure and they're not, uh, they don't have a good, strong connection to earth.

And so people will plug themselves into that thinking that they're okay. Earthing, but what they're really doing is they're grounding themselves. They're physically connecting their bodies to the electrical grid of their building, which is not a good idea because there's a lot of interference, what they call dirty electricity that is on that grounding rod on the grounding system of the building, and it's not a good idea to connect your body to all of that interference.

The second thing that's bad about that is that now you've just created yourself. Uh, turn yourself into a lightning rod, so to speak, you're like a grounding rod. So if you have electronics around you in the bed of the light or your phone's plugged in, and now you're laying on a grounding mat, you're making yourself a path for those electrons to get back down into the grounding system.

And so it's not a good idea to ground yourself to the electrical system. So like in a situation like yours, it's almost impossible to ground earth correctly. You just need to go out on the grass, go for a walk and get it out in the park. Right. Yeah. So with that, you would say, so in my case, it's in a high rise.

And so for anyone listening, that's also in a high rise. It's just, you're not going to be able to physically ground outside to the earth or, you know, connect to the earth, then do you, it's the kind of the hard and fast way of thinking of this is it's just not going to work to ground those kind of attempts are just going to be kind of ill fated.

Yeah, it's probably not a good idea for you to connect into a grounding mat when you're up on it and think about like a bird that's sitting on the electrical wire is not getting shocked because he's not touching ground. Now, if that bird were to reach out and touch some ground or earth, then it would get electrocuted because now it would be a path back to.

Earth. Now, yes, that's why you don't want to connect yourself to ground because now you would be completing the circuit and putting yourself in line so that those electrons have a path to get back to earth and you're going to put microcurrents through your body. You don't want to do that. And is there room for so for people that are well, I'm not in a high rise.

I'm just, you know, right on ground level for those ground level people. Is that an approach that you would suggest or more layered? When we do it for clients, if you want to earth inside your home, you have to turn the circuits off to that bedroom. So, I took a client in Austin, he's another podcast I went on, we did a lot of work with him and his home.

And we turned the circuits off into his bedroom, and then we ran a grounding rod to earth. So, in, we dug the, put the stake into the earth, ran the wire into his room, and put it, connected it with his sheets.  But all of the electricity in the whole room was off at night when he was sleeping. So now he was physically, electrically connected to the earth.

But he was not connected with the electrical system of the home, the electrical system was turned off. And so that's a proper way to, to earth if you want to do it inside your home. A lot of these things, people are looking for a quick fix and get around. Honestly, it's best just to go to the park, go to the beach.

Take off your shoes and walk around, go out on the grass. Okay. It is really hard to, it's really hard to replicate that and to get away from that. Uh, so wise, if we're going to do that, we'd wanna do it in the manner that you spoke to, that we're really physically getting ourselves connected to the earth if we're trying to do it in the bed.

But for the most part, if you're dealing with that, we wanna just make it a routine to get ourselves grounded throughout an earth throughout the course of the day. Correct. Yeah. Okay. Got it. Are there other pieces that you think of when you're thinking of optimizing for sleep in particular? Any other call outs or concerns that you have or kind of best practices that you like to see for people to think about their sleep environment?

Another one we didn't really talk about is sound and vibration. That's another one. Some sometimes people, you know, if you're living in inner city and you got noise, sometimes people like the white noise and maybe you can even get more insight on this than me. Because I found that some people like to have white noise and they almost can't sleep without the background noise.

Yeah, some people like quiet. So I grew up out in the country, out in the wilderness. And so I'm used to quiet. So I need quiet to sleep.  So making sure that we don't have any. weird vibrations or low level frequencies going on in the house that can disturb your sleep. And sometimes maybe, maybe the HVAC system has a whine to it that you can't really consciously think of, but it's there.

And then at night, every time it kicks on, it disturbs your sleep. So you look at your aura ring, then you get, you know, every, you get this disturbance. Like what is that? That could be these frequencies that are kicking on throughout the house. So it's good to monitor that and also be aware of those as well.

Sure. Okay. Really fantastic. Well, one of the things that we've seen is that throughout the course of this podcast that people want to know for people like yourself who have thought deeply about your area of study and how this so profoundly impacts your sleep, they want to know, well, what is, what is that person doing?

What are they doing? So they're definitely going to want to know what is Ryan doing to optimize his environment. And I think you even, did you mention that you might have like an Airbnb too that you're optimizing? Was that? Something that's still happening. Yeah, no, we do. We have a, we have an Airbnb that's totally emf free.

It's the correct lighting. It's got air purifiers. It's got water purifiers, viewers, organic. Uh, sheets and natural cleaning supplies. It's uh, really a true, um, healthy home. Okay, so If you ever come into Boise, look us up and come stay there.  Totally, because I mean, I just would love to see that be a chain, like, offering.

I think a lot of people would Be willing to pay a little bit more to ensure that they're having all of those things, kind of all those boxes checked. So that's super exciting. And then in your world and how you're managing your sleep, I'm super curious. So your nightly sleep routine, what might we see for you kind of in the steps that you're taking?

Or maybe what we want see is impactful as well. . Yeah. You know, and it starts during the day with the air quality. We have the air filter in there running full blast, filtering the air in the bedroom. We have a Merv 16. filter for our HVAC system that's always on. It doesn't, it's not on auto. It's always constantly running.

We have an electrostatic filter to pull out, pull out fine particles as well. And then we also have an HRV system, which is bringing fresh filtered air and piping it into the house, into the bedroom. So when. We go into the room at night to sleep. It's, it's pure, clean, filtered, fresh air right from the start.

So that's the first thing we do, um, lighting. We start, uh, earlier in the day as throughout the day. We have, we have three different sets of lights at our house. So we have what's called our utility lights. That's going to be our can. That's the full spectrum light. Those are on during the day. Once the sun starts to go down, those are off.

Those are no longer on anymore. We switch over to our transition lights and that's going to be more of our amber color amber colored lights. Yes. about medium intensity, not as high as the daytime lights up until about two hours before bed. And then those lights go off and we have our nighttime lights and that's more of our oranges and reds at super low intensity.

Um, getting our eyes and our melatonin starting to produce, you know, of course, keeping off of the technology at night and no one's perfect for non guilty as well. Someone's jumping on my phone, but as much as we can. Make that time for, you know, we have, we have kids. So that's when we read books to the kids.

That's when we hang out. That's when we talk, there's more family time and not getting on your computer right before bed, not getting on your phone right before bed or, or getting, watching TV, uh, making sure we're keeping the electronics. Away from the sleeping area as much as possible,  then once we go into the the room, uh, we have organic sheets.

We have a wool mattress. I have a little bit of a latex allergy, so I can't have anything latex in the bed. So we have, uh, it's a wooden frame bed, so it doesn't attract any of the electric fields.  In the room,  and then once we're done for night, ready to go to bed, I hit a button and it powers down all of the electricity, all of the circuits, the lighting, the filter, everything shuts off.

So I have a super quiet, it's super low emf, um, zero electric fields, almost zero magnetic fields and pretty low radio frequency fields where we're at. Uh, the house is shielded on the outside with chicken wire. So the outside energies doesn't come in, that's built into the stucco. So it doesn't look like chicken wire.

Yes, it looks  good.  But we're blocking all the energies, uh, super quiet, super pure air. And then the morning when I get up, if it's summertime and the sun's out, I, the first thing I like to do is, is go out by the backyard, by the pool and, um, just stand there in my underwear in the sun and let the sun hit me for 15 minutes and just kind of.

Pull in the fresh air, let the sun hit my eyes. And that really kind of wakes me up and sets me up for the day. And then throughout the day, making sure I'm getting that full spectrum lighting, making sure I'm grounding. Um, I always find,  especially with the kids, when we go to the lake or we go to the beach or something, and we're out in the sun all day long, we come home, the kids are always passed out easy, you know, getting that light.

Getting that transition that difference that, you know, from day to night and really letting the warmth warm us up, get us going and then in the evening, the light and the temperature decrease also, you know, putting the thermostat down right before bed. Um, so we're not sleeping in a hotter room. So that's kind of the routine that I do.

Wow, good for me. That's fantastic. And actually you addressed our second question, which was, what's your morning sleep routine and do you do that practice of getting outside full body getting that sunlight? Do you do that even in the winter months or what does that look like there, which would actually be great for a little cold therapy.

So I have the red lights. The mito red rack that I turn on in the morning as I'm getting ready and going to the bathroom. I just set it up and let it took me there in the morning time. I always like to try to get that nice bright light in the morning. Either way, one way or another. I prefer to get it from the sun.

We did did some testing. A friend of mine is Brian Hoyer. He owns Shielded Healing. He's another EMF guy. He's really smart. He was staying at my house for the weekend and he has some really cool light meters. And we were measuring the light coming off of my MitoReds versus the light coming off the sun.

And the sun was actually much more powerful, much more intense and much more full spectrum than what was coming off of the MitoReds. So if you have a choice between real sunlight versus the more of these artificial things, always go with the real sunlight. You're going to get more benefit from it. Sure.

Uh, well, I appreciate that call out and love the dedication to when that's not always available or time considerations that you're still supplementing. And so as far as brands, so that's a brand that you like for the red light panel. Did you mention, is there a brand for the, or is that custom made the wool mattress that you use?

Um, it was something that I think we might have it on our website. My wife found it. It was out of. Somewhere in Europe. I don't know. It took a while to get it shipped over, but it was these virgin sheep up on a mountain that they, I don't know, one of those kind of deals. Of course you sleep on a bed like that.

That's amazing.  And real quick, any callouts for types of pillows? You know, we get all these questions and I feel like if anyone would know, you might have some insight, you know, just the certain things to be considerate of for those materials, for the bedding or pillows or sheets. You know, making sure it's It's not a product that's going to affect you or give you allergies.

Like for me, latex, I can't do latex. Some people can't do wool. Some people can't do down. So you're going to got to experiment about what works good for you. But also the pillow sheets. This is a really big one. People will throw that in with the Tide Pods and the Downy. And that's just nasty. You're putting chemicals on that.

And then you're laying that right next to your face. You're breathing that in. Super critical to wash with super natural. cleaning supplies when you're doing the laundry with your sheets and your pillows and do those regularly. Um, at least once a week, you should be cleaning sheets, pillows, switching that stuff out because we're building up dead skin cells in the body.

We're sweating out toxins, uh, dust mites, all kinds of nasty stuff that we want to make sure that we're replacing that stuff and cleaning it and keeping it clean. Also your pillow itself, you should be replacing that every six months because that can build up with a lot of nasty stuff in your pillows as well.

So making sure. Nice, organic, fresh pillows, fresh bedding, using natural laundry detergent is really going to help and go a long ways. Oh, that's such a good point about the pillow. We actually just had the founder or creator of Got Mold on the podcast and he was saying no wet heads in bed was kind of his mantra and that's such a good point to no matter what be rotating and cycling in, cycling out those pillows and certain things like that that need to be replaced.

Really, really good point. How about bed vacuums?  Someone had just tagged me in a look like a viral sort of video around people being shocked when they're vacuuming their beds and finding all kinds of craziness coming off of that. Do you suggest that people do that routinely too? So we have a mattress protector on ours that blocks a lot of that stuff out.

But yeah, absolutely. And you know, and ours is the wool, so we got to flip the mattress every once in a while. So yeah, I would definitely make sure that you're cleaning, also monitoring and making sure you're looking for. Dust mites and for lice or any of those things that could start getting into the mattress.

That's where it's going to start and doing those regular inspections and keeping everything super clean and also making sure you're cleaning underneath your bed. Look underneath your bed and when we do inspections, that's a nasty place and that's really close to where we're sleeping. Move that bed every quarter at least and vacuum underneath there, sweep, clean underneath if it's a solid surface.

Oh, yeah. You just made me think of, um, one of the big takeaways I also had when you came in was we were not routinely taking off our shoes in our place. And you're like, okay, the nicest of ways, like you can't do that. Uh, so now we've instituted, we have slippers. We've got like a whole section where you properly, like you sit down, you take off your shoes like normal people.

And you made such good. It was really thoughtful. I think it's a really cool way to think about this place that you're spending all of your lot of your time for most people upwards of over, you know, 90 percent or so of their day, really taking that time from the minute you walk into your space to the minute you put your head on your pillow.

What are you interacting with? What are things that you haven't thought thoroughly of? And you guys do a fantastic job at helping us think in that way. Okay, so bring us back to our questions for you. The third one is what might we see on your nightstand  or if you're traveling, maybe proverbial nightstand, ambiance, apps, no apps, et cetera.

So I actually don't have nightstands on my bed because that's going to keep me from putting stuff on the nightstand. Yes.  Amazing. Okay. Say more. Yeah, our room is super basic. If I could show you, it's literally just our bed and We have like a chair on the side and we have our air filter. And that's all we have in our bedroom.

It's strictly for bedtime. That's it. I love it Okay, and so for you so because some people will be like what well, where do you put your light? Where do you put you? Well, I want to read Like how do you deal with those things or what would you say to some of that? So I read out on the couch. We have a nice living room set up.

I read out there anything that I can do Yeah, some people do in your bed. You can do somewhere else. And that's where it comes back to being intentional about what those areas are for and being really strict about that. Your brain will associate those things with that area. So you want to make sure that you're, yeah, if you want to read or you want to study, you want to get on your phone, do it outside of the room.

And then when you're ready for bed, you go into bed.  Brilliant. Love it. Okay. Fantastic. I know that would be a paradigm shift for a lot of people. And that's kind of what our bedroom is like too. So it's just very simple. So with that, then the last question would be, what would you say has made the biggest change to your sleep game or said another way, maybe the biggest aha moment for you in managing your sleep?

You know, it's funny. I think that, um, it's not even anything environment related. I think it's not eating before bed. It's helped me a lot. I think that's helped a lot. In fact, I did a five day fast recently and I had the aura ring and I was wondering my heart rate. Was low starting low from the beginning.

Instead of sloping throughout the night, it started low and it was the lowest it's ever been in the H. R. V. Was the highest it's ever been when I was on that five day fast. I realized how much food was actually affecting me. And if I were to eat  a big meal, especially a heavy meal before bed, I would sleep horrible that night.

And if I could go, you know,  34 hours and not eat before bed in that window, then I get a lot better sleep.  So wise, I love that you called that out, because that's just a huge one that I see time and time again for people, and once they start to realize that, and particularly I think wearables are particularly helpful in this conversation, because we might know or have a sense that we might sleep better when we do these activities.

But when we see it on our numbers, it just is so unequivocal. So that's fantastic. Congrats on the five day fast amazing and so for you, so you wear an aura ring. How do you work with that? Do you do airplane mode? How do you think about that? So this is the version three, and you can put it on airplane mode, but I even find even not on airplane mode.

The the level is sends out is super, super small. In fact, even when I'm doing readings in people's house, I have to hold this right directly onto the antenna for to get it to sense. It's super low levels. I love that. That's so good to hear. And that was kind of my experience in the testing that I've done, but it's great to hear from someone like you.

Yeah, because we always want to be mindful, of course, where we don't want to be doing something that is going to take away from our goals with our sleep when ironically, we're looking to get information about our sleep with a wearable. But I think with something like an aura ring, that's the one that we have everyone that we work with wearing.

So I'm glad to hear that your experience has been like that. Fantastic. Okay. So Ryan, one, I am just such a huge fan of you. I'm so excited to see all the amazing things happening with your business. Actually, are you even, I don't know if you're allowed to talk about this or not, but are you, there's some cool things ahead, right?

You're going to. Be working with some shows and all kinds of possibilities. Is that all accurate? Can we talk about that? Yeah. Can't really say much yet. It's, we have some really cool stuff coming up. Cool stuff. All right. I should have checked with you before. Yeah, that's okay. No.  Get ready. You're going to hear more about Ryan and all the cool things that he's doing with his company and just really, really mission driven.

Um, such a fan. So for those that want to one, I think no matter what, you should absolutely check out Ryan's website to go to that shop page and stock up on a lot of these things are not wildly expensive, or if they are an investment, he's taken the time, energy, and effort to kind of research what works, what doesn't.

And it has all the tools. I mean, thousands and thousands of dollars worth of tools to kind of test and see what's effective. What's not so definitely no matter what, check that out. But where can they find you? Where can they do all those things and more and then potentially work with you to have you check out their home?

Yeah, you know our instagram we we do we have a team that works on that we That's kind of where we give out a lot of free content and help and educate people Um, it's not salesy in any way. It's 100 percent meant to teach people so we have a ton of really good free content on there that we're constantly updating.

So follow us on Instagram at test my home. And then our website is google test my home. com. Again, we have a lot of education on there as well. I've been on lots of different podcasts. We put all the links on our education page, the podcast page. You can always start there and learn and listen. There's so many easy free tips that you can take away and start implementing today to make your healthy, your environment a lot more healthy.

You can engage with us by doing a zoom phone consultation where we take an hour and walk through your home remotely. We have a kit that we can send you out the testing equipment that comes with the E. M. F. meter air quality meter mold dust test kit. Uh, that's actually Michael Rubino's test kit and then amazing  and then a water test kit so you can test your own Um environment and then you can jump on a call with me or one of the coaches and we can come up with a plan For you or even just hire us to come out and do an in home testing as well And if you know those places you can get on our website and fill out a form And one of our guys will get back to you and get something scheduled up  So great.

Well, thank you, Ryan. So appreciate the work that you're doing. It's making a huge, huge difference for people and really exposing these blind spots. I mean, I know my mind was just reeling after being with you and looking newly at this space that I'm spending all this time in, but also being empowered to take actions to make a difference with that knowledge.

So it's not just finding out, Oh, no, what do I do? It's actually, Oh, no. And there are so many things that we can do so really, really helpful and really can make a difference. So thank you for the work you're doing and looking forward to working with you more in the future because I really want to continue to get this information out for people.

Yeah, yeah. And thanks for having me on and shedding some light on this topic. It's much needed. I appreciate that. Oh, fantastic.  You've been listening to the Sleep as a Skill podcast, the top podcast for people who want to take their sleep skills to the next level. Every Monday, I send out the Sleep Obsessions newsletter, which aims to be one of the most obsessive newsletters on the planet.

Fun fact, I've never missed a Monday for over five years and counting, and it contains everything that you need to know in the fascinating world of sleep. Head on over to  sleepasaskill. com forward slash newsletter to sign up.