Flux Health Forum

Sleeping with a device

PEMF Basics
#18

Hi Dr. Karen

I still struggle with “tithering” , although far less than before.
Subjectively , a PEMF mattress- either partial or full body seems to work well for many people w/o the wires getting tangled, being pulled out, or making the body uncomfortable.

My initial PEMF experience was the BEMER mattress, which I rented and which I did enjoy sleeping on.

My goal was to find a way to make a comfortable PEMF mattress using PEMF-ICES.

I used Tai Chi/acupuncture(my limited knowledge) where to optimally place coils. My approach was to try hit some of the Tai chi Energy gates to relax my body.

I did achieve partial success with:

  1. the small mattress which I attach to the C5 and apply to my lower spine area. The C5 is placed on a chair, next to my bed, while the long coils allows flexibility to where I lay on my bed.
    A) I can place the mattress on my back or inbetween a shirt and my PJ top.
    B) Coil does not come out like it did when I used 4 seperate array coils.
    C) Wires do not tangle with the mattress as they do with the small mattress.
    D) When I used single coils and strapped them, I was uncomfortable, felt restricted and wore out some coils that way.

  2. Using an array (2 by 2 coil on M1) on the upper spine

  3. I have unsuccesfully so far, tryed using another array coil undder my pillow.

  4. I used an array coil under my left knee to experiment. AS I thankfully at present have no knee pain, I used other subjective indicators. It seemed to work well. The array is smooth, unlike the other coils which I find disruptive to my sleep. I also tried placing the array under a covering which seemed to work very well. FYI: I seem to remain in the same area of the bed durring sleep and often awake in the same spot that I went to sleep.
    Note: I was not succesful strapping arrays to my knees.

  5. If my understanding is correct, the coils can reach 4 inches maybe 5 inches above or below where placed.
    I have only used single arrays below my knee. It only covered 1 knee.

  6. Suggestion: One could experiment by gently wrapping it in a comfortable towl or maybe an item of clothing, perhaps inbetween a few stockings or socks?
    One could also have it perhaps half an inch from the skin to avoid discomfort.

Problem areas:

  1. My C5 wire does not fit smuggly into the connector. (By placeing the C5 on a chair next to me bed-I overcame this issue.
  2. My C5 can only attack one partial mattress which only covers the area of four array coils packed tightly next to each other. (I used 1 , now 2 M1’s attached by a long chord to expose various parts of the body.

Future innovation suggestion for DR. Bob regarding the C5.

  1. an improved C5 with 8 or 12 or 16 outlets could help attach , two, three or four mattress’s to a single machine w/o having to buy an additional C5 for each extra mattress.

  2. An outlett on the C5 which is deeper and allows for a tighter fit.

  3. A pad that is circular which fits around the head - for use durring day-time hours. THis might mean designing coils which fit the circular part of the head, more efficiently then aquare coils. (The idea could be to use an anti-inflammatory device to cover as much of the brain as possible.

Thank-you Dr. Bob and Mrs Dennis for the pad, excellent customer support,
the wonderful forum in addition to grumpy science and the series with Aaron.

2 Likes
#19

Is the tither due to the coils or the C5 vibration or both?

#20

Oh my! What a wealth of ideas you’ve shared! It will take me some time to work them through, so please don’t think I"m ignoring them! :smiley:

The tether problem is definitely due to the attachment of the coils to the device in combination with my moving all over the place during the night. I love the idea of the larger combined pad, but I move from fetal on one side, to one leg up and the other straight, then over to the other side – fetal and one straight – then on my stomach so both can be straight…it just goes on all night and my brain just stays on semi-alert to make sure I’m not typing my leash around myself. :slight_smile:

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#22

Laughing,

Yes, don’t get tangled up with all of those shifts in position. I don’t do as many shifts in position as you do. I am a side sleeper with a big body pillow, so I basically have 2 positions.

I ended up buying reclining chairs and couches and they sell some, which go all the way back, and I sleep on one of those when I need to for certain reasons and I actually sleep better on those.

I also have an adjustable bed in the other room, so I have options.

The couch recliner is probably where I sleep the best.

#23

Hello and thank you for this forum! I have fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. I have M1 and would like to use it on my head while I am sleeping. Has anyone tried that? I know that it’s a good idea to use M1 during sleep but not certain if this applies to the head as well, although it was suggested to me to use delta setting to improve my sleep quality. I’d appreciate any advice on this.

#24

there are many forum posts, including a depression study, which You can search under keyword ‘brain’. Basically you have to experiment for yourself, listen to yourself, and find what works for you for now.

People here can only give testimonials like this which may or may not work for you:

#25

have you ever tried/considered taping the coils to the mattress? while it won’t be guaranteed on your body all the time - but it doesn’t seem like taping it to your body is either - you will at least get magnetic field exposure w/o pulling wires out of the socket AND without waking up in a tangle. I intend to do this soon, but my device has been out on loan for a while. when i save up for enough pennies, i’m gonna be doing this for sure! :open_mouth:

#26

Thanks @OptimalHealth. I don’t tape the coils on, I stick them inside the oven mitts. I don’t think tpaing them would be enough since my hands would likely be in the same spot for very little cumulative time. This way is working for getting enough time and extended exposure and I tend to wake up anyway, even without being aware of the wires. Over time, my sleep positions have adapted as well, so I do less turning and less risk of pressure on the wires.

For a body bit that would be in the one spot more often, like the back or shoulders maybe, this would make a lot of sense I think.

Thanks for thinking of me! :pray:

#27

Yes… sorry… to clarify, I was thinking of taping coils to mattress mainly for upper body coverage with minimal tangling and disconnect from the device. If there were only a way to make it “wireless.” :slight_smile:

Come to think of it, I wonder if the closest thing to general wireless therapy would be to use a high energy, (bigger) coils PEMF generator to pulse magnetic waves at our body. I guess the problem would be: 1. the power needed to create a therapeutic PEMF to penetrate deep enough for the distance; and 2. the annoying clicking sound that would be created from the big coils. haha… beneficial “wifi” for the body.

Anyway, I digress… mitts sound like a great solution as long as your hands don’t get too hot - that’s never been an issue (heat)?

#28

LOL - My hands will feel hot at times, but I “sleep hot” anyway.

I don’t find that the coils themselves get warm or as if they are overheating. And since they’re mitts, I can slip out of them for a couple minutes to cool down, if needed.

#29

Lily,

I have used the M1 on my head while I slept and I am coming off of brain problems and I think it has helped me with brain plasticity.

The one side effect I have had was vertigo, probably from knocking calcium crystals around in my ear and there is a matter of coil placement and I genuinely believe that is a serious enough matter to be careful of where you put the coils.

You might go to PubMed and read studies on things like TMS. I say that because some coil positions for some things really do matter. For instance, when they studied depression, the right side and left side of the prefrontal cortex worked differently. It has been a few years since I looked it up, but with the brain, the setting and coil position do matter.

If you have anything like mental health issues particularly, go through the literature to learn about it.

For example, some studies intentionally use Gamma and some use Alpha and some conditions will say that a certain part of the brain is low in Theta or high in something else.

Don’t neglect the research is my advice.

Still, we are all self-hackers using a research tool on ourselves and I have slept with it and other than vertigo once I haven’t had anything negative.

I also have used it on my vagal nerve all night and that would be a good topic for you.

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#30

Prometheus, thank you! I’ve spent countless hours reading through the forum and have seen some mention of ICES at night but was looking for more recent experiences. And I missed Bob’s reply that you quoted. I probably missed some other relevant forum entries as well. I am concerned about keeping M1 on my head for, say, five hours straight, and I haven’t seen any mention of this.

#31

Thank you, bettereveryday! I’ve read quite a bit about your journey on this forum. Incredible.

Thank goodness, I don’t have mental issues, just pain all over, fatigue and other non-mental issues, so I was thinking about targeting hypothalamus and base of the skull.

It was my understanding that vagal nerve doesn’t necessarily need to be stimulated on the head, but could be in other places on the body. Where do you prefer to access the vagal nerve?

Thank you!

#32

Lily,

I have played with various areas on the vagal nerve. I am careful getting too close to the gut because I eat Whole Food Plant-Based and feel confident that I have a good gut microbiome and I am not sure about the research on PEMF and the gut microbiome yet.

I tend to start where they would do the electrodes if I had them implanted. There are a lot of pictures of that on the internet. I stay further away from the ear since I had vertigo. I think it could have been caused by seeing a study where they stimulated near the ear for tinnitus and I tried that location and got vertigo.

#33

Hi Lily:

I think vagal stimulation sounds like a good place to start. I would suggest trying just at your left carotid artery area on your neck.

For use on your head, I would go slow. Start with 15-20 minutes - I’ve had clients get headches form longer use. These probably go away with continued use, as they did in the brain injury study ICES was used for, but why not just let your brain adapt gently? :slight_smile: To avoid having to guess, as @bettereveryday Deb mentions, I would suggest using a 2x2 matrix on both sides, then adding in front and back - but again slowly increasing time in each area. This way, if there is some area that needs more “feeding”, it will get more, but you are more likely to allow things to balance out than to activate one area more than another. You can also use these shorter times to see what frequency “feels best” or gets you better results in the hours after.

Hope that helps.

#34

:open_mouth: ha! i put it over my gut ALL THE TIME and overnight even… no problems :slight_smile: but i guess how do you gauge that? it helps me stay regular too :slight_smile:

#35

I do too. I had some diarrhea (TMI???) from a new medication and a day or two of using it seemed to help that resolve. It might have been just adapting to the med, but it seemed awfully quick to me. I’ve continued, thinking it might help with leaky gut – helping the gut tissues replace themselves more “tightly”.

@bettereveryday Deb - have you seen studies that suggest this might not be wise?

#36

Karen,

Real studies aren’t out there. There are studies that it affects the blood brain barrier permeability and tight junctions and, unrelated to PEMF, there are studies that the tight junctions are involved with certain gut microbiome issues, but nobody has specifically done a study of PEMF and tight junctions and whether it would help or harm the microbiome. I suspect if you have something like SIBO or some overgrowth, or have just finished rounds of antibiotics, it might help, but if you are starting off with a good situation, you might be messing with it. That is purely speculative, but anyway the blood brain barrier becoming more permeable is good if you are trying to take meds for brain cancer, but is not good if you have bacterial pathogens crossing the blood brain barrier.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro.2016.178

I have done a lot of work on my diet to have a wide range of organic fruits and vegetables and I have lowered the risk factors for leaky gut and I do not have any digestive issues so I just am waiting for the science to arrive and blood brain barrier and gut microbiome just seem like good things to be more careful about.

If my gut was really messed up, I would use it because they do think PEMF does affect the bacterial load. It just depends whether you have a lot of good versus bad bacteria.

#37

Karen,

My brain was messed up, and I did use it even though I wondered about blood-brain barrier because I weighed it in my mind and the hope of brain plasticity and of increasing the blood flow to the brain and other things which I felt might help my brain were good enough things to take risks on and that has paid off.

If I had started with a stronger brain, I would have probably just stimulated the vagal nerve instead.

#38

I can give you an example of one type of setting I don’t use anymore. Gamma. I was using Gamma based on the research of people with Alzheimer’s being low in Gamma and when they were exposed to pulsed Gamma, it stimulated the Microglia to clean up the amyloid-beta and tau.

I like trying things and I bought a pulsed Gamma light and used pulsed Gamma sound and used the Gamma setting on the ICES on my brain and the thing is, that was based on a study where there was an improvement in people with Alzheimer’s, but after that, I encountered an opposing theory about Alzheimer’s and it was that the Microglia were doing too much cleaning up in Alzheimer’s and they were affecting the synapses too much, so, that would be a case where I tried it and even maybe felt like there was some benefit, but I no longer use Gamma every day. I still might use it when I know I didn’t sleep well for a few weeks and that would be a time where I suspect my brain didn’t get cleaned up at night, but I am purely self-hacking and I am so grateful to be able to do it. I probably take more risks than other people when I have actual issues, but I also keep continually looking at the research and adjust accordingly.

https://www.alzforum.org/news/research-news/human-microglia-eat-synapses-more-so-alzheimers

Science is always a war of opposing ideas.

I can look at nutrition and I have relatives and friends with Diabetes and Keto versus Whole Food Plant-Based versus losing 15% of your body weight versus fasting would be a playing field of ideas.

Recently, Dr. Greger added in acetone does the exact same damage as blood sugar, so Keto through adding in oils and fats can normalize the blood sugar very well, but increase insulin resistance and you can still get things like neuropathy through the acetone working the same pathway as blood sugar did. Up until that moment, I probably would have suggested Keto with the oils second after Whole Food Plant-Based with no oils, but the science juggles around and we have to wait to see what the next study brings. Fasting type of ketosis and losing 15% of body fat still are on my list until science knocks it out.