If you’ve ever heard that having a plant in your room could help to “purify” the air as you sleep, you’ve probably been influenced by a far-reaching NASA study from the ’80s.

This found that indoor plants, like snake plants and aloe vera, could help to get rid of formaldehyde and other volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from the air.

Some have extrapolated from that that placing some plants in your room could help you sleep, though that is not what the original NASA study claimed.

But is that true, and what does “purifying” the air even mean? How many plants would it take to “purify” the air to begin with?

You would need a lot of plants

A 2019 meta-analysis of the research into this topic found, well, that potted plants do not improve air quality – given the amount of plants most of us have.

But in theory, they wrote,

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