Underrated rationality hack: Buy a CO2 sensor, and open the window when it alerts. Best 70 bucks I spent in a long, long time.
Why? Because CO2 levels that are routinely exceeded indoors nowadays can inherently have incredibly detrimental effects on rational thinking, and CO2 levels rising are also often indicators that other air quality aspects that affect rational thinking are going down and that ventilation would likely help you think by targeting multiple problems at once. In many places this is getting worse, not better, as modern houses are more hermetically sealed for insulation to save energy, and work spaces and homes become more crowded, while outdoor CO2 is rising planet-wide, people move to cities with ever less green as the housing crisis is tackled, and people have to spend more time indoors against fierce winters and intolerable summers due to climate change (which is very worrying, because now is when we need to be most rational.)
The intensity of the effect on your cognition, how early it becomes noticeable and which functions become noticeably compromised varies a lot with the individual, but the effect can be very pronounced, reducing executive functioning, complex reasoning, speed of thought, mood, sleep https://www.o2sleep.info/Researce_CO2_nextday_performance.pdf , social functioning, motor performance https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412018312807 and overall productivity, leaving you fatigued. While we can observe physiological changes in the brain, it is not yet clear why the resulting functional loss is not evenly distributed in the population—some seem much more resilient, some much more sensitive; you probably won’t know which group you are in until you check. Here is a meta-review of 37 studies (it is on sci-hub if your research institution does not have access) to mostly illustrate that this is a common enough issue to warrant checking for you individually and ensuring in your office spaces: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ina.12706
Humans evolved in CO2 levels of 200-280 parts per million. Our outdoors meanwhile averages 420 in summer due to all the fossil fuels we burned, but can easily breach 500 in cities in the Northern hemisphere in winter. Forest and ocean carbon capture loss will worsen this. Being indoors amplifies this a lot. In a small room without ventilation, even if you aren’t doing much of anything beyond existing, you will raise levels by around 100 an hour; much more if you exercise, or burn gas, or aren’t alone. It is not rare for indoor levels to reach 2500. By 1000, humans typically start losing the ability for complex reasoning.
For me, high CO2 manifests as being headachy, irritated, brain foggy, difficulties mustering willpower, slowed thinking, trouble focussing, trouble being patient, trouble getting restful sleep, with effects becoming noticeable over 750 already, and debilitating at 1100. But it manifests differently in different people—this might not hit you as hard, but in that case, gift the sensor to your office to ensure average productivity there; a bunch of people there will be hit this hard by it.
If you are affected, you will notice the effect, but the cause is undetectable to you. You can’t smell or see CO2. And there are many other plausible causes, so just feeling unfocussed does not tell you want went wrong and how to fix it. If you are in a long-running meeting in a small room, there are many reasons to become frustrated and unfocussed; if you step into a forest, there are many reasons to become focussed. You won’t know if opening the window is a solution, and set yourself up for a mere placebo effect. But with a sensor, you get a connection. You are annoyed you can’t focus, it chirps, you go fuck, this air quality went down the drain, open the window, breathe for a few minutes… and feel clear headed again. The correlation is eerie.
Anyhow. You can buy CO2 sensors in various places online and offline; I hate to admit I got mine from amazon. You want one ideally set to depict current levels, as a specific number; you can also have colour codes and even alarms if very high levels are breached. I am happy with the one I got https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B093L47XZ9/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 - a small one that is usually plugged in, but can also run on the battery for a day and be portable, which allowed me to check out places like my office too, and make changes. It warns you acutely, and allows you to instantly fix the issue by opening a window, and it shows you trends so that if a problem recurs and needs a systematic fix, you can e.g. debug your ventilation system or ventilation habits. Just make sure to regularly recalibrate it outside (that will itself get trickier as this crisis worsens, as we will lack a reliable low source to recalibrate, but for now, seems generally unavoidable in affordable models, and for now, still works.). It has significantly improved my quality of life, and I just wanted to share.
Also—another reason to target fossil fuel emissions now. The emissions are making us, quite literally, stupid. The idea of stepping into my garden, and still not thinking clearly, because we have poisoned the air of our entire planet, is horrific to me. There is genuine concern the air alone will end up making us sick, and that independent of the far more pressing resulting collapse of the climate, we need to fix this for this reason alone: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0323-1
Final interesting side note: The fact that effective ventilation systems often require us to use energy to actively pull air through small tubes, and that this air being sucked out of buildings is very enriched with CO2, comes with a potential interesting side application: installing a carbon capture device inside your green powered ventilation system, thereby becoming net carbon negative. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969722061873
Oh, I absolutely intend to set up a combination of heat pump + CO2 capture + ventilation + filters for mould and other contaminants in a future home. :)
But I am currently in Europe, where most houses do not have ventilation systems or air conditioning systems at all, but people are taught how often and how long and when to open and close windows (after showering and cooking to control humidity, before going to bed, after waking, frequently when in company or working out, 3 min at minus temperatures as the temperature differential speeds up air exchange, 15 min at Summer temperatures, all windows open fully for a cross breeze and full air exchange while heaters are off, etc.)
And most people in Europe aren’t in any position to install a ventilation system, because they are renting or cannot afford it (the energy costs and initial investment alone), because they are worried about the greenhouse emissions from the energy cost of running ventilation, or the workers and parts currently are not available, so that recommendation would not be doable for most, nor would they necessarily see the need for such an investment per se—while getting a CO2 sensor and opening a window is doable, and allows one to gather information necessary for such choices (like deciding to only move into ventilated buildings in the future, or fixing one’s ventilation, or simply realising that one does not open windows often enough or long enough or during enough activities or that there are dead corners in the house or that the windows need to be cracked while asleep, etc.)
Complete side note, but in Iran, I encountered ancient effective ventilation systems that were keeping indoor places cool and with nice humidity levels even in the literal desert, while being quiet and requiring zero electricity/gas to run. Called wind catchers, because they operate solely by catching and redirecting wind blowing high above your building, and channeling it through your house, often past your internal water supply or other components retaining heat or cold to adjust temperature. Basically a passive architectural feature, once set up, requires very little maintenance, and not that expensive to make, either, while being completely green. Incredible things. Look gorgeous, too. And bizarrely effective; they were using them to run refrigerators. They don’t work in all climates, but where they do, they are a cool solution, not just cause they also operate off-grid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher
Iranian architecture in general is rad, not just because it is stunningly beautiful, but because it is ingenious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_architecture Today, after the US messed the place up so badly, we know Iran as a relatively small country run by religiously radical dictators who treat women and queers like garbage, trample on human rights, and whose desire for nuclear weapons has led to sanctions that have absolutely crippled their economy, so it is a horrible place to live with no freedom or economic opportunities.
But Iran stands in the center of the ruins of an ancient, continuous civilisation 6 k years old https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Iran , which was set up between and across vast deserts. So when it comes to obtaining, transporting across large distances and storing water, cooling buildings, and running agriculture under very adverse conditions, while having no access to electricity, there is an incredible wealth of knowledge on clever solutions for green tech there.
Muslims kept the scientific method alive and protected European texts while Christianity pushed us into the dark ages, while making tons of inventions (logic, math, empirical methods, engineering...) of their own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventions_in_the_medieval_Islamic_world ; five centuries before our renaissance, they were pushing for rationality and enlightment; I think a lot of rational people this day would recognise the beginning of our approach in this dude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham They performed successful fucking neurosurgery in the middle ages (washing with soap they made, disinfecting with alcohol produced only for this purpose, cauterising to stop bleeding, anaesthesia with sponge applied chemical derived from their chemistry and their literal drug trials, using 200 different surgical instruments from their advanced metal smithing and carefully preserved and critiqued knowledge on diseases and anatomy, incl. understanding contagion of diseases through contaminated air and contaminated water and dirt, and extensive protocols to avoid it) while our approach to medicine mostly consisted of praying, blaming the stars, or bad smells from our utter lack of hygiene. Meanwhile, a muslim take at the time was that if evidence or logic contradicted God, the failure was in your understanding of God, because evidence and logic were always right.
Wonderful people to this day, too, unbelievably hospitable. They really deserve better. (Got off track here due to ADHD, sorry. Just wanted to share something that is often underappreciated.)
Different parts of Europe are very different in regard to ventilation. I’m in Germany where we mostly use windows but a Swedish friend told me that in Sweden they mostly use passive ventilation.
because they are worried about the greenhouse emissions from the energy cost of running ventilation
Ventilation along with a heat recovery system reduces overall heating costs because it’s much more energy efficient than opening windows.
This shortform just reminded me to buy a CO2 sensor and, holy shit, turns out my room is at ~1500ppm.
While it’s too soon to say for sure, this may actually be the underlying reason for a bunch of problems I noticed myself having primarily in my room (insomnia, inability to focus or read, high irritability, etc).
Although I always suspected bad air quality, it really is something to actually see the number with your own eyes, wow. Thank you so, so much for posting about this!!
It is maddening otherwise; focus is my most valuable good, and the reasons for it failing can be so varied and hard to pinpoint. The very air your breathe undetectably fucking with you is just awful.
I also have the insomnia and irritability issue, it is insane. I’ve had instances where me and my girlfriend are snapping at each other like annoyed cats, repeatedly apologising and yet then snapping again over absolutely nothing (who ate more of the protein bars, why there is a cat toy on the floor, total nonsense), both of us upset at how we are behaving and confused… when one of us will see the sensor and go, damn it, oh just look at those levels, we should have opened the window cooking… and then we snuggle up briefly in the garden while it airs out and everything is fine. It is eerie. (I find it deeply objectionable that my perception of reality is distorted because the air composition around me is mildly altered, and that this leads to snapping at my favourite person. This is really no way to run a mental substrate.)
I’ve also gotten tested for sleep apnea, because I tend to wake with severe headaches, a stiff distorted neck, dry mouth, fatigue and brain fog, wake gasping from nightmares where I suffocate, and cannot fall asleep on my back. I’m hyperflexible and with narrow airways, so it looks like my airway doesn’t seal entirely, but partially collapses when I sleep, so I end up getting too little air through the narrowed airway, and then distorting into painful positions to open my airway. Simply improving the air quality in my room massively improved this issue. My airway presumably still partially collapses, because my ligaments consider their current positions mere recommendations to be upheld while muscles keep them on it, but if the air is really excellent, I still get enough to wake refreshed. I’m also anaemic and very sensitive to metabolic changes, and wonder whether that is part of the reason that I react so intensely to CO2. There are apparently people who are barely impacted at all until much later.
I recently tried to join a new gym, and had a godawful time there. Horrible workout performance, terrible mood, headache, brainfog. I eventually entered a cardio room and ended up just staring at a simple device in confusion, I couldn’t figure out how to make it work, and forgot why I had even gone in there. I really did not want to join this gym, despite them having such a good financial offer and more classes and pretty facilities. I thought I ought to join, and felt irrational for my immense reluctance, which I could not pinpoint. It finally clicked to me that it might be their ventilation system completely failing, because I recognised the experience and the cause I had seen illustrated at home. Came back with a sensor, and it hit alarm levels almost instantly. I told them, and it was interesting—they had no idea that this was happening in particular, but they had been losing a lot of customers, and a lot of them had complained that they could not get enough air, that the place had bad vibes, they felt like they could almost smell something bad, they somehow couldn’t be energetic there… I seriously wonder whether 50 years from now, we will look back at this like we now look at Victorian lead paint.
If this affects you, a habit I have also been trying is waking up, and immediately after, going to a window, opening it, and just breathing fresh morning air for a minute. Wakes me up surprisingly well. I’ve also found I love reading in the garden for this reason, and that this is part of why a forest walk makes me feel so much better than using an indoor treadmill.
Underrated rationality hack: Buy a CO2 sensor, and open the window when it alerts. Best 70 bucks I spent in a long, long time.
Why? Because CO2 levels that are routinely exceeded indoors nowadays can inherently have incredibly detrimental effects on rational thinking, and CO2 levels rising are also often indicators that other air quality aspects that affect rational thinking are going down and that ventilation would likely help you think by targeting multiple problems at once. In many places this is getting worse, not better, as modern houses are more hermetically sealed for insulation to save energy, and work spaces and homes become more crowded, while outdoor CO2 is rising planet-wide, people move to cities with ever less green as the housing crisis is tackled, and people have to spend more time indoors against fierce winters and intolerable summers due to climate change (which is very worrying, because now is when we need to be most rational.)
The intensity of the effect on your cognition, how early it becomes noticeable and which functions become noticeably compromised varies a lot with the individual, but the effect can be very pronounced, reducing executive functioning, complex reasoning, speed of thought, mood, sleep https://www.o2sleep.info/Researce_CO2_nextday_performance.pdf , social functioning, motor performance https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412018312807 and overall productivity, leaving you fatigued. While we can observe physiological changes in the brain, it is not yet clear why the resulting functional loss is not evenly distributed in the population—some seem much more resilient, some much more sensitive; you probably won’t know which group you are in until you check. Here is a meta-review of 37 studies (it is on sci-hub if your research institution does not have access) to mostly illustrate that this is a common enough issue to warrant checking for you individually and ensuring in your office spaces: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ina.12706
Humans evolved in CO2 levels of 200-280 parts per million. Our outdoors meanwhile averages 420 in summer due to all the fossil fuels we burned, but can easily breach 500 in cities in the Northern hemisphere in winter. Forest and ocean carbon capture loss will worsen this. Being indoors amplifies this a lot. In a small room without ventilation, even if you aren’t doing much of anything beyond existing, you will raise levels by around 100 an hour; much more if you exercise, or burn gas, or aren’t alone. It is not rare for indoor levels to reach 2500. By 1000, humans typically start losing the ability for complex reasoning.
For me, high CO2 manifests as being headachy, irritated, brain foggy, difficulties mustering willpower, slowed thinking, trouble focussing, trouble being patient, trouble getting restful sleep, with effects becoming noticeable over 750 already, and debilitating at 1100. But it manifests differently in different people—this might not hit you as hard, but in that case, gift the sensor to your office to ensure average productivity there; a bunch of people there will be hit this hard by it.
If you are affected, you will notice the effect, but the cause is undetectable to you. You can’t smell or see CO2. And there are many other plausible causes, so just feeling unfocussed does not tell you want went wrong and how to fix it. If you are in a long-running meeting in a small room, there are many reasons to become frustrated and unfocussed; if you step into a forest, there are many reasons to become focussed. You won’t know if opening the window is a solution, and set yourself up for a mere placebo effect. But with a sensor, you get a connection. You are annoyed you can’t focus, it chirps, you go fuck, this air quality went down the drain, open the window, breathe for a few minutes… and feel clear headed again. The correlation is eerie.
Anyhow. You can buy CO2 sensors in various places online and offline; I hate to admit I got mine from amazon. You want one ideally set to depict current levels, as a specific number; you can also have colour codes and even alarms if very high levels are breached. I am happy with the one I got https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B093L47XZ9/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 - a small one that is usually plugged in, but can also run on the battery for a day and be portable, which allowed me to check out places like my office too, and make changes. It warns you acutely, and allows you to instantly fix the issue by opening a window, and it shows you trends so that if a problem recurs and needs a systematic fix, you can e.g. debug your ventilation system or ventilation habits. Just make sure to regularly recalibrate it outside (that will itself get trickier as this crisis worsens, as we will lack a reliable low source to recalibrate, but for now, seems generally unavoidable in affordable models, and for now, still works.). It has significantly improved my quality of life, and I just wanted to share.
Also—another reason to target fossil fuel emissions now. The emissions are making us, quite literally, stupid. The idea of stepping into my garden, and still not thinking clearly, because we have poisoned the air of our entire planet, is horrific to me. There is genuine concern the air alone will end up making us sick, and that independent of the far more pressing resulting collapse of the climate, we need to fix this for this reason alone: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0323-1
Final interesting side note: The fact that effective ventilation systems often require us to use energy to actively pull air through small tubes, and that this air being sucked out of buildings is very enriched with CO2, comes with a potential interesting side application: installing a carbon capture device inside your green powered ventilation system, thereby becoming net carbon negative. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969722061873
While more expensive it’s worth noting that heat recovery ventilation exists if you want to invest more money into upgrading a home.
The fact that windows need to be opened manually to ventilate is a design flaw.
Oh, I absolutely intend to set up a combination of heat pump + CO2 capture + ventilation + filters for mould and other contaminants in a future home. :)
But I am currently in Europe, where most houses do not have ventilation systems or air conditioning systems at all, but people are taught how often and how long and when to open and close windows (after showering and cooking to control humidity, before going to bed, after waking, frequently when in company or working out, 3 min at minus temperatures as the temperature differential speeds up air exchange, 15 min at Summer temperatures, all windows open fully for a cross breeze and full air exchange while heaters are off, etc.)
And most people in Europe aren’t in any position to install a ventilation system, because they are renting or cannot afford it (the energy costs and initial investment alone), because they are worried about the greenhouse emissions from the energy cost of running ventilation, or the workers and parts currently are not available, so that recommendation would not be doable for most, nor would they necessarily see the need for such an investment per se—while getting a CO2 sensor and opening a window is doable, and allows one to gather information necessary for such choices (like deciding to only move into ventilated buildings in the future, or fixing one’s ventilation, or simply realising that one does not open windows often enough or long enough or during enough activities or that there are dead corners in the house or that the windows need to be cracked while asleep, etc.)
Complete side note, but in Iran, I encountered ancient effective ventilation systems that were keeping indoor places cool and with nice humidity levels even in the literal desert, while being quiet and requiring zero electricity/gas to run. Called wind catchers, because they operate solely by catching and redirecting wind blowing high above your building, and channeling it through your house, often past your internal water supply or other components retaining heat or cold to adjust temperature. Basically a passive architectural feature, once set up, requires very little maintenance, and not that expensive to make, either, while being completely green. Incredible things. Look gorgeous, too. And bizarrely effective; they were using them to run refrigerators. They don’t work in all climates, but where they do, they are a cool solution, not just cause they also operate off-grid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher
Iranian architecture in general is rad, not just because it is stunningly beautiful, but because it is ingenious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_architecture Today, after the US messed the place up so badly, we know Iran as a relatively small country run by religiously radical dictators who treat women and queers like garbage, trample on human rights, and whose desire for nuclear weapons has led to sanctions that have absolutely crippled their economy, so it is a horrible place to live with no freedom or economic opportunities.
But Iran stands in the center of the ruins of an ancient, continuous civilisation 6 k years old https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Iran , which was set up between and across vast deserts. So when it comes to obtaining, transporting across large distances and storing water, cooling buildings, and running agriculture under very adverse conditions, while having no access to electricity, there is an incredible wealth of knowledge on clever solutions for green tech there.
Muslims kept the scientific method alive and protected European texts while Christianity pushed us into the dark ages, while making tons of inventions (logic, math, empirical methods, engineering...) of their own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventions_in_the_medieval_Islamic_world ; five centuries before our renaissance, they were pushing for rationality and enlightment; I think a lot of rational people this day would recognise the beginning of our approach in this dude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham They performed successful fucking neurosurgery in the middle ages (washing with soap they made, disinfecting with alcohol produced only for this purpose, cauterising to stop bleeding, anaesthesia with sponge applied chemical derived from their chemistry and their literal drug trials, using 200 different surgical instruments from their advanced metal smithing and carefully preserved and critiqued knowledge on diseases and anatomy, incl. understanding contagion of diseases through contaminated air and contaminated water and dirt, and extensive protocols to avoid it) while our approach to medicine mostly consisted of praying, blaming the stars, or bad smells from our utter lack of hygiene. Meanwhile, a muslim take at the time was that if evidence or logic contradicted God, the failure was in your understanding of God, because evidence and logic were always right.
Wonderful people to this day, too, unbelievably hospitable. They really deserve better. (Got off track here due to ADHD, sorry. Just wanted to share something that is often underappreciated.)
Different parts of Europe are very different in regard to ventilation. I’m in Germany where we mostly use windows but a Swedish friend told me that in Sweden they mostly use passive ventilation.
Ventilation along with a heat recovery system reduces overall heating costs because it’s much more energy efficient than opening windows.
Huh, I did not know that, and literally believed the opposite. Thank you for telling me!
I did this for a while, but then returned it and just started opening the windows more often, especially when it felt stuffy.
This shortform just reminded me to buy a CO2 sensor and, holy shit, turns out my room is at ~1500ppm.
While it’s too soon to say for sure, this may actually be the underlying reason for a bunch of problems I noticed myself having primarily in my room (insomnia, inability to focus or read, high irritability, etc).
Although I always suspected bad air quality, it really is something to actually see the number with your own eyes, wow. Thank you so, so much for posting about this!!
I am so glad it helped. :)))
It is maddening otherwise; focus is my most valuable good, and the reasons for it failing can be so varied and hard to pinpoint. The very air your breathe undetectably fucking with you is just awful.
I also have the insomnia and irritability issue, it is insane. I’ve had instances where me and my girlfriend are snapping at each other like annoyed cats, repeatedly apologising and yet then snapping again over absolutely nothing (who ate more of the protein bars, why there is a cat toy on the floor, total nonsense), both of us upset at how we are behaving and confused… when one of us will see the sensor and go, damn it, oh just look at those levels, we should have opened the window cooking… and then we snuggle up briefly in the garden while it airs out and everything is fine. It is eerie. (I find it deeply objectionable that my perception of reality is distorted because the air composition around me is mildly altered, and that this leads to snapping at my favourite person. This is really no way to run a mental substrate.)
I’ve also gotten tested for sleep apnea, because I tend to wake with severe headaches, a stiff distorted neck, dry mouth, fatigue and brain fog, wake gasping from nightmares where I suffocate, and cannot fall asleep on my back. I’m hyperflexible and with narrow airways, so it looks like my airway doesn’t seal entirely, but partially collapses when I sleep, so I end up getting too little air through the narrowed airway, and then distorting into painful positions to open my airway. Simply improving the air quality in my room massively improved this issue. My airway presumably still partially collapses, because my ligaments consider their current positions mere recommendations to be upheld while muscles keep them on it, but if the air is really excellent, I still get enough to wake refreshed. I’m also anaemic and very sensitive to metabolic changes, and wonder whether that is part of the reason that I react so intensely to CO2. There are apparently people who are barely impacted at all until much later.
I recently tried to join a new gym, and had a godawful time there. Horrible workout performance, terrible mood, headache, brainfog. I eventually entered a cardio room and ended up just staring at a simple device in confusion, I couldn’t figure out how to make it work, and forgot why I had even gone in there. I really did not want to join this gym, despite them having such a good financial offer and more classes and pretty facilities. I thought I ought to join, and felt irrational for my immense reluctance, which I could not pinpoint. It finally clicked to me that it might be their ventilation system completely failing, because I recognised the experience and the cause I had seen illustrated at home. Came back with a sensor, and it hit alarm levels almost instantly. I told them, and it was interesting—they had no idea that this was happening in particular, but they had been losing a lot of customers, and a lot of them had complained that they could not get enough air, that the place had bad vibes, they felt like they could almost smell something bad, they somehow couldn’t be energetic there… I seriously wonder whether 50 years from now, we will look back at this like we now look at Victorian lead paint.
If this affects you, a habit I have also been trying is waking up, and immediately after, going to a window, opening it, and just breathing fresh morning air for a minute. Wakes me up surprisingly well. I’ve also found I love reading in the garden for this reason, and that this is part of why a forest walk makes me feel so much better than using an indoor treadmill.