Grounding- The Next Big Thing In Wellness
Grounding Explained
Have you heard of grounding (or referred to as earthing)? New research suggests that to be healthy we need to take off our shoes and get our bare feet in contact with the ground.
Benefits of Grounding
- Reduce inflammation
- Reduce chronic pain (I can strongly vouch for this)
- Improved sleep (I can strongly vouch for this)
- Increased energy (I noticed this )
- Lowering stress and promoting calmness by reducing stress hormones
- Normalizing biological rhythms including circadian rhythm
- Relieving muscle tension and headache (I noticed this)
- Speeds healing- used in some places to prevent bed sores
- Reduce jet lag
- Reduce snoring
Are you skeptical? I know I was when I first heard about it
The Research
The earth is struck by lightning about 100 times every single second, with each bolt containing up one billion volts of electricity (yes, that is a lot of 000s). This has an effect of making the earth highly available in neutral electrons.
You may ask “Why do I care about available electrons?”
Electrons are very important in creating energy for our body. Our bodies create the most amount of energy via the Krebs cycle (remember that daunting thing you had to memorize once upon a time in high-shool or college biology?)
Earthing Decreases Inflammation
Below is a Thermographic photo showing someone before and after 30 minutes of grounding. Inflammation produces heat, the red and yellow image was taken before the subject grounded and the the blue and green image is “colder”, showing decreased inflammation after grounding.
How To Ground
Walking on the ground outside with your bare feet is the easiest and cheapest way. You can also buy a grounding pad/sheet and sleep on it! I bought a earthing mat and have felt the amazing benefits of grounding, which have included better, more sound sleep, less or zero back pain in the morning and an overall well rested clarity feI get after a really good night’s rest. Literally, I have been getting the best sleep I have ever gotten since I bought my grounding pad. All I do is put the grounding cable into my regular outlet socket in my wall and put the pad underneath my shoulder (shirt off) or bare legs.
What Is The Time Recommendation For Daily Grounding?
There hasn’t been any studies to date (that I know of) that have looked into this. Though to spend as much time as you can grounded is a good idea.Try to get at least 30 minutes in a day. If it’s raining, if you forget or are really busy than buying a grounding mat is a good idea. This is the one I bought and I like it: Earthing Sheet
Back To The Basics & Back To Our Evolution
Modern society definitely has many positive things it has contributed to humanity, though too modern society has taken us away from our “basics” and has many challenging effects on humanity. I like to look at grounding, like the Paleo Diet. The Paleo Diet came from an estimation of what we humans ate for thousands of years before modern society. After all, our body’s entire evolution (thousands of years) has been based on what it’s been exposed to. Just like modern society has taken us away from our typical diet that our body’s evolution is used to, modern society has taken us away from the earth. We used to live, eat, reproduce, play, etc. all on the earth. Our body’s have evolved on the earth. Grounding is a natural thing that we have been taken away fro because of modern civilization creating rubber shoe’s, carpeted houses, etc. From an evolutionary standpoint grounding makes a lot of sense.
Main Take Aways About Earthing
- Grounding has many wide arranging benefits that mostly are due to earthing’s ability to decrease inflammation
- If you try grounding, you will probably notice some differences in your health, though it might take some time for you to notice.
- Grounding takes us back to our basics, back to the hunter and gatherer days which our body’s evolution is built upon.
- Try grounding yourself and see how you feel, at the end of the day it’s your experience that matters, not what some article tells you about. Like Ghandi said “an ounce of practice is worth more than tons of theory”.