Sleep & Your Wifi Router: What You May Not Know

First the Facts

• The wifi router in your home is constantly emitting invisible signals, exposing you to electromagnetic fields (EMFs)
• EMFs stress your body’s nervous system and hormones
• Those more sensitive to EMFs may experience poor sleep as a result

On any given day, you’re likely to have the ability to access wifi every single place you go. Going to the grocery store? Wifi. Bookstore? Yep. A national park? Even there. Ever-present access to wireless technology is a perk of living in the twenty-first century. But as with most things, there is a trade off, and sadly one of those for you could be poorer sleep.

Why is Wifi a Problem?

We humans continue to bathe ourselves in electromagnetic frequencies from our phones and other devices, so doesn’t it make sense that we might experience interruptions in our normal bodily functions? Think about it; the brain uses electrical signals to control the brain, including telling it when to go to sleep.

We’ve already discussed how using your devices 30 minutes before bedtime can harm your sleep cycle because of the effects of blue light from the screen. But these wireless gadgets can still disrupt your sleep, even when you’re not looking at them.

As long as a wifi router is functioning, it’s sending out waves to transmit information to nearby devices. These “information carrying waves” are a type of electro-magnetic field, or EMF.

While EMFs are safe at low levels, there is enough evidence to suggest that they still affect your body in some ways. Here are just a few potential health concerns associated with exposure to EMFs:

• Anxiety
• ADD and ADHD
• Hormonal imbalances
• Insomnia and trouble falling asleep
• Increased stress response

Some people are more sensitive to EMFs than others. If you find you struggle with one or all of these, overexposure to EMFs may be a piece of the puzzle for you.

How Does EMF Exposure Affect Sleep

When you sleep, your body is still super active! Your immune system is doing major repair work, hormones—namely melatonin, necessary for quality sleep—flood your body, and your cells repair and regenerate.

All this work is important to not only functioning the next day, but also for a quality night’s sleep.

EMFs are known to act as stressors to these systems at work (nervous, endocrine, and immune) and if you know anything about stress—and we suspect you do—then you know it makes it difficult to function.

Simply put, your wifi router and other EMF-emitting devices are straining your immune, nervous, and endocrine system, potentially disrupting your hormones.

Sleep and hormones are more closely connected than you realize.

When we’re talking about something as slippery as sleep, it’s hard to know what exactly the root problem is. Making it more difficult is the fact that you could be fighting against a hormonal imbalance, and how are you supposed to measure that?! Luckily we can help you there! Own Your Hormones is the way to get REAL answers through lab testing, so you can figure out what your body is trying to tell you.

How Can I Protect Myself From EMFs?

There is one easy thing you can do to protect yourself and your family from EMFs which are stressing your body out, and making it more difficult to sleep: turn off your wifi router at night!

That’s right, you can just turn it off! You can even put a timer on the outlet where your router is plugged in. This way, you can program the timer to go off sometime close to bedtime, and you won’t even have to think about it.

Does it get any easier?!

Bonus: putting your wifi on a timer will also force you and your family to engage with each other after a certain hour when the wifi is disabled. Imagine actually talking with your spouse at the end of a day, instead of mindlessly scrolling side by side. Sounds like a much more peaceful environment already—who’s ready to sleep?!