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The amount of carbon dioxide in the air in your home office could be seriously impairing your ability to concentrate. Read on to find out why this is, and what you can do about it.
Depending on the size of the room or apartment that you are in, and the number of people crammed in there, you may be sitting in a soup of carbon dioxide the is potent enough to impair your cognitive ability by up to 50%.
In this post, I will go through some of the info that I have found on the effects of indoor CO2, but before you read on… why not go and open that window?
Here’s a few numbers to get us all warmed up
Pre-industrial CO2 level in the atmosphere was ~260ppm. Our fossil fuel burning has increased this to around 400ppm, which is about the minimum that you will see in your home, or anywhere for that matter.
While the concentrations of CO2 outdoors are increased over many years by burning hydrocarbons, indoor concentrations are increased because of our breathing. We humans are basically just machines that suck in oxygen, and spit out carbon dioxide. Each time we breath in, the air will be~400ppm, but the air that we breath out has a much higher concentration of CO2. An exhaled breath will have ~38,000ppm.
