Can a smell really make your sheets “fresh”??

We are creatures of habit. Did you know it takes 21 days of focus to change a habit? And then, it is many more days/months of deliberate focus so we don’t go back. It is really hard to change.

I had to make some changes when my son was diagnosed with asthma, about thirteen years ago. One of the hardest was changing the products I used to clean with and make my house “smell” good. We are pretty much addicted to smells – which has a very strong emotional connection to our childhood. When these scents have good memories, you are much more likely to purchase a product.

I started with my son’s bedroom, since he spent the most time there. It was overwhelming to focus on the entire house, so I took baby steps and made sure his sleeping environment was a healthy as it could be. Many of the changes were easy – such as choosing a different product or opening the window weekly to flush out the toxins and allergens that had built up over the week. The harder changes were in things I had an emotional connection to – which is a little weird, because you don’t realize it until you go to actually “change” something.

Some my habits came from the daily marketing advertisements on the concepts that “their” product would help you to be a “good mom”. Having a clean “fresh” smelling house was a big misconception that I was lured into as “new mom”. Little did I know that clean does not have a smell – and you don’t have to put a scent on something for it to be “fresh”. And, over time, my habits became my behavior.

When I learned that there are three ways a child is exposed to a chemical: inhalation, skin absorption and ingestion; I realized that he was sleeping on sheets which were bounced around in my dryer with scented perfumes. He was being exposed in two ways – through the inhalation and while his body lay upon the clean sheets! That was one of the easiest, yet hardest things I had to do – get rid of those toxic dryer sheets. Since then (thirteen years later) there have been many studies showing the toxic chemical exposure we receive throughout the night. And since we learned in my first blog for February, that our skin is our largest organ – it only makes sense to make sure it is exposed to natural and non-toxic products.

Luckily, there are many alternatives to the traditional dryer sheet loaded with synthetic fragrances. Health food stores and
using 100% pure essential oils is a safer way to give your clothes a natural smell.

Other sources to check:

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/dinged-by-dryer-sheets.html#

http://www.naturalnews.com/002693.html

February: Healthy-n-Green®Interior Design Principle – Safe Sleeping Zone