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.

Note: in a recent article, I covered the supplements I’ve found were the most helpful for sleep. This section will instead focus on the reusable products that assist with sleep.

Ear Plugs

One of the great tragedies in modern life is that there is now so much noise pollution, many “soundscapes” which used to exist in nature are disappearing (which in turn has led to a global project to catalog them before they are lost forever). Because many are sound sensitive, they frequently find they must do something to mitigate the noise they are surrounded by. Typically, I find one of the following approaches are utilized:

•Living by an ocean, river or creek and having its noise dampen the ambient noise. While many find this is very helpful, many others unfortunately do not have access to this option.

•Using a white noise generator (e.g., an app on the phone). While this works for many, others (particularly those most sensitive to sound) find it is counter productive.

•Wearing ear plugs.

In the case of ear plugs, a variety of different models and styles exist. Of these, I believe the silicon ones are by far the most effective (performing better than even custom made ones) and of the silicon brands (which are sold online and in local drugstores), I believe the brand Mack’s is by far the best. In turn, many people, especially those who are particularly sensitive to sound have told me these ear plugs were life-changing for them.

Note: in this publication, I have argued that autism largely results from microstrokes creating neurological damage in the brain and that this can be most easily observed by evaluating the function of the cranial nerves. For example, this was a part of a thread I recently posted on Twitter.

In the case of autistic children (or those on the spectrum) more significant cranial nerve dysfunction is often observed. Many (myself included) have suspect this accounts for the high sensitivity they have to stimuli, as the cranial nerves (along with key parts of the brain such as the thalamus) are responsible for dampening the stimuli we are exposed to. For example, research has shown that autistic children are significantly more likely to have a dysfunctional tensor typmani (a muscle innervated by the cranial nerve which dampens loud noises) and thus are more sensitive to sound. In turn, I have found good quality ear plugs are particularly helpful for neuroatypical individuals with varying degrees of vaccine-induced neurological damage.

Weighed Blankets

Years ago, I discovered that it was sometimes very difficult for me to sleep in a new bed, and I eventually realized the issue were the sheets on top of me, as rather than having a blanket with a bit of weight, it was made from some type of material which was almost weightless. Later, as I began reading through the various products people had found transformed their life, I frequently found weighted blankets (which are essentially thin blankets with glass beads inside them to make them heavier) were often remarkably helpful for improving their sleep. Because of this, I keep one at locations I frequently travel to (they are very affordable), and often advise patients to use them.

Organic Cotton Sheets

In a recent article about the importance of healthy clothing, I highlight that many individuals feel better with natural fabrics, and particularly sensitive individuals need to wear organic clothing. Generally speaking, we found this was the most important for sleep, and in turn, there was a subset of patients who could only sleep if they were on organic cotton sheets. For this reason, I often advise patients change their bedding.

Grounding Sheets and Zeta Aid

In the previous article about sleep, I argued that a key factor which allows individuals to initiate the sleep cycle is if fluid can move out of the brain and that an impaired physiologic zeta potential (the same thing which gives rise to vaccine induced microstrokes) is often a key issue in this regard. In turn, I’ve found that:

•Many people who start regularly taking Zeta Aid to improve their health (one of the most affordable and accessible ways to improve the physiological zeta potential—especially if done in conjunction with only drinking reverse osmosis or distilled water) often experience a significant improvement in their sleep.

•Many people who sleep on conductive sheets connected to an electrical ground get a significant improvement in their sleep (as electrically grounding the body is another way to improve the physiological zeta potential).

Note: I have found grounding sheets, inclined bed therapy (discussed further here) or sleeping on magnet pads often improve one’s sleep, but the effect varies greatly from person, and in some cases, initially works but then wears off after a few months.

EMF Shielding

A variety of products exist which claim to shield and protect you from EMFs. To this day, I am not sure if any help (although the Energy Armor bracelets seemed to help a bit—but they’ve since been discontinued). Rather, I believe the most effective approach is to use some type of shielding.

Two approaches exist for this: use EMF shielding fabric or painting a room with EMF shielding paint. Of the fabrics, the best one I’ve found is Swiss Shield Naturell, while for the paint, it’s Y-shield paint. In the case of the fabric, it’s classically sold as a canopy to cover the bed (which some people find greatly helps with their sleep). Alternatively, I’ve found that if one has a tailor make a custom outfit of it (e.g., pants and a long sleeve shirt with a hoodie) that can also be extremely helpful.

Bed Jet

One of the major challenges in heating or cooling a house is getting the heat or cold to reach the target area of the house. The most common approach use to address this is having a central system which conducts heated or cooled air through vents to the entire house, but this suffers the downside of individuals being sensitive to the wind that comes out (e.g., some can’t sleep near vents), and the air ducts potentially becoming contaminated (e.g., with mold—which can be a real issue), or if that can’t be fit into the house, having window mounted AC units and space heaters.

Of the many approaches I’ve seen to addressing this problem, my favor (albeit costly) approach is to run heat conductive tubing throughout the walls of a house and then adjust the temperature of the home by pumping heated or cooled water through that circuit. This in turn makes it possible to heat or cool the house without needing to blow noisy air through the house.

In the case of sleeping, similar approaches exist (e.g., since the body needs to drop its temperature by around 2-3 degrees Fahrenheit to sleep there’s very promising data of having a blanket filled with water at a precisely controlled temperature to induce the sleep cycle). Many of these approaches are less than ideal (e.g., many hazards exist with electric blankets, and many believe they can create significant issues from the EMFs they produce).

Presently, my favorite approach has been BedJet, a system which blows air set to a specific temperature into a sheet on top of the body.

This system has a few major advantages. Specifically it:

•Allows you to heat or cool yourself without needing to have air blow against your body (rather it conducts through the sheet) and is fairly quiet (especially at lower settings)

•It requires much less energy to cool you than heating or cooling the entire room would take.
Note: if the room is too hot, the Bedjet is not sufficient to adequately cool you on its own.

•Allows you to keep your core body warm while your head is at a cooler temperature, something many find is helpful for sleep (e.g., this temperature differential can drain blood from the head into the body).

•When two units are used, Bedjet offers a sheet that allows each half of the bed to be set to a different temperature. This in turn solves a longstanding problem I periodically ran into and previously could not find a good solution too—couples where each partner needs a different temperature to sleep at (leading to the situation where the room was always too hot or too cold—something which can be incredibly straining on a marriage).

I hate endorsing somewhat expensive products (BedJets are 500 dollars), but given how much these help certain people I wanted to mention them. Additionally, a variety of cheaper alternatives exist (I just have no experience with them).

Blackout Curtains

I believe light-proofing the room you sleep in is very important (e.g., remove any electric device from the bedroom that emits a light) and one of the most crucial elements to this are having blackout curtains. The key thing to understand about blackout curtains is that their efficacy varies greatly, so when you buy them, you want to make sure you purchase ones that fully block any external light to the room, rather than ones that only partially block it.

Lightbulbs

A variety of opinions exist on which bulbs are optimal to have at home, especially at night (a good case can be made for a variety of niche products). Generally speaking, we find incandescent bulbs work much better than most of the other options on the market (which makes the energy efficiency bans against them particularly frustrating).

Alarm Clocks

Being woke up by an alarm clocks is often very jarring for the nervous system, and one of my main goals after I finished my medical residency was to structure my life so that I could minimize my need for them (e.g., by not working call shifts). I was thus delighted for my patients when I learned about sunrise alarm clocks. These alarm clocks, rather than forcefully waking you up, attempt to mirror the natural waking process by having a faint light turn on about an hour before you need to make up and then gradually increase its intensity until it is time for you to wake up.

The key advantage of this is that it does not disrupt critical parts of the sleep cycle (rather your tend to wake up when the body is ready to) and many report feeling much more refreshed and awake when they get up (as opposed to hating their alarm clock). The primary disadvantage to them is that they sometimes won’t work (e.g., if you’ve had a large shift in when you went to sleep and need to wake up at a different time or if its light is too far away from you).

Note: many different models exist, this article for example compares and contrasts a few of them. I personally prefer the ones that don’t emit extraneous light (e.g., with a digital clock).

Conclusion

One of the things that most surprises me in the sleep aid field is how little attention is given to devices that aid sleep—something I cynically believe is due to the fact much less money can be made off of the permanent solution they offer (as in contrast, sleeping pills need to be re-purchased on a continual basis).

I sincerely hope these suggestions will help improve your life, and I look forward to hearing each of the ideas you have to share. Your support and insight have played a pivotal role in making this publication possible and I greatly appreciate all that you have done for this newsletter.

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