EMF Sensitivity – Management of the Bucket Part 1

How can someone live with EMF sensitivities and manage their “bucket”? And what is “the bucket”?

First, here are two of my recommended places to find out details of how to live with EMF sensitivity:

1. The Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity Workbook: A Guided Journey to Feeling Better (2011), written by Angela Hobbs, published in Canada. ISBN# 978-0-9868528-5-5. (Note: We do NOT sell this book. We do not get any compensation for telling you about this book. It is simply a recommendation of a resource that I have personally read.)
2. EUROPAEM EMF Guideline 2016 for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of EMF… Europe seems to have more advanced research going on over there and it appears that what they conclude is the direction that the understanding EMF specialists are tending to follow on this side of the world. This is a long, scientific document but is quite well articulated.    

Also, there are numerous links on my downloadable brochure, available here.

Now for the “funner” way of summarizing how to live with this. 🙂

The “Bucket”

This following analogy is not original with me. But I did decide to draw it out and explain it like this. I think it helps children as well as adults to grasp what is going on and how to manage it:

Think of a BUCKET!

For whatever reason(s), people have various sizes of “buckets” as to how much environmental pollution one’s body can handle before showing signs of reacting against that pollution.

Some people call this a “total body burden”. It is how much your body can handle before noticing.

What determines the size of your “bucket”?

No one knows exactly “why”. (You might also want to read Part 2 about Management of the Bucket here.)

The reasons might be genetic (i.e. you might be born this way because of your family’s sizes of “buckets”).

They could be injury-related, for example, at some point your environment caused an injury which damaged you and “shrunk your bucket” for the long-term). That “injury” might not have been noticed at the time by you, for example, it could be that you had no “household grounding wire” working where you lived or another wiring error so that your body became a “human ground rod” for the flow of electricity through your house. It could be because you lived or worked very close to high voltage power situations, or moldy basements, or used harmful chemicals that you thought were safe, etc..

The “Bucket” Sizes:

“I must be in the medium-sized or huge bucket category because I’m able to tolerate all kinds of things! I can use my cell phone, work with electricity, be near office modems/routers, live near a cell tower – those things don’t (and won’t) bother me!”

Just adding a note here to the people who think this way….

I can’t think of one EMF sensitive person in the world, of whose story I’ve heard or read about, who has not had a past of being able to use cell phones, electronic equipment, etc. without symptoms.

The point is, we used to be fine with that kind of technology. We did not have symptoms either whenever we were exposed to what causes us symptoms now. Our buckets were not “full” yet.

• Sometimes even now, we can still wonder “why” a new symptom seems to have cropped up. Haven’t we figured out all our sensitivities and are living with better choices? What is going on now? For me, almost always over the years, it ends up that something changed in my environment and is causing the unexpected symptom –
  • Maybe I changed to a new brand of shampoo/soap, perhaps a new-and-improved formula of a favourite brand of facial tissue has come out, or maybe it’s simply me who has now become sensitive to something that I was able to handle in the past and even work closely with but now can’t without symptoms.
  • Perhaps the symptoms don’t even come until a month or more AFTER something different has been changed in my environment! But then, we start to notice something isn’t quite right and the investigation is on. What is it this time??? Does it correlate with something that IS in our environment, regardless of “how long ago” it got there?
  • How can one tell “what” it is if it’s an environmental thing? Two general ways that I/my family/others tend to figure this out –
    • Either remove suspected things and see if symptoms improve. (e.g. Toss it out onto the porch. Unplug it. Shut a breaker off.)
    • Or remove yourself for a while and see if symptoms improve. (e.g. Go outside for a while.)
    • If symptoms are from a disorder/disease such as a cold or flu bug or other health condition, the symptoms will remain regardless of “where” (in what environment) the sensitive person is. (That’s just common-sense logic. We might go see a doctor in that case.)
    • But if the symptoms disappear within minutes or even a couple of days, and then return again if the environment is back to what it was when symptoms were noticed – that “come” and “go” pattern – then realizing it has an environmental cause that needs to be avoided is the logical, common-sense conclusion.

To the person who thinks they are “just fine” with “no issues” with EMFs….

You’re still filling your bucket when you use these things. It fills rather silently. And YOU don’t know how close to the top you’re getting because you can see that or know your future. (No person can.)

The number of people who become sensitive has been growing significantly in recent years according to researchers and doctors involved with seeing environmentally ill people. So the likelihood of more people getting close to the top of their bucket looks quite likely, especially since there is a growing increase of these things that we’re all exposed to to a certain extent – it’s part of our world, our communities, and the services we are given.

So don’t be over-confident that you “won’t” get sensitive just because you can handle those things “for now”. YOU don’t know “how much” exposures will be “too much” for your body to handle.

• You could become sensitive suddenly, feeling or even looking unwell, getting symptoms which are a puzzle to you and health care professionals (which is what was in my story).
• You could become sensitive gradually, adding symptoms little by little and thinking that those are just within the range of “normal life” when they’re not and could be prevented by taking better control of your wireless or electricity exposures (e.g. Wi-fi, Bluetooth, household grounding, etc.). EMF sensitivity doesn’t need to show up suddenly. It just might sneak up on a person.

Then the things which used to be tolerated can no longer be tolerated as well as it had been.

I used to tolerate and use various kinds of personal care products, study in science labs, work with lots of markers and art supplies (there are safer ones and toxic ones – I used both). I used to use cell phones without symptoms, enjoy the convenience of wireless in the house, including the handy cordless phone, the microwave, the baby monitor, etc.. I felt fine growing up in a house that had electrical issues and staying in rougher accommodations to work at a camp. I was fine. But then my bucket was filled up.

Some people describe non-ionic radiation as a jiggling of cells until they begin to break (instead of a sudden breakage that ionic radiation can cause).

I think of it as, if I sprained my right foot and it healed, then I kept re-injuring it (and it “heals”), it will heal weaker – meaning that if I decide to climb an apple tree and jump down each day or each week (i.e. frequent exposure to harm), that right foot will likely show it’s weakness and be now more prone to re-injury and pain, even though it has “healed” from its initial injuries.

Yes, there can be “recovery” from EMF MCS but the kind of recovery we mean is a recovery where a certain amount of sensitivity remains – like a recovery one might get from the effects of smoking if one quits smoking and being around second-hand smoke. One might regain more tolerance, yes, but it doesn’t mean that a person can go back to smoking regularly again and do well.

The issue to keep remembering is that these sensitivities are to things which are like smoke, smog, alcohol – things which exist in society but are not very good for our health in large amounts to have as part of our regular lifestyle.

Pollution whether it is chemical-based or electronic “e-pollution”, should be minimized in ANYONE’S life, regardless of the “bucket size” – for the sake of others around and for the sake of oneself.

YOUR bucket could shrink with enough exposures to harmful things!

A “Total Body Burden” Explanation

(Rather Than Thinking It As A Single or Repeating Allergy-Event Situation):

There is NO perfect environment in this world. But some areas have less pollution than others.

People get sick and/or injured and eventually die here for various reasons, not just environmental ones. Only God’s heaven (which is a real place as described in the Bible) is perfect, without sickness, without death, without pain of any kind, and without any wrongdoing.

But here, we people sometimes make choices which pollute the world we live in and all of us suffer to one extent or another.

When anyone is in a “cleaner” environment, their body can sigh a bit of relief and begin to heal from any damage from the polluted environment.

The longer one can live in that better environment, the more opportunity one has to recover at least some of their health. This is because that person’s bucket can begin to “empty”…. to heal by replacing with healthy cells faster than getting them damaged by pollution:

• The holes and cracks in this bucket represent the amount of TIME spent in a better environment to recover and get rid of some of the effects of pollution.
• The more a bucket (person) empties (recovers from environmental damage), there is more opportunity to be healthier.

The person who can just spend a short amount of time in a low-polluted environment (e.g. sleep in low-pollution but work in high levels of pollution) and/or a lot of time in a somewhat polluted environment (e.g. living 24/7 in low-levels of some but not all pollutants), just has a few cracks and holes at the top of the bucket.

• Therefore the bucket can’t empty a lot and remains almost full.
• This means that it won’t take very much of an exposure to a pollution trigger (for example, going out in public) to result in that person overflowing with a reaction to it.

The person who can mainly live, work, and sleep in areas of low-environmental pollution gets a lot of holes in their bucket and can empty/recover much faster.

• The tolerance also improves because there is room in that person’s bucket for pollutants (e.g. when going occasionally out in public where there are pollutants such as in stores).
• More stuff can be tolerated before overflowing to a BIG reaction (and might not even get to the point of overflowing with those symptoms if those exposures are not long or heavy).
• And then, of course, re-healing can occur easier when coming back to sleeping, etc. in the area of low-environmental pollution.

Being willing to change the living environment (e.g. eliminating wireless in a house) or if necessary, to move to a better environment, is critical for the likelihood of recovery of people with very small buckets!

Many people CAN recover from this (at least to a certain point)! But that could involve some difficult decisions for lifestyle changes.

Because our modern culture often accepts a lot of pollutants in it every day, those of us with the very small buckets who aim for recovery often must change their lifestyle.

This is not always accepted as “sensible” by people they have known (e.g. co-workers, extended family, friends, community leaders) or even some professionals. (Even some people claiming to understand EMF sensitive people will try to say that there does not need to be a change in lifestyle – but this is misleading and deceptive.)

One of the purposes of this section of our website is to provide more information about good choices one can make to “manage the bucket” better and to share truth and real hope!

Legal disclaimer: This article is not offered as medical advice. This is a blog based on anecdotal, personal experiences and thoughts.