Like mowing the lawn; being around a smell that bothers you; not wanting to inhale hazardous dust
I wore masks before they were a thing. I always wore on planes because the smell of diesel fumes and nasty plane smell made me nauseous. As if the motion sickness weren't bad enough. Any other alternative?
What about when i make laundry soap and the dust from borax is in the air?
Borax is the most-studied, with the lowest overdose potential. Calcium Fructoborate is a synthetic reproduction of the naturally-occurring vitamin found in plants, there is also Boron Citrate and Boron Glycinate, but I just haven't found much in the literature to give me confidence that any of those are more "safe and effective" than Borax.
Boric Acid is also very good- and GREAT for eye infections and female yeast infections, BUT does have significantly higher skin absorption than Borax (skin absorption of Borax is functionally zero), which makes Borax better to have around the house with kids and completely safe for things like baths and laundry and dish detergent if you use it for those. Almost all ingested Boron, regardless of the form, is hydrolyzed to Boric Acid within the GI tract in the presence of the Hydrochloric Acid in our stomachs.
Even with its higher skin absorption, it is still VERY hard to overdose on Boric Acid or Borax- the only overdose death I could find in the literature when I was researching this a couple years ago was a man who was trying to commit suicide, so he dissolved TWO CUPS of Boric Acid powder in water and drank it in one sitting in an overdose attempt- and it still took him THREE DAYS to die. There are plenty of mentions of "overdoses" on places like Livestrong and the CDC- but there are never any sources attached to those. I could only find that ONE that was actually written up in almost a century and it was a suicide. I think there was also some lady in the 1920s who committed suicide with Boric Acid if I recall correctly. There were a handful of infants well over a century ago who had issues because their parents were dipping pacifiers in a mixture of honey and borax 10x/day to soothe them, and they all recovered normal function within a few weeks after their parents stopped doing this idiotic thing.
Long story short- Borax is thoroughly studied, incredibly safe, particularly in the minuscule doses needed to achieve therapeutic effect, ridiculously cheap, and useful for all manner of household activities. You have to go WAY out of your way to do something unsafe with Borax, even getting it in your eyes is completely fine as it is the primary active ingredient in contact solution. That's why it works so well in the slime that kids make- and why the only safety issues that arise with slime happen when parents try to use alternatives to Borax since they believe all the lies on the internet about safety.