Sleeping Aids and Electromagnetic Fields

September's Open Thread

I believe one of the biggest issues in modern medicine is that patients often don’t get the opportunity to establish a genuine relationship with their physician and hence often lack the critical voice which is necessary for a therapeutic doctor-patient relationship. Because of this, my goal here was always to be able to correspond with everyone who reached out to me. Unfortunately, due to the traffic I now receive, it’s not possible to do that. For that reason, I decided the best solution was to have a monthly open thread (where people could ask any question they wanted) and link that to a topic I’d wanted to write about but didn’t quite feel merited a full article. In this month’s open thread, I will discuss another facet of the insomnia puzzle—the devices that improve sleep and strategies for sleep friendly housing.

The Importance of Sleep

Presently, I believe one of the most important things for health is having restorative sleep which in turn requires having a functional sleep cycle. For example, as I showed in a recent article, some of the critical functions of sleep include:

• Maintaining circulatory health and preventing heart attacks.

• Ensuring proper metabolic health (e.g., preventing hunger, diabetes, and weight gain).

• Supporting immune function (e.g., reducing susceptibility to the flu).

• Preventing cancer.

• Avoiding fatigue, brain fog, and serious accidents.

• Keeping you awake and alert.

• Healing and restoring the brain (e.g., reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s).

• Regulating hormonal function and maintaining fertility (e.g., sleep deprivation lowers testosterone levels).

• Processing emotional trauma (e.g., sleep is typically disrupted in PTSD, and PTSD often significantly improves once a drug is given which prevents PTSD from disrupting sleep).

• Interpreting emotional signals.

• Allowing rational control over impulses.

• Maintaining one’s sense of reality (e.g., prolonged sleep deprivation can trigger psychosis, and sleep is known to be disturbed in schizophrenic patients).

• Facilitating creativity (e.g., many paradigm-shifting discoveries came from dreams, Thomas Edison was well-known for using dreams to concoct his inventions, and when people are woken up from REM sleep, they often demonstrate a radically improved abstract problem solving capacity).

• Reducing one’s sensitivity to pain (whereas sleep deprivation increases it).

• Facilitating the long-term retention of memories.

More importantly, rather than these benefits being abstract, people immediately notice how much worse they feel when they are sleep deprived or they have a condition (e.g., fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue) which prevent them from getting restorative sleep.

The War Against Sleep

Given how critical sleep is for health, it’s remarkable that our society fares so poorly with it and our health authorities do so little to support it. This I believe is due to many different economic interests being opposed to creating the changes necessary for healthy sleep. For example:

•Many industries depend upon having consumers use bright electronic devices at night (which is terrible for the sleep cycle).

•Many industries (e.g., hospitals) depend upon workers having abnormal hours (e.g., periodically working night shifts), something which is highly disruptive to the sleep cycle and thus health (e.g., the WHO classifies shift work as a probable human carcinogen since existing research shows it causes a 33-62% increase in the risk of cancer).

•The pharmaceutical industry (which now exerts significant control over the government) is reliant upon Americans having as many chronic illnesses as possible. Because of this, safe and unpatentable ways to maintain health (e.g., regular outdoor sunlight exposure) are actively disparaged by the medical industry.

•Insomnia is one of the largest drug markets in the United States (e.g., in 2022, 65 billion was spent on sleep aids), so the industry benefits from insomnia being a chronic condition which has a marginal response to the existing medications, in turn requiring the populace to become lifelong consumers of these products. In the case of sleeping pills, this is particularly unfortunate as rather than help you sleep, most of them function as sedatives which block the sleep cycle from occurring once the user is knocked out. Because of this, sleeping pills have many severe side effects (e.g., one large study found, depending on how many sleeping pills were taken, that these pills increased the risk of death by 3.6-5.4 times), and sadly, many other equally disturbing datasets about these medications exist.

Recently I discussed one of the most tragic aspects of this entire story—the fact that a highly effective sleep aid (which completely transformed people’s lives) was buried in the 1990s by the FDA in collusion with the mass media (using a playbook that was remarkably similar to what we saw done to ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine during COVID-19). These events were so egregious that they inspired comedian Jimmy Dore to do a segment on the FDA’s War Against Sleep.

Sleeping Environments

Since sleep is so critical for health, like many, I advocate for ensuring the environment you sleep in is conducive to healthy sleep (since the sleeping process is very sensitive to external stimuli as it is critical for survival to be able to awaken if a potential danger is in the environment). Many of the principles for ensuring a healthy sleeping environment are covered under the umbrella of “sleep hygiene,” an approach which seeks to cultivate a sleeping environment which contains the signals that instruct the body to enter the sleep cycle (e.g., by having it being free of artificial lighting—particularly blue light, not having the room be too hot, avoiding mental activity before bed time and consistently going to bed at the same time).

Note: the principles of sleep hygiene are discussed in more detail here.

Presently, I believe that a healthy sleep environment is so important that when a patient becomes a prospective home buyer, I often advise for them to prioritize how well they sleep in a house they are considering purchasing, to take a quick nap in the bed of the house when they tour it and if possible (while under contract) to be able to sleep for a night in the house. This in part is because I believe in its importance for their health and in part because I periodically see people who end up selling their homes since they cannot sleep in them. Furthermore, while the real estate market is becoming more and more competitive, the “sleepability” of a house is rarely considered, and as a result, if a buyer looks for it, they can normally attain it.

Note: improved sleep is a major benefit of living in rural areas.

Electromagnetic Fields and Sleeping Environments

When the sleepability of a house is considered, things such as the surrounding noise (e.g., outside traffic, neighbors, airplane traffic), the air quality, and the surrounding light pollution are often taken into consideration.

Note: there has recently been a transition from orange (sodium vapor) streetlights to bright white LED ones (as they are more energy efficient and hence “more environmentally friendly”). I do not support this as the newer lights are quite harmful to wildlife, make it significantly harder to see the stars at night, and make it much harder to sleep (if they are by your window). Furthermore, the dangers are significant enough that even the AMA warned against the health effects of these newer lights in 2016 (along with authoring a detailed report on their dangers).

However, other sleep affecting factors (e.g., toxic chemicals off-gassing from a newly manufactured home) rarely are discussed. Of these, I find the most consistently under-appreciated quality of a home are its electrical qualities.

Since so many things can affect the electrical sleepability of a house and the response individuals experience varies greatly from person to person, I typically advise patients to see how the house works for them rather than trying to give any hard and fast rules to follow (although better quality EMF meters which can detect high frequency microwaves are often helpful in this regard).

Note: many of the sites I’ve found patients had the most rejuvenating experiences with (e.g., particularly healing hot springs) tend to be located in low EMF areas. One of the most interesting anecdotes I ever heard about this came from Dietrich Klinghardt (a well-known integrative physician who places a significant emphasis on the dangers of EMFs), who stated that he found a valley in South America that was an EMF dead zone, and that he would frequently have severe chronic illnesses resolve when patients lived there. Unfortunately, midway through this process a cell phone tower got placed in the valley and the area became unusable for this purpose—which speaks to a broader issues—EMF free areas are becoming harder and harder to find.

Typically, when looking at the electrical qualities of a house, I’ve found the following can matter.

•If the wiring in the house creates concentrated pockets of dirty electricity.

•How much Wifi is present (e.g., from the neighbors).

•How close the house is to cell phone towers (and conversely if there are mountains blocking their signal from reaching the house).
Note: this website is the best resource I have found for evaluating the proximity of cell phone towers to homes, although I have come across cases of towers not being listed in it.

•If the house is in the path of a radar installation (e.g., because its close to an airport).

•If the house is on a geopathic stress line (e.g., it crosses over an underground river).
Note: I’ve also found in some cases the opposite can happen and the underlying geology can make a place work much better to sleep in.

In turn, many find that changing the electrical qualities of a home can significantly improve their sleep. For example, I’ve heard more reports than I can count from (more electrically sensitive) individuals that turning off their house’s circuit breakers at night greatly enhanced their sleep and I’ve also heard many people share that turning off their house’s Wifi at night caused them to have much deeper and more vivid dreams.

Note: this is also a reason why many (myself included) have their house wired with ethernet lines rather than using Wifi.

The link between EMFs and sleep hygiene in turn is somewhat controversial since it lies outside the conventional paradigm and there is not yet a clearly established mechanism which could explain how they disrupt sleep. From my own exploration of this subject, I uncovered a 2019 paper which provided a fascinating clue to this puzzle.

Note: for context, the hippocampus (the part of the brain responsible for learning and storing short term memories into longterm memories—which is also a critical function of sleep) relies upon slow periodic wave activity to accomplish its consolidation of memory.

Briefly, that paper provided the evidence to argue that:

•The slow periodic waves the hippocampus uses to encode memories are not physically transmitted (e.g., through synaptic junctions and neurotransmitters) but rather through coupled electrical fields that can become self-propogating.

•Previously, it was assumed those fields were too weak to matter, but the authors were able to show these faint fields could exert a biological effect.

•The electrical fields the hippocampus uses to encode memories are sensitive to external electrical fields.

•Because of this, an externally applied field could either enhance or cancel out the field being generated by the hippocampus.

In turn, this provides a mechanism to explain why environmental EMFs could affect the sleep process (particularly dreaming).

Note: we frequently advise patients not to charge their cell phones near their beds. This is in part due to the light the phone emits being disruptive to sleep, in part due to the EMFs both it (and the charging process emits) disrupting sleep, and the fact that continually having messages you think about or respond to during the night also being detrimental to sleep.

After publishing this article, I received this email from a reader I wanted to share

Sensitivity to EMFs

The biological effects of EMFs are another very controversial issue. This is because:

•The sensitivity to them varies greatly.

•Many industries rely upon EMFs to function (and hence have a vested interest in them being viewed as completely safe).

Note: because EMFs have significant biological effects but that research faces many political obstacles, a significant body of evidence exists showing that EMFs can cause biological harm (e.g., see this book and this book for the links to cancer, palpitations and male infertility) yet much of the more modern research comes from countries like Russia and hence rarely makes it into the Western scientific community.

In my own experience, you typically will encounter individuals who fall into one of the following categories:

•They are extremely sensitive to EMFs and have to live in isolated rural areas to avoid debilitating symptoms (e.g., rapid migraines that lead to convulsions). Unless you directly know people like this, it’s often difficult to believe they exist, but electrically hypersensitive individuals (EHS) are very much out there.

•Those with chronic illnesses (especially mast cell disorders) who gradually realize their illnesses become significantly worse when they are exposed to EMFs.

•Those who feel EMFs and can tell they aren’t good for them (because the fields feel uncomfortable), but typically aren’t significantly affected by them. This for example is my situation.

•Those who can link minor symptoms to EMF exposures (e.g., a headache from being on the cell phone too long).

•Those who, when you point it out, notice they feel more relaxed and calm and clearheaded in low EMF areas.

•Those who have no discernible reaction to EMFs and cannot wrap their heads around why others do.

Likewise, I find that some people can’t sleep in high EMF housing, some notice they get more restorative sleep in low EMF housing, and many others have no issues being saturated by EMFs and external light while they sleep. This in turn touches upon one of my key principles in medicine—you have to acknowledge that different individuals can have a very different response to the same stimuli, and you cannot generalize one’s experience onto others.

Note: typically the most problematic EMFs are those in the microwave spectrum, such as that emitted from cell phones, radar, and Wifi.

Sleep Aids

Every now and then, I read a thread about what products or devices someone purchased which most positively transformed their life. What I find fascinating about these lists is that almost of the products inevitably are gotten to improve sleep—which again touches upon how important sleep is for our health and how greatly it is neglected by modern society (a recent Gallup poll found 57% of Americans want more sleep but only 42% get enough).

Note: results like this poll and the fact that Americans spent 65 billion dollars on sleep in 2016 highlight a longstanding problem with our medical system. If the medical system does a poor job of addressing a problem, it typically receives more money to address it, which inevitably results in the industry having a vested interest in never solving the problem and gradually swallowing the national budget.

In the final part of this article (which as mentioned above exists as an open forum for you to ask any questions that have come up over the last month), I will share the best sleep aid products I’ve come across—including one that solves a surprisingly difficult challenge some couples have when one requires a much warmer temperature than the other to sleep and one that is often very helpful for neuro-atypical individuals (e.g., as a result of a vaccine induced brain injury), along with a few of the more innovative approaches I’ve seen for designing a sleep-friendly house. Likewise, I invite you to share the approaches which most helped you on your journey to healthy sleep.