Banish your phone from your bedroom…

I am sure that I have gone on at length in previous blogs about the EVILS of using your mobile as an alarm clock and the amazingly beneficial effects of banishing all electrics from your sleeping area – if you are not familiar with this patter, see below…

However, I was interested in a lengthy article in the MailOnline a couple of days ago advising exactly the same – NEVER keep your mobile phone in your bedroom. They did make passing reference to  electromagnetic sensitivity but 90% of the article was devoted to other reasons why you should not keep your phone in your bedroom.

Well, I am not proud and to be honest I really do not care why my nearest and dearest  – and indeed everyone else that I know – do not keep a phone in their bedroom – as long as they don’t! So please do read the article. And while you are at it you might want to read another good post on the subject at The Sleep Judge.

But, meanwhile,  to titillate your interest:

• The light produced by mobile phones, especially modern bright screens, stimulates the retina and persuades your brain that it is day. So instead of producing the sleeping hormone, melatonin, it produces the waking hormone, cortisol.

• This applies not only to phones but to tablets, laptops and tellys. If you want to give your melatonin the best chance you should try not to look at a screen for at least an hour before you go to bed and preferably longer.

• Light colour. The light emitted by phone is blue – the ‘waking’ colour – and you hold it close to your face.

• Sleep pattern.  We sleep in 1 1/2 to 2 hours bursts but usually go back to sleep immediately without waking properly at all. But if a flash of light of vibration from your phone caught you at the waking moment, it would wake you entirely and you would have difficulty in going back to sleep.

• Even worse – if you do wake and check your phone you are logging into an anxiety pattern – needing to check the phone ‘in case it is something urgent’…. But you need to be relaxed to sleep properly and will not be if you are always waiting for ‘that call’.

 

Why you should sleep in an ‘electrically clean’ environment.

Whether or not you accept the now extremely large body of research which suggests that man mad electromagnetic radiation can be harmful to health, no one can deny that over the last 25 years we have increased the amount of that radiation in the atmosphere many, many thousand fold. What else powers the billions of mobile phone we all use, the universally available wifi, the smart meters which monitor our electricity use etc etc. (if you want to know more see the ES section of the FoodsMatter site.)

Nor can anyone deny that  we are ‘electrical creatures’ and that communication between the cells of our bodies – what keep us all going – is made via tiny electrical impulses.

While human kind has lived within the earth’s electromagnetic field for many millions of years, that field consists of a smooth curve. Man-made, information-bearing electro-magnetic radiation is not a smooth curve. It is pulsed, to accommodate the minute ‘packages’ of information that go to make up your phone conversation. In electrical terms, a smooth signal and a pulsed, intermittent signal may have very different effects.

This is not the place to delve into how and why this could damage our health (for some detailed info see this paper by Dr Andrew Goldsworthy) but let us just accept that we have dramatically changed out environment in a very short time. Moreover,  it would not be unreasonable for such a significant change to have some fall out in terms of our health.

So, being a precautionary soul, I feel that implementing the precautionary principle is sensible. Rather than subjecting myself to the effects of this man-made electromagnetic radiation 24/7, maybe doing it on a part time basis might be wise. And the easiest way to do that is to minimise it during the 6 to 8 hours that I spend in bed and, hopefully asleep. Given that the time I am asleep is my body’s opportunity to do the general service and maintenance work that is necessary to keep me going, minimising any possible extra strain created by this radiation might also be helpful?

So, here are my suggestions….

1. Park your mobile phone and its charger, as far away from your bedroom as possible – and turn it off!
(There are of course occasions when it is important that people can get hold of you at night but I would strongly advise you in that case to have a traditional telephone in the bedroom, not use a mobile.)

2. Get rid of the radio alarm clock – it is pumping out radiation at you all night. Buy yourself a nice old fashioned battery driven alarm clock and and a battery driven radio.

3. Do not watch telly  or your laptop in bed or, if you really want to, turn it off an hour before you want to go to sleep and unplug it or turn it off at the mains.

4. If you use wifi, turn the router off before you go to bed – it continues to put out radiation even when you aren’t using it and it can penetrate walls.

5. If you use a hands-free phone, unplug it. Like the wifi router, it continues to pump out radiation whether or not you are using it.

6. Unplug all chargers – as with the wifi router and the hands-free phone they continue to ‘charge’ whether or not you have anything plugged into them.

7. Unless you are totally wedded to it, get rid of your electric blanket or pad.

8. In an ideal world, turn off the electric in your bedroom altogether, although this is not always possible. (I can, for example, turn of the ring main but if I turn the lighting circuit off it also turns off the burglar alarm!)

9. And, of course, encourage that sleep hormone by having really tight fitting curtains or blinds so that your body really does believe that it is night and that it should be asleep!

Sweet dreams….

PS Do check the ‘comments’ for questions to do with airplane mode….