Skip to contentThe Wellness Workshop · Jessica CharlesThe Clean Foundation
The Wellness Workshop · Foundations
Remove Before You Add
Kitchen · Bedding · Personal Care · Air
We’re always being told what to add: more supplements, more products, more protocols. I’d start with what you can remove. Clean up a few of the things you’re exposed to every day, and you’ve already improved the foundation — often without spending a thing.
Why This Matters
Start With What You Can Remove
Have you ever looked at how many things touch your body before you’ve even left the house? The pan you cook in. The water you drink. The toothpaste, deodorant and sunscreen you put on your skin. The detergent on your sheets. The air you breathe all night.
Wellness usually starts by telling us what to add — another supplement, another product, another protocol. I think the better place to start is with what you can remove.
You do not need to make your home perfect or throw everything away. A handful of thoughtful swaps can reduce some of the exposures you repeat every single day, often for very little money and sometimes for none at all.
Clean up the foundation first. Then decide what is actually worth adding.
The Idea · Why Subtraction Comes First
The Three Routes of Exposure
Every practice in this workshop — red light, hydrogen water, breathwork, PEMF — works by supporting or stimulating a biological process that is already trying to function. But if something in your daily environment is disrupting that same process at the same time, the support you add has to work against it — and you get less from it than you should.
The body has three primary routes of exposure to its environment: skin, lungs, and gut. Most people manage what goes in through the gut with some care. Very few think about what is in direct contact with their skin for eight hours a night, or what they are breathing inside a sealed building all day. This module closes those gaps.
What the Body Is Processing Daily
Skin — 24 hours of contact
Bedding, sleepwear, clothing, personal care products, cookware. The skin is the body's largest organ and an important route of exposure — what sits against it for hours becomes part of what the body has to deal with.
Lungs — 20,000 breaths daily
Cleaning fumes, mould spores, and VOCs — the vapours that come off new furniture, paint and carpet. A sealed building holds on to all of it.
Gut — food, water, cookware
What you eat and drink is the route most people manage consciously. What it is cooked in, stored in, and what is in the water used to prepare it — less so.
8h
Skin contact with bedding and sleepwear every night
2–5×
Indoor air more polluted than outdoor (EPA data)
€0
Cost of most changes in this module
The Kitchen · Gut Route
What to Remove from Your Kitchen — and Why
Three swaps. Open each to understand the mechanism behind it.
PFAS — the chemistry that makes a pan non-stick — do not break down. Not in the environment, and not in you. When non-stick cookware is heated above 260°C or scratched, it releases compounds that collect in liver, thyroid and immune tissue. PFAS have been found in blood samples worldwide, including in newborns, and the body takes three to seven years to clear half of what it takes on. What you cook in today, you can still be carrying years from now.
Cast iron adds small amounts of iron to food — useful for many women, who are commonly iron-deficient. Ceramic and stainless may need a little more cooking fat, but they contribute none of the same non-stick chemistry. A well-seasoned cast iron pan is functionally non-stick and lasts a lifetime.
Municipal tap water is treated to be safe to drink, and in most of Europe it is. Safe is not the same as clean. Depending on where you live, it can also contain chlorine or chloramine used for disinfection, trace pharmaceutical residues, microplastics, added fluoride in some countries, and agricultural runoff from the local catchment.
A counter-top carbon filter handles chlorine, chloramine, and many pharmaceutical residues. Reverse osmosis removes more, but it also strips minerals from the water, so re-mineralise it before drinking. A pinch of Celtic salt or Baja Gold adds trace minerals back in. Avoid Himalayan salt — it has been found to contain significant levels of heavy metals, including lead.
Covered in depth · Cellular Hydration module
IIIPlastic food and water containers→Glass · Stainless steelPhthalates · Microplastics in blood · Heat accelerates leaching
BPA-free labelling often replaced BPA with other bisphenols such as BPS and BPF. These are also endocrine disruptors — chemicals that interfere with hormone signalling. Heat, UV exposure, and acidity all accelerate leaching. That makes hot food in plastic, acidic drinks in plastic bottles, and reusable bottles left in a hot car the situations to avoid most. Microplastics have now been found in human blood, breast milk, placental tissue, and lung tissue.
Glass and stainless steel are chemically inert, reusable for years, and among the simplest high-impact swaps in the module.
Simplest swap · Highest impact
The Bedroom · Skin Route · 8 Hours Every Night
Eight Hours of Skin Contact, Every Night
Eight hours of skin contact with the same material is one of the longest continuous exposures in your day. During sleep, the body is in repair mode: skin absorption is elevated, the immune system is active, and tissues are regenerating. What surrounds you for those hours is not a neutral variable.
Polyester, nylon and acrylic are petroleum-derived fibres, and they off-gas VOCs against the skin all night. They also trap heat. Your core temperature needs to fall as sleep deepens, so spending the night too warm keeps sleep shallower — exactly when you want the deepest stages of sleep and the repair work that comes with them.
Synthetics also build a static charge against the body as you move through the night. Natural fibres do not.
The skin regulates temperature, clears waste through sweat, and absorbs compounds it comes into contact with. Synthetic sleepwear creates a warmer, less breathable microclimate against the body — trapping heat and moisture while keeping synthetic fibres in direct contact with the skin for 7–9 hours.
Sleeping without clothing on natural fibre bedding is the simplest solution. If clothing is preferred, 100% cotton, linen or silk — all of which breathe, hold temperature, and put nothing synthetic against the skin.
Free · Tonight
Not all natural fibres are equal. Here is what to look for:
Linen
Best overall · Year-round
Made from flax — one of the most sustainable, durable, and breathable natural fibres available. Naturally anti-microbial. Cool in summer, warm in winter. Becomes softer with every wash. Higher initial cost but outlasts any synthetic bedding by years. Linen has been used around the Mediterranean for centuries because it handles heat, moisture, and repeated washing exceptionally well.
Organic Cotton
Most accessible · Look for GOTS certified
Conventional cotton is one of the most pesticide-intensive crops on earth, and residues remain in the fibre. Organic cotton — especially GOTS-certified — avoids that agricultural chemical load. It is soft, breathable, and widely available. GOTS also covers dyeing and processing, which matters because dyes and finishes are another route of skin exposure.
Wool
Temperature regulation · Winter weight
Merino wool in particular is extraordinarily good at regulating body temperature across a wide range — naturally moisture-wicking, anti-microbial, and fire-resistant without chemical treatment. High-quality merino is soft enough for direct skin contact. Exceptional for winter and for those who run cold overnight.
Silk
Skin & hair · Temperature sensitive
Natural protein fibre with a smooth surface that reduces friction on skin and hair — relevant for people with sensitive skin or those managing hair condition overnight. Naturally hypoallergenic. Temperature-regulating though not as robustly as linen or wool. Pillowcase upgrade is the most impactful single silk purchase.
Personal Care · Skin Route · Daily Accumulation
What You Put On Your Skin — Goes In
The average person applies 9–12 personal care products every day — moisturiser, deodorant, shampoo, toothpaste, sunscreen, makeup, often several more. Safety testing generally evaluates individual products or ingredients rather than the full combination a person may use across a day. Several contain ingredients with known effects on hormones, nerve tissue or cancer risk, and daily use is what turns small individual exposures into something worth paying attention to over time.
Ingredient
The concern
What to use instead
Aluminium saltsDeodorant / antiperspirant
Aluminium salts reduce sweating by plugging the sweat ducts. If odour control is the goal, deodorant can address that without blocking perspiration.
Crystal deodorant (potassium alum — different molecular structure, does not penetrate skin) · Magnesium-based deodorant · Bicarb formulations
Toothpaste
This is one of the personal-care products used every single day, often for decades, so I keep the formula simple. My preference is a fluoride-free toothpaste with ingredients chosen specifically to support the teeth and oral environment rather than a long list of unnecessary additives.
Fluoride-free hydroxyapatite toothpaste · Look for xylitol as another useful ingredient
Synthetic fragranceEverything
"Fragrance" on a label is a legal loophole. It can stand for any of more than 3,000 undisclosed compounds — phthalates, parabens, and synthetic musks that build up in body tissue and act on nerve cells.
Fragrance-free formulations · Products using essential oils only · Check labels for "parfum" — same thing
Chemical sunscreen filtersSunscreen
Oxybenzone and octinoxate turn up in the blood within two hours of going on the skin. Oxybenzone is one of the compounds the body reads as a hormone of its own. Both are banned in Hawaii for what they do to coral.
Broad-spectrum mineral sunscreen using zinc oxide and/or titanium dioxide as the active ingredients · Zinc oxide is my first choice when I want strong UVA + UVB coverage
Sodium lauryl sulphateShampoo · body wash
Strips the microbes that live on skin and scalp and protect it. Disrupts the acid mantle — the skin's first barrier against anything arriving from outside. Damages the protein structure of hair.
SLS-free formulas · Co-wash · Bar soap with simple ingredient lists · Water-only washing for scalp (adaptation period 2–3 weeks)
Indoor Air Quality · Lung Route · 20,000 Breaths Daily
The Air Inside Your Home — Often More Toxic Than Outside
We obsess over what goes into our water and food, then take roughly 20,000 breaths a day inside buildings where the air can carry two to five times more pollutants than outside. That deserves at least as much attention as what is in your supplement drawer. Modern buildings are well-sealed for energy efficiency — which means whatever is off-gassing inside stays inside. VOCs from furniture, paint, carpet, and cleaning products accumulate in a way that outdoor air dispersion prevents.
Open the windows — the biggest single change here
Ten to fifteen minutes of air moving through the house clears the VOCs that have collected since the last time you did it. Morning air, before traffic peaks, is usually the cleanest of the day. Do the bedroom before sleep and again on waking. It costs nothing and the air is measurably better within the quarter hour.
Houseplants — lovely, but not an air purifier
Plants can make a room feel better and may have benefits of their own, but a normal number of houseplants is not going to meaningfully clean the air in a real home. The famous NASA experiments were done in sealed chambers and do not translate well to ordinary rooms. For indoor air quality, focus first on source control, opening the windows when outdoor air is good, and using proper filtration where needed. Keep the plants because you love them — just don’t count them as your air filter.
HEPA air filter — especially for the bedroom
A HEPA filter captures particles down to 0.3 microns — including dust mites, mould spores, pet dander, pollen, and many airborne microplastics. Running one in the bedroom overnight gives you 7–9 hours of significantly cleaner air while you sleep. The bedroom is the highest priority simply because it is where you spend the longest uninterrupted stretch of time. A basic unit costs €50–80, and filters should be replaced every 6–12 months.
Conventional sprays, bleach products and synthetic air fresheners are among the largest sources of VOCs in a house, and they arrive at the moment you are cleaning it. Castile soap, white vinegar, bicarbonate of soda and pure essential oils handle almost every domestic job with nothing off-gassing afterwards. Drop synthetic air fresheners entirely: they add to the air, they do not clear it.
The Aired House
Northern Europe never needed the acronym VOC to arrive at the answer. Germans still call it Lüften: every window thrown wide for ten minutes, every season, snow included. Across the Mediterranean the morning ran the same way — shutters open, beds stripped, linens hung over the balcony rail in the sun. The sealed, climate-controlled building is barely two generations old. The habit of flushing a house with morning air is centuries older, and it was right.
The Digital Environment · EMF · Light
The Bedroom at Night — Three Things to Change
The bedroom at night is the most important environment to manage. You spend more uninterrupted time here than anywhere else, during the hours when the body is most focused on sleep, recovery, and repair. Three digital changes — none of which cost anything — produce measurable effects within days.
The Phone — Outside the Bedroom
Phone on aeroplane mode, in a different room. Separate alarm clock.
Even silent, a phone within reach can keep a small share of attention tied to it. Researchers have measured that cost during the day: people perform worse on demanding tasks when their phone is merely present than when it is in another room, and they do not notice the difference. At night, removing that cue makes the bedroom a cleaner signal for switching off.
For this habit, the behavioural case is already strong enough to justify moving the phone; the EMF question does not need to carry the argument.
The Router — Off Overnight
WiFi router on a plug timer — off from 11pm to 7am.
A plug timer costs under €10 and takes five minutes to fit. Nothing in the house needs the router between eleven and seven, and it is one more thing running all night in the room you sleep in. People often report sleeping more deeply within a week of setting it.
Blue Light After Dark — The Most Important Light Change
No overhead LED lighting after 9pm. Dim, warm, low.
Blue-heavy light tells a set of cells at the back of the eye that it is still daytime, and melatonin — the hormone that starts the night — stops being released. Even a short burst after dark can push its onset back by an hour to an hour and a half. Modern overhead LEDs are blue-dominant. Switching to one warm lamp or candles after dinner, with amber-tinted glasses for screen use, is the strongest single lever you have on your circadian rhythm, or body clock. Red light devices are the exception in the evening: they do not suppress melatonin.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Indoor Air Quality Research
Has consistently found indoor air carrying two to five times more pollutants than the air outside, across most developed countries.
Ward, Duke, Gneezy & Bos
Journal of the ACR, 2017 · Device Presence
Showed that a silent phone within reach takes up mental capacity, and that people cannot tell it is happening. Which room it is in matters more than which setting it is on.
The Daily Practice
The First Week — In Order of Leverage
1
Tonight
Phone out of the bedroom
Aeroplane mode, different room, separate alarm clock. The single highest-leverage change in the module, and it starts working the first night.
Free
2
Tonight
One warm lamp after 9pm
No overhead LEDs after dark. A single warm lamp or candles after dinner; amber-tinted glasses for any screen use.
Free
3
Tomorrow Morning
Open the windows
10–15 minutes of cross-ventilation, bedroom first. Morning air, before traffic peaks, is typically the cleanest of the day.
Free
4
This Week
Router on a plug timer
Off from 11pm to 7am. Under €10, five minutes to set up, and the downside is essentially zero.
Under €10
5
This Week's Shop
Swap the cleaning products
Castile soap, white vinegar, bicarbonate of soda, pure essential oils. Drop synthetic air fresheners entirely.
Often cheaper
6
As They Run Out
Replace personal care one item at a time
Deodorant, toothpaste, sunscreen, shampoo — swap each for its cleaner counterpart from the table above as the current one finishes instead of throwing away half-used products.
Like for like
7
As Budget Allows
The one-time purchases
Cast iron or stainless cookware, glass storage, a water filter, natural-fibre bedding — starting with the pillowcase. Each is bought once and lasts years.
One-time
Free — Available Tonight
Phone on aeroplane mode, outside the bedroom
Windows open 10–15 minutes, morning and evening
One warm lamp after dark — no overhead LEDs
Sleep in cotton, linen, silk — or nothing
Vinegar, bicarb, and castile soap for cleaning
Upgraded — One-Time Purchases
HEPA filter running overnight in the bedroom
Counter-top carbon or RO filter, re-mineralised
Linen bedding — starting with the pillowcase
Cast iron pan and glass food storage
Plug timer on the router, off 11pm–7am
One meal is nothing. Twenty years of meals is a different question
A single meal cooked in a scratched Teflon pan is not the point. The concern is repeated exposure over years, especially with compounds that can remain in the body for a long time. Almost everything in this module works that way. Stack several of these changes and keep them in place for a few weeks; that is when the difference tends to become noticeable.
Start with the bedroom — it is where you spend the most time
Eight hours. Every night. The bedroom is the single highest-leverage environment to address — bedding material, air quality, light, and devices all interact during the window when the body is most vulnerable and most actively repairing. Prioritise the bedroom first. The rest of the home follows.
This module costs almost nothing
Phone to aeroplane mode: free. Window open: free. Router timer: €10. Natural cleaning products: often cheaper than conventional. Linen bedding: higher upfront, lower lifetime cost. Cast iron pan: bought once, lasts a generation. Most of the highest-leverage changes here can happen without a major purchase.
I would rather remove one exposure you meet every single day than add another product to compensate for it. That is what I mean by a clean foundation.
