Hot Flashes? CHILL OUT!

If you’re new to my Substack I’m a prostate cancer patient receiving treatment with drugs that cause side effects that mimic those of menopause. I’m in the unique position of being a biological man who understands the challenges that women can experience in menopause. My mission is to educate men on how and why they can and should support their female partners from peri-menopause through post-menopause. If you’re a woman on a journey through menopause, I hope you consider printing out this post, and sharing it with your male partner. It might help you! Also, please consider sharing this post with a friend or re-Stacking it. I would be honored if you would do so and subscribe. It’s free!

The following information is a chronology of my experiences with hot flashes and my related opinions to those experiences. It is not a scientific paper or study and should not be considered as medical advice. I have not tested this device for safety however I personally use the product that I’m discussing every day and have done so since September 2024. I purchased my Embr Wave 2 directly from the Embr Labs website at whatever the going price was at that time I have no financial interest in the success of the manufacturer and/or the product. The device has helped improve my quality of life regarding hot flashes and that’s why I’m writing about it in hopes that it may help someone else.

Who turned the heat up?

For the record I’m not a medical professional. I’m just a retired engineer with a fairly decent understanding of how many things work. That includes the basic premise of why hot flashes occur. Basically, you and I each have the biological equivalent of a thermostat. It’s called the hypothalamus and it’s located in our brain. It tells our body what to do to warm up or to cool off. Everything is fine until estrogen levels dip in both women and men like me, causing our bio-thermostat to malfunction and cause a hot flash. The hypothalamus decides that our core is overheating and goes into panic mode. It rapidly attempts to move as much blood from our body core to our skin to dissipate heat. The problem is there’s no valid reason to do this. Hot flashes are more than uncomfortable for some people and can vary from just a few a day to more than 30/day, which I routinely have. They can be mild or severe and be accompanied with nausea. I personally experience nausea when I have a severe hot flash. I feel hot and miserable. If I have them during the night and can’t abate them, it’s going to be a rough night for me with a lot of sleep disturbances.

Hot flashes may be treated medically with hormone replacement and/or prescriptions. For some people there are non-medical options for relief. In an attempt to improve my quality of life I began a quest to identify other possible solutions to mitigate my hot flashes that don’t require another prescription. My experience has been quite positive which is why I’m writing this post.

Enter Embr Wave 2; Chill out!

As an engineer I am hardwired to look for solutions that make life better. When I started cancer treatment I started researching technology that might help mitigate my hot flashes and especially the sleep disturbances that they caused. I found a device that held the hope of reducing the severity of hot flashes and improving my quality of life. The device is called the Embr Wave 2 and was developed by some MIT alumni. It sort of looks like a smart watch. It does not tell time, but it can tell your brain that you’re not actually hot. That’s a good thing and as I write this, no smart watch that I’m aware of can do that. You wear it on whatever arm you don’t have a watch on. In my case, I wear it on my right wrist. Unlike a smart watch, it’s worn on the underneath side of your wrist, not on the top. I thought this would take some getting used to, but honestly, it wasn’t a big deal probably because all the edges of the device are rounded so it doesn’t catch on anything. It recharges on its own little stand, and I typically can get a whole night sleep, and several hours during the next day before having to recharge it. I had a hard time believing that it could work so I originally took a low cost one month “subscription” and quickly pivoted to purchase a unit once I got the results that I hoped for.

So how does it work? Is it magic?

The Embr Wave 2 is a wrist mounted miniature heat pump. It uses the Peltier effect to drop the temperature of the square shaped plate on the rear side of the device. During my engineering career, I saw versions of these miniature heat pumps used to cool electronics. They are quite effective in small applications like the Embr Wave 2 and heat sinks for electronics, and even smallish refrigeration devices like beverage chillers, but are to the best of my knowledge not scalable at this point to be capable of cooling a room or greater.

What does it do for hot flashes?

As I was writing this post, I had 4 hot flashes. What can I tell you; writing and editing takes time. Here’s the way it went. I started to feel a hot flash coming on. I felt a building of heat in my torso, rising up into my upper chest, my neck and my shoulders. I reached over to the Embr Wave 2, clicked the left button once to turn it on, clicked it again to put it into cooling mode and clicked it a couple more times to make the intensity of the cooling wave stronger. Almost immediately, the back of the Embr Wave 2 got cold. That cold feeling lasted for a couple seconds, went away, then started again in a few seconds. The process repeated on and off for about 3 minutes creating a wave of cooling. During this time, the hot flash quit building and eventually faded out. Killing a hot flash was that easy. It’s been my experience that the quicker I can activate the device the better the results will be. If I wait until the peak of a hot flash and then start the device working, the results aren’t the same but then again I’ve already “Let the horse out of the barn” so to speak. Metaphorically speaking, the goal is to keep the horse (meaning the hot flash) in the barn. Got it? The way I understand it, the cold waves interact with the nerves on the underneath of the wrist and send a signal to the hypothalamus saying that it’s not hot and to stop the vasomotor action of the hot flash.

What about hot flashes during sleep? Who is going to push the button?

There’s an app for the Embr Wave 2 that lets you put it into a pre-programmed mode to help you get a good night sleep if you suffer from hot flashes. I’ve been able to notice major differences in my quality of sleep when I have worn the Embr Wave 2 and when I haven’t. Come bedtime each night, I open the app with the device already on my wrist and connected to my phone via Bluetooth. I then select the program named “all night-cool”. I can then set the cooling intensity I think want. Cooling Intensity setting varies from 1 through 9. The default is 3. I typically use 3 but sometimes use 4 or 5 if I’ve had a really rough day with hot flashes. As I understand it, the device pulses cold waves for brief periods of time all night while it’s set on sleep mode. The program will run up to 8 hours assuming that the device is fully charged.

Generally speaking, I try and wear the Embr Wave 2 each night when I go to bed and make certain that it’s fully charged. Sometimes, I will wear it extensively during the day and forget to charge it before sleeping. Anecdotally, it seems that I have fewer hot flashes at night with the Embr Wave 2 on and when I compare the sleep patterns that my Apple Watch collects, the results reinforce my belief that the device helps me get a better night sleep than if I sleep without it in use.

How to get more information and receive a 15% discount

If you want more information on the Embr Wave 2, visit embrlabs.com. I’m not a social influencer or any kind of influencer for that matter but I asked Embr Labs if they could offer a discount to my readers. They offered a 15% discount that runs until July 1, 2025 and gave me my own personal discount code that I can share with you. The promo code is “BOB15”.

To be clear, I’m writing because I believe this device is helpful to me. I do not receive any form of compensation from Embr Labs for any units that are used, purchased, or subscribed to using the promo code BOB15. I just want to make the world a better place and help people live their best lives.

I hope this helps you or someone you care about.