Sleep You Don’t Have to Work For

Meditation is the usual advice for a restless mind. For patients who can’t manage it, a small PEMF device offers another way in.

Of all the concerns patients bring to us, few come up more often than sleep: trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, and waking up feeling like they never really rested. Most of the patients I sit down with have already tried the obvious fixes and are hoping there’s something else out there.

For a lot of people, the problem isn’t that they aren’t trying hard enough to fall asleep. It’s that their body never got the signal to power down.

Researchers increasingly describe insomnia as a state of hyperarousal: a nervous system stuck in a low-grade “on” position long after the lights go out. Most of us know the feeling: your mind won’t stop cycling, your heart is beating a little faster than it should, and midnight comes and goes with you wide awake.

Meditation helps because it works on exactly that. It slows the churn of thoughts, and it eases the strain of lying there trying to fall asleep. As anyone who’s done it knows, the effort usually makes things worse. The research is encouraging, too: in a randomized trial published in JAMA Internal Medicine, a simple mindfulness program did more for older adults with sleep trouble than standard sleep-hygiene advice (Black et al., 2015).

Meditation is often where we start. The catch is that a lot of people can’t, or won’t, do it. Sitting still with a busy mind can feel worse than not trying at all, and telling an exhausted person to relax is rarely the help it’s meant to be.

When something came along that claimed to help people fall asleep without any of that effort, I wanted to try it myself. It’s a small device called the XPulser.

It’s a PEMF device (pulsed electromagnetic field), but a refreshingly simple one. There’s no menu of programs to learn. It does one thing: it puts out a steady pulse at 3 Hz. That number matters, because 3 Hz falls in the delta range, the slow brainwave rhythm your brain settles into during the deepest, most restorative part of the night. The thinking behind it is called entrainment: give the brain a slow, steady rhythm to follow, and it tends to fall into step.

The technology itself isn’t new. It’s a type of PEMF called ICES, based on pulsed-field research Dr. Robert “Bob” Dennis originally did for NASA. It runs at low power, gentle rather than forceful, which is part of why it’s easy to sleep right through.

Using it couldn’t be much simpler. The device is tiny, powered by a 9-volt battery, with two small coils on a lead. I tucked the coils into my pillowcase and switched it on. It makes a soft, almost hypnotic click as it sends its pulses through the fabric, three times a second at that same 3 Hz. Delta, ticking away a few inches from my head.

The first night, I fell asleep fast and woke up only once. The next morning my Apple Watch showed my best sleep score in three months.

A single night proves nothing. It could have been coincidence, or simply the novelty of a new routine. I continued using the device nightly and tracked the results. Over the full month, it was the best stretch of sleep my watch had ever recorded for me.

That was last November. The novelty has long since worn off, and the coils are still in my pillowcase. I’ve used it every night since.

I want to be upfront: that’s one person’s experience, tracked with a consumer watch, not a clinical trial, and results vary. But as a sleep facilitator, it’s exciting.

Its appeal, for me, lies in how little it demands. For the patient who can’t meditate, there’s no practice to build and no quiet mind to summon; you lie down, and it works while you rest. It reaches the same destination meditation does, a calmer and slower brain at bedtime, by the opposite route. Instead of training your way into delta, you borrow the rhythm.

A few practical notes. At the Apothecary, the XPulser is $499. If you’d rather try it before committing to that, we also rent them out: $150 for two weeks, which is plenty of time to see whether it does anything for you. And if you decide you want one of your own, I wouldn’t wait: the manufacturer has a difficult time keeping them in stock.

The XPulser does one thing, which is part of its appeal, but it is not the only option on the shelf. For anyone who wants a device that does more, we also carry the FlexPulse at the Apothecary. It runs ten programs with adjustable intensity instead of a single fixed setting, and 3 Hz delta is one of them, so it can do what the XPulser does at bedtime and a good deal more during the day. At $1,299 it sits in a different price category, which is worth knowing before you weigh the two against each other.

The XPulser is one of several options we offer. In the office we also have neurofeedback, meditation instruction, photobiomodulation, and higher-intensity PEMF. Different tools, same goal: a calmer, slower brain at bedtime.

Sleep problems are worth taking seriously, and there’s usually more to try than people realize. If you’d like to build out your sleep toolkit, email me at mknapp@wrossmd.com or call the Apothecary at 410.992.4747.

Matt Knapp is Wellness Coordinator and Patient Educator for the Brain Health Program at Crossroads.

The XPulser is a general-wellness PEMF device. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, and it is not a substitute for medical care. If you have a pacemaker or other implanted electronic device, are pregnant, or have a seizure disorder, please check with a clinician before use.