Sleeping Aids and Electromagnetic Fields
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.
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.