Sleep

Sleep can be a mysterious creature

The Human Body and Sleep During a Prolonged Power Outage

"Sleep can be a mysterious creature. There are times when the lack of sleep creeps up from behind and conscripts your conscious mind, rendering you seemingly unable to function while doing normal ordinary daily activities but under the cover of darkness, it often leaves one sitting alone in the vexing obscurity of the night while the mind recounting the days activities screams for attention."

We humans are so very out of sync with our own bodies rhythms that most of us know nothing or are even aware that the body has biorhythms like all other forms of life on this planet. We, as homo-sapiens-sapiens, are not exempt from these natural cycles. 

"Human regulatory systems are designed to adapt to daily and seasonal climatic and geomagnetic variations; however sharp changes in solar and geomagnetic activity and geomagnetic storms can stress these regulatory systems, resulting in alterations in melatonin/serotonin balance, blood pressure, immune system, reproductive, cardiac, and neurological processes."  Global Healing Center

"You can get your sleep screwed up very quickly," says W. Christopher Winter, M.D., medical director of the Martha Jefferson Hospital Sleep Medicine Center in Charlottesville, Va. When the power goes out, we see a disruption in zeitgebers, a German word for "time givers," or those little items your body uses to understand where it is in the day, he explains -- things like light exposure, exercise, bathing, social interaction and eating. "Those are the things that really help your body kind of figure out where it is in a 24 hour period," he tells HuffPost.

So what does that mean for you and me? It means we humans have a symbiotic relationship with the earth and cosmos and everything in between whether we believe it or not. Science has the empirical evidence to prove that we are affected and effected by that (energy) which is all around us.

The use of electricity and wireless networks messed with our rhythms. 

Imagine, if you will, the year is 1489. (Your choice of where you are on the planet.) It's 2:29 am, what are you doing? Believe it or not, you are most likely up roaming the castle or checking on your camel.

Modern day TV and movies would have us believe that people slept when the candle burnt out and woke when the sun came up, it makes for an easier story line. Not so say researchers. Science has discovered that early humans slept twice a night, usually within a 12 hour period. This range of 12 hours, began with a sleep of three or four hours beginning at dark of the night. Then wake up, sit around a fire and tell stories. It was a perfect time for study and contemplation, to make love, eat or drink a little something and then hit the sack again until morning. 

Your ancestors didn't sleep like you this link tells you why.

Sometime in the 1990's a psychiatrist, Thomas Wehr conducted research using fifteen participants restricting artificial light for four weeks to study the effects of light on sleep patterns.

To get to the chase of Wehr's study; at first participants slept huge chunks of the night time hours, likely making up for our modern lack of sleep times. Once they had adjusted, they began to have two sleeps just like our ancestors.

"Over a twelve hour period, the participants would typically sleep for about four or five hours initially, then wake for several hours, then sleep again until morning. They slept not more than eight hours total." The average being 6.5 hours total.

The middle hours of the night, between the two sleeps, was characterized by unusual calmness. This was not the middle-of-the night-toss-and-turn that many of us experience. The individuals did not stress about falling back to sleep, but used the time to relax." From the article at the above link.

Exploring the withdrawal effects of a long term crisis on the family.

Powerful electrically charged ions from every form of electronic device imaginable bathe us every single minute of every day. Until, one day the power goes out and that polluting energy is no longer there. Initially, after the shock of not having power wears off, the body feels relief. Almost an "Ahhhhhhh," like sinking into a tub of relaxing warm water after a hard day.

These man made frequencies interfere with our own bio-rhythms like a cheap wine. Over time frequencies poured on us from every direction keep us drinking it in, saturating our finely tuned senses until eventually, we are addicted.  Will humans go through the same withdrawal symptoms when the power goes out similar to that of a drunk without his wine? Absolutely!

From The Global Healing Center, written by Dr. Edward Group

10 shocking facts about wifi and sleep Bet you didn’t know that.

"Have you ever felt more awake after using wi-fi or even struggled to sleep through the night? Reports of these phenomena have been frequent and even prompted a study in 2007 that evaluated low-frequency modulation from cell phones and its impact on sleep. Participants were exposed to the electromagnetic signals from real cell phones or no signal from fake phones. Those exposed to the electromagnetic radiation had more difficult time falling asleep and actual changes in brainwave patterns were observed."

Of course, the cell phone industry won't tell you this. Their job is to get us to keep addicted, buying more and newer gadgets. So let's shake these gadgets and see where we are.

Ask yourself these questions;

Do I feel the need to get back to civilization after only a few days far out into the wilderness?
Do I become irritable without a cellphone signal?
Do I become obsessed, needing to look at my social media messages?
Am I having a hard time falling asleep without the noise in my head? Does accidentally leaving my phone in the car cause me to panic?

If you answered yes, then you are hooked on electronics.

In the first couple of days without power you may experience one or all of those symptoms while you detox your body from all those electrical ions. How are the kids doing? The younger ones in your family or group should have very little problem and will most likely benefit, sleeping better from no electricity within a short time. But the pre-teens and older teens should be screaming and hysterical within a few hours of having no Wi-Fi, a cell phone signal, computer or electricity in general. "Mom! How am I going to take a shower? Mom, do something! Dad, call the power company! Dad!" Oh, yes, but we'll save that temper demonstration for a later date.

An article on CBS news website;  According to Dr. Michael Dow, an addiction expert, says; "

"With the internet, google, twitter, and texting you now have almost instant gratification of your desire to seek. Want to talk to someone right away? Send a text and they respond in a few seconds or minutes. Want to look up some information? Just type your request into google. . . It's easy to get in a dopamine induced loop. Dopamine starts you seeking, the reward you get for just seeking prompts you to seek more. It becomes harder and harder to stop looking at email, stop texting, searching amazon, or stop checking your device to see if you have a message or a new text."

So, we can see sudden withdrawal of these electronic devices can cause anxiety and sleep deprivation during hard times. Add to that worry about environmental living conditions, or possible lack of life sustainable necessities, it wouldn't take much of an imagination to grasp where there could be much contention within the group only a few short hours into a power outage.

What can we do?

Today, start to mitigate some of the negative effects of electric device and power withdrawal. An old idea has become new again. it's is called Earthing or Grounding.

What grounding is all about click here.

Earthing can be as simple as walking in the grass on a warm sunny day, barefoot. When was the last time you saw a depressed gardener standing in the middle of the garden with his toes in the dirt? The soil in which the gardener digs has enzymes.  When the enzymes in the soil touch the skin they create an antidepressant molecule which the skin absorbs. Cool, eh? God thought of everything!

   15 minute video "Down to Earth"

You have got to get your hands and feet dirty. Toddlers benefit the most from playing in the dirt. It jump starts their immunity making it much stronger. Then, of course, there is sleeping on the ground (in a tent, of course) for 7 days (3 days at the very least) and you will be totally convinced! I am 69 years old and I sleep on the ground whenever I can, weather permitting. It is amazing what it does for me. I can't lie, however, after the first few days I have a difficult time getting up off my sleeping pad in the morning, but I miraculously find myself energized and having much more vitality by the end of the week. It is simply amazing!

Humans and the earth share the same 7.83 Hz. resonance or close to it. It's called Schumann resonances after the physicist Winfried Otto Schumann who discovered it. This vibration is considered the natural state of everything.

Teaching your body to sleep click here.

6 bedtime herbs to help you sleep click here.

  
And all this is contingent, however, that you are not being looted, vandalized, or chased by thugs. Crappy weather can put a damper on sleeping in a cave somewhere too. The upside is that your group or family, on average, will become emotionally closer to one another during those in-between night time hours. Could it be possible to learn that your brother-in-law, you know, that duffus that your sister married, is really a pretty cool dude? Well, maybe.😉