Benefits of Earthing
Grounding/Earthing is such a simple concept. It’s having electrically conductive contact of the human body with the surface of the Earth. Basically your hands or feet with nothing insulating (rubber) between them and the ground. Tons of studies have showed that this can help people sleep better, wake up with less pain and stiffness, improve digestive disorders, reduce PMS and hot flashes, and balance melatonin levels. The question is, why?
“We all live and function electrically on an electrical planet. We are each of us a collection of dynamic electrical circuits in which trillions of cells constantly transmit and receive energy in the course of the their programmed biochemical reactions. Think of them as microscopic electronic machines. The movement of nutrients and water into the cells is regulated by electric fields and each type of cell has a frequency range in which it operates. Your heart, brain, nervous system, muscles, and immune system are prime examples of electrical subsystems operating within your bioelectrical body. The fact is, all of your movements, behaviors, and actions are energized by electricity.“
Clint Ober, Earthing
While some people don’t think of themselves as electrical beings, this has been long established. One of the primary electrical entities in the body is the heart. Each beat of your heart is triggered by an electrical signal from your heart muscle, which we can measure with an EKG. Each signal passes through the cardiac circuitry causing the heart to contract and push blood through the chambers of your heart and out into the body. TENS units also relieve pain with low electrical voltage. There’s a lot of casual references to this in our language as well. “They have bad vibes.” “We aren’t on the same wavelength.”
Inflammation
When we put our feet on the ground, we complete the circuit with energy from the earth like a light bulb clicking on when wires touch in a science project. Our bodies are instantaneously flooded with electrons from the earth’s surface. Electron’s role in the body is similar to antioxidants, they neutralize free radicals. When you are injured, white blood cells release free radicals at the injury site that get rid of pathogens, bacteria, or dead cells. This area is called the “repair field”. Without earthing, some of the free radicals that are released into the repair field leak into the surrounding tissue. If there’s not enough free electrons to reduce the remaining free radicals, they’ll steal an electron from a healthy cell. Another one does the same thing, creating a chain reaction. This can produce chronic systemic inflammation. If you know anything about free radicals or antioxidants, you also know that this could have a lot of implications for cancer and aging too, as they are both caused by free radicals.
Inflammation is now believed to be the underlying cause of more than 80 chronic illnesses including allergies, eczema, lupus, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia, alzheimers disease, and cancer. Why are we depriving ourselves of electrons when they are a free preventative medicine with no side effects?
Depression
Neuroinflammation causes depression which is one of the reasons why an anti-inflammatory diet can have such a huge effect on mood disorders. Grounding relieves inflammation, so it could be very therapeutic for people with depression.
Blood Clotting and High Blood Pressure
Earthing has been shown to have an immediate effect on red blood cells, strengthening their negative electrical surface charge which improves their ability to repel each other. This allows them to flow more easily and reduces clotting. Blood viscosity lowers making blood easier to pump and blood pressure goes down. This seems especially relevant right now, when a lot of people are having blood clotting disorders. Here’s a clip from The Earthing Movie where they show the difference between the blood of a grounded and ungrounded person:
Wound Healing
This study showed a huge improvement in a wound that had been open for 8 months and was able to close up in just two weeks with 30 min of grounding per day. This link contains photos which I’m not going to post here, because they’re pretty gnarly, but definitely impressive. They show how grounding patches attached close to injuries can quicken healing as well. This is used by a lot of athletes including in the Tour de France. Scientists have also used thermal scans to show that people with poor circulation in their hands and feet can have full circulation back from just 30 minutes of grounding or a few days sleeping on a grounding mat.
Stress Hormones and Adrenal Fatigue
One of the most interesting discoveries about earthing was actually made by a researcher that was trying to prove Clint Ober’s theory wrong. This doctor measured the cortisol levels of people that slept grounded for a few weeks. Cortisol is known as the stress hormone, because when you become worried or fearful or anxious your cortisol level rises. This stimulates your sympathetic nervous system and puts you into fight-or-flight mode. In modern life, many people stay in this mode which contributes to sleep disorders, hypertension, autoimmune disease, mood disorders, blood sugar irregularities, and chronic inflammation.
Cortisol is naturally highest first thing in the morning (8am) and lowest at midnight. This kind of explains it’s function in the body as a “get stuff done” hormone. It gets you going first thing and tapers off throughout the day so you can sleep at night. For the study, doctors tested participant’s cortisol at four hour intervals for 24 hours before the test (graph B) and then for 24 hours again after sleeping grounded for a few weeks (graph C). The majority had a major improvement from their cortisol levels being all over the place to coming into a natural circadian rhythm (graph A). They also had increases in their melatonin levels. Melatonin is a powerful antioxidant, has anticancer properties, and helps regulate other biological rhythms.
This explains why Earthing can have such a positive effect on adrenal fatigue. When we have our sympathetic nervous system activated all of the time from excess cortisol and not sleeping deeply from melatonin shortages, the adrenals become exhausted. This can result in adrenal fatigue and weight gain. Quieting the sympathetic nervous system and activating the parasympathetic nervous system has great healing properties. Without electronics and the stress of modern life, this is the state we were in all the time unless we needed a quick kick in the butt to run from a predator or something. EMF exposure also stimulates the sympathetic system.
How to Ground Yourself!
Research has found that as soon as you step on the earth with bare feet your body starts getting flooded with electrons. I feel a difference as soon as I get my bare feet in the grass or sand or dirt. Cement (not asphalt) is also conductive. If you’re having a stressful moment and can walk outside and put your feet on the ground, you will feel your body balance out and the energy dissipate off of you. You can also take some deep breaths in and out through your nose, which activates the healing parasympathetic nervous system. If you only have a few minutes, I’d try this.
I’ve been experimenting with this for a few months now and have also found it to relieve headaches, digestive issues, and PMS symptoms. I’ve also noticed that when I practice yoga without a mat, I can stretch deeper and go harder with significantly less soreness and recovery time. If you can exercise outside, I’d definitely recommend it!
In some of the studies, the subjects simply sat in a chair with their feet on the ground for 30 minutes per day and saw results. You could sit in your yard and read or have a refreshing beverage for 30 minutes when you get home from work. You could run around barefoot and play with your dog for a little bit! Sit in a park on your lunch break and take your shoes off like a hippy lol
You can also ground yourself in a salt water bath! The pipes are grounded and touching the conductive water. I use my shower that has a filter on it to fill up the tub, since I don’t currently have a whole house water filter. If you have well water or a whole house filter, that will be fine. I wouldn’t take a bath in tap water when trying to improve my health since our skin is our largest most absorbent organ.
A lot of the research participants slept on grounding sheets which had profound effects. This seems like a great option and has been well studied. If you have any kind pain or illnesses and don’t want to sleep in a cave on an animal skin, this would be my suggestion. I’ll report back once I have gotten a grounding sheet and tried it myself.
If you don’t have time to do go outside, there are also grounding mats that you can plug in similar to the sheets I linked to. I’ve included a search on amazon. My suggestion would be to look at the reviews and pick one that has had good results. If you don’t want to support amazon, just look up the company’s website and buy directly. I noticed a lot of the independent websites didn’t have reviews, so I would do it this way to ensure you don’t end up with a dud.
A Couple of Considerations:
Water makes surfaces more conductive, especially salt water. Swimming in the ocean is the ultimate earthing. If you can stand on grass with dew or rocks in a stream, you will be grounded quicker.
When you’re grounding, you don’t want your phone or other electronics on your body unless they are in airplane mode. This is a time to give your body a rest from the unnatural frequencies and let it reset to the frequency of the earth. I have an article on EMF Reduction if you want to make your home an area with less frequencies where you can stay in this healing relaxed state.
Some emf experts claim that if you have dirty electricity or other emf in your house, that it can be unhealthy for it to be running through your body into a grounding mat. Clint Ober’s studies don’t seem to support this, as there wasn’t a difference in results between people that lived in high EMF environments and those that didn’t. It seems like it could be to dissuade people from something that could cost the medical industry billions. In any case, always experiment and trust how your body feels.
If you feel a weird kind of buzzed heart racing feeling when you’re barefooted outside and you are near buildings or power lines, it could be a spot where a grounding rod for electricity has been put in the ground been nearby. This has only happened to me once, so I don’t think it’s that common, but trust your instincts and just go somewhere else if you feel that.
If you want more information on this I would recommend the documentary The Grounding Movie and The book Earthing by Clint Ober. They are full of references, testimonials, and more knowledge on the subject than I could fit here.
It’s funny how we’ve separated ourselves so much from nature and just assumed there would be no consequences. Sunshine basically reduces your risk of dying of every major disease and we get nutrients from dirt and sea air. Is it really that surprising that putting your bare feet on the ground could be the missing key to improving your health? It sounds too easy to be true, but getting back to our primal nature is proving to be what we need. We can move away from the health problems that have become so common and into vibrant lasting vitality! Namaste barefooted friends!
“Health isnt something we really have to work at. We have to let it be. We have to take the things that are interfering with our health, compromising our immune systems out of our lives. Then the body will go back to normal.”
