Signal vs. Noise: How To Simplify Health and Healing by Aligning with the Earth's Natural Rhythms

The world of natural and functional medicine is getting noisy. There are an endless number of tests and supplements that are overwhelming for both doctors and clients trying to navigate it all.

I’m beginning to realize that most of the functional labs and supplementation might just be noise.

Not because there is no evidence to support these tools, but because they are being used as band-aids for our disconnection from nature.

We are not honoring the real signal that leads to health.

The running joke in science is that when you look hard enough, you will find evidence supporting or refuting practically any diet, supplement, medication, procedure, or bio-hack.

Who do you trust?

What do you do?

What supplement should you take?

Our challenge is to cut through the noise and find the real signal—what is essential and creates real world results.

The opposite of essential is getting distracted by the non-essential, and the consequence is wasted time and attention, with time being the one non-renewable resource each of us has.

There’s no time to waste.

What Steve Jobs Can Teach Us About Signal

Kevin O’Leary aka Mr. Wonderful on The Diary of a CEO podcast recently shared a story of his interactions with Steve Jobs in the course of doing business together:

"There’s a concept that he understood that very few people focused on back then in the early 90’s—signal to noise ratio. What was so brilliant about Jobs that I tell every CEO now, and I don’t care if you’re an S&P 500 CEO or you’re just starting a business, his vision of signal was that the top three to five things you have to get done in the next 18 hours.

Not your vision for the business next week or next month or next year. Just the next 18 hours. You’re awake, you’re going to get those three to five things done that you have deemed critical to your mission.

They MUST get done today. Anything that stops you from doing that is NOISE."

I don’t use Steve Jobs as a model for health necessarily, but I appreciate his insightfulness about his relentlessness to get things done.

Luckily, Nature Provides All the Signal We Need To Heal and Stay Healthy.

The first principle of naturopathic medicine is vis medicatrix naturae, the healing power of nature.

This means that Mother Nature rewards resonance and alignment with her natural laws and punishes us when we break them. Whether a client is struggling to lose weight or lower your blood pressure, it is because he or she likely stepped out of bounds.

Mother Nature is both a nurturing parent and a tough disciplinarian.

I take the perspective that anytime there is a symptom or disease, it must make sense. We may not like dealing with the symptoms or understand why, but it must make sense.

So we have to play by her rules the best we can.

A Few Of Mother Earth’s Natural Signals For You To Consider

Schumann Resonance - The "heartbeat" of the Earth

The Earth has an inherent electromagnetic field measured at a frequency of 7.83 Hz that started with the Great Oxygenation Event. This frequency aligns with the brain’s alpha and theta waves and is associated with feelings of calm, meditation, and creativity.

Ways to get into alignment:

• Forest bathing and spending time in nature

• Listening to music with a frequency of 7.83 Hz

• Earthing by having your feet connected to the ground or touching a body of water

• Minimizing exposure to non-native EMF aka electromagnetic field (e.g. wireless transmitters, artificial light)

Brain-Heart Coherence

When we look at the heart and brain coherence, there are resonant frequencies where the heart beat is shown as a smooth sine wave. A smooth wave is associated with emotions of peace, joy, and contentment. A jagged wave is associated with anxiety, frustration, and poor heart conductivity and cardiovascular function.

According to the Heart Math Institute, the leading organization behind the science of of brain-heart coherence defines it as:

"The science-based practice of synchronizing your heart and brain. This alignment balances your nervous system and creates coherence between your heart, mind, and emotions — which is key to clearing stress and unlocking your higher capacities."

Ways to get in alignment:

• Meditation and prayer

• Breath retraining—using specific breathing techniques to improve Autonomic Nervous System balance

• Biofeedback—using tools like Heart Math’s technology to visualize your Heart Rate Variability (HRV) in real time

Circadian Rhythm

We sometimes forget that the light rays from the sun allow for life on Earth. Animals, including humans, evolved alongside the 24 hour circadian rhythm of night and day. When our skin and eyes are exposed to daylight during the day and darkness at night, the brain via the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) ensures that our hormones, sleep, and metabolism work in unison to create health.

We frequently see studies like the famous Nurse’s Health Study that follows nurses who work indoors and frequently work night shifts that have higher rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer due to disrupted circadian biology.

Ways to get into alignment:

• Start getting more daylight on your skin and in your eyes during daylight hours even if it’s cloudy (without sunscreen or lenses in front of your eyes)

• Eliminate "mal-illumination" from screens and LED/fluorescent lights indoors and at night. Opt for incandescents or candlelight and wear blue light blocking glasses at night.

• Get outdoors more frequently throughout the day from sunrise to sunset

Before You Add Another Supplement To Your Routine…

Look at your day-to-day life right now and times when you felt at your best. Take an honest inventory:

• How often do you get outside?

• How much of your day is spent indoors?

• How many hours a day are you on your phone or in front of a screen?

• How has the quality and duration of your sleep been?

• When was the last time your skin made contact with the Earth or touched something connected to it?

These fundamental signals in our environment and within us are designed to provide the health and healing each of us is looking for. Modern life seems to take us further away from evolutionary design, and the types of illnesses we see today are a reflection of this.

Experiencing is believing. The more I have been prioritizing alignment with these signals, the better I feel and the less supplements I have to take. And in turn, the more often I recommend these strategies (in addition to smart supplementation), the better the results my clients see.

P.S. If you are interested in a Healthy By Design consultation session with me where I can help you identify areas where you may be out of sync from nature, schedule one here https://l.bttr.to/uYxzi or share your feedback or questions via email.