Info I’ve Collected on Grounding
Nov 14, 2024
Written May 2023 - Updated July 2023
I created this post, because I have been telling so many people about grounding that I decided to just put all the info in one spot.
I have come to understand that grounding is an essential resource for physical health. I, personally, am experiencing obvious health benefits, and so are many people who I have introduced to it.
It’s very easy and inexpensive, and one of the most effective ways to address a basic health challenge that most of us are dealing with.
I especially hope any of my family, friends and clients who have chronic conditions, who are undergoing surgery, who have trouble sleeping, who are experiencing depression or mental fogginess, who are healing an injury, or want to support any significant bodily change like trying to lose weight, or develop muscle strength and flexibility, will try it.
Also, I hope parents will consider it for their kids. (For more on that watch the full grounding movie below, which contains startling and sobering information.)
I have found the information on grounding is often presented in confusing ways, but at its simplest it’s pretty straightforward, so I have tried to offer a simple and clear explanation.
Why should I ground my body?
Grounding has been shown to help reverse a number of chronic conditions in adults, children, and even newborns. The data is truly impressive, and I encourage you to look at some of the studies below.
The reason it can affect so many conditions is that it addresses the fundamental condition of inflammation, which is itself a cause of many health problems, including: arthritis, sleep disorders, failure of wounds to heal, heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune disorders, asthma, depression, behavioral challenges in children, and many more.
I have recommended grounding now to a lot of people, and they have reported back with some very impressive and fast improvements:
- Fast (or even immediate) relief of chronic pain
- Healing of injuries that had seemingly been unable to heal
- Improved sleep and mood upon waking
- Increased energy in general
- Improved mood
- More cognitive clarity
- Children feeling better (as evidenced by behavior), including a young child with autism experiencing few and shorter meltdowns and greater resilience to change
There are countless stories of healing and improvement on the web. These are just the ones that my personal connections have experienced in the past few months.
What is Grounding?
Grounding happens when we put our bodies in physical contact with the body of the planet. It’s the same thing as when we ground an electrical outlet, which allows electrons to flow through a grounding wire connected to the earth.
You have probably heard of the benefits of taking antioxidants for prevention of cancer, heart disease, and literally hundreds of common ailments. Antioxidants work by neutralizing free radicals. Free radicals are positively charged molecules which strip electrons from healthy cells, thereby damaging them.
Antioxidants prevent this by providing free electrons, and neutralizing the free radicals. This is why doctors and nutritionists recommend taking them in various forms like curcumin, or resveratrol, and eating antioxidant foods like blueberries, etc. The health benefits of antioxidants are very well known.
In a similar way, when we ground our bodies, electrons from the earth are transferred to our body, neutralizing positively charged molecules. It turns out this creates many health benefits. (Links to lots of studies below).
Will Grounding Help Me with My Health?
Yes, there’s a really good chance it will.
There is a lot of data about how grounding addresses a whole host of physical conditions. This is because many (and maybe most) of our chronic physical ailments are connected to inflammation, which is at higher and higher levels these days.
There are thousands of studies linking heart disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, unhealthy weight gain, unhealthy weight loss, arthritis, respiratory problems, chronic pain, cancer, and a host of other ailments, to inflammation.
Grounding addresses the underlying problem directly, and so the health benefits are very broad and address many people’s specific difficulty.
There are links below to a bunch of studies showing how it affects certain conditions.
Again, it’s worth remembering that the basic mechanism is:
- Inflammation has been pinpointed as a cause of many chronic illnesses.
- Grounding reduces and prevents inflammation.
My Personal Journey
On May 1, 2023, I started sleeping on a grounding sheet at night, as well as spending time grounding outdoors. Right away, I experienced significant (sometimes amazing) beneficial changes in both my body and my mood.
I had been feeling like my body was just “out of wack” somehow. I was feeling weak and experiencing a disturbing amount of stiffness and weakness in my hips and legs, especially in the morning. I was starting to have trouble walking up and down stairs, clinging to the railings like an old person!
I tried to address it with exercise and diet, but when I exercised it felt like it was making the situation worse, as if I was injuring the muscles, but they weren’t recovering. Exercising seemed to make me feel weaker. I twisted my knee one day, and it didn’t heal for months.
It was concerning enough that I got tested for a bunch of things, including lyme disease, and when the regular docs didn’t find anything, I made an appointment for mid-May with a holistic doctor who I have worked with before and who I trust. This was a stretch because he’s very expensive, and a three hour drive away, but I really needed help.
About that time my brother shared the grounding movie with me, and I decided to see if it could help me.
On May 3, Day 3 of grounding, (yes, Day 3!) I got up out of bed, and RAN down the stairs in the morning. I was so shocked that when I got to the bottom, I turned around stunned and said out loud, “What the F just happened?”
Day after day, I continued to feel stronger and stronger, and in a better mood. I had mental fog, which I thought might be a leftover from Covid, and that seems to be gone.
Again, I had a knee injury that just wouldn’t heal for months. Within a few days of grounding the pain was gone, and within a couple of weeks, the knee felt strong and sturdy again. Now, months later, the knee is still fine.
Interesting, too, that on night six I stopped feeling the relief from pain in my hips, and I thought, “Oh no, was this temporary?” Then in the morning I discovered I hadn’t plugged my sheet into the ground outlet, so although I was sleeping on it, it wasn’t actually grounding me.
Anna too felt physical improvements within the first few days of sleeping on a grounding sheet, notably that the back pain that she’s been experiencing for the last few months was a lot less after 3 nights.
Other family and friends who have tried it have consistently described some benefit, often relief from some specific injury or ailment they’ve been experiencing.
Some people report getting their first night of good sleep in a long time.
When I visited my trusted doctor in mid-May, I told him that in the last two weeks I’d started grounding, and how much things had changed. He took in that information in the way any intelligent person committed to scientific understanding would. He said, “Ok, since grounding helped you so much that suggests that we need to look at inflammation…” and proceeded from there. Since then, I am also doing a number of things based on what he suggested and what the blood tests helped reveal. Thank goodness for doctors willing to be open to new information!
I’m continuing to track this for myself and the people I know, because I suspect the benefits over time will be even greater.
Quick check in from January 2024, after 8 months of grounding:
My health is great, my skin is great, my energy is great and stable, people are commenting that I look well and younger, my aches and pains are mostly gone, except when I do things that I know cause inflammation, like eat a lot of sugar. My recovery from injury is faster. I feel like grounding addressed a profound deficiency that is now resolved, and that has made all the difference.
How Can I Ground?
At its simplest, you can ground your body just by going outside and contacting the ground directly. This might be standing with your bare feet in a patch of grass.
Since it’s not always practical to put your bare feet on the ground, it’s good to know there are many other ways to ground outdoors. Touching live plants, iron railings, and many other things will ground you. There is a video below about 15 ways to ground outdoors.
However, most of us can’t spend much time grounding outdoors. The good news is you can also ground indoors by using various products that connect you to the ground of the building you’re in. There are lots of ways to do this.
I think the easiest and most accessible way is by buying a fitted grounding sheet and making sure you’re grounded while you are sleeping. This way you can get multiple hours of grounding daily without changing your routine at all.
You can also get a grounding mat to put under your feet or arms as you sit at your desk, so that you are grounded whenever you’re working.
And if you want, you can buy grounding shoes or sandals. That way whenever you’re outdoors, you have the potential to be grounding.
And finally, I really do recommend just lying down in the grass for a half hour when you can, with as much of your skin touching it as possible. I’m not sure this grounds you any more than any of the other techniques, but I think it has some other benefits that are hard to pinpoint.
Resources
There is A LOT of info out there, so I’ve selected a few resources to help you get started.
I’ve highlighted some in red that feel like a good place to start in case you just want to look at a few of them.
The Earthing Movie
This is where it all started for me, and it’s a good starting point.
https://youtu.be/44ddtR0XDVU
I will admit that I find the movie a bit annoying, because they go for the drama and the mystery where I think it would be more helpful to just present the information. Nonetheless I think it’s a really good start and is worth watching.
- It provides a pretty good overview of the history of grounding and why we might need it more now than in the past.
- It provides a lot of impressive concrete examples of both individuals and groups who have benefitted.
- It gives examples of the benefits for children.
- It gives a bit of an intro to the science of it, although I don’t think the filmmakers really understood this part, so it ends up a bit confusing!
- It also offers a larger human and spiritual context.
All in all, I think that the movie is valuable, and it’s entertaining. I have watched it three times to try and sift through to what I really wanted to know, and it prompted me to look into grounding more deeply.
One page with a lot of Grounding information
https://www.ultimatelongevity.com/earthing-grounding/products/index.shtml
If you don’t have the time or head space to watch the movie, this page is good for a quick overview. It contains a 12 minute excerpt from the longer Earthing movie as well as a photo of the inflammation drop in the body after grounding, recordings of several people’s experience and some links to studies.
Note: It’s a company that produces earthing products. I haven’t tried their products, but I’m offering this page as a starting point, because the info is all in one place.
What I have purchased
I think the most important thing to purchase is a grounding fitted bed sheet. This way you can be grounded all night while you sleep without having to do anything extra.
I do not personally recommend a grounding mattress pad. I tried one, but when I put sheets on top of it, both bamboo and cotton, they did not conduct, so even though the mattress pad was grounded, I was not.
Note: I found this out after sleeping on it for three nights without testing it, and wondering why I wasn’t feeling as good. Then when I did test it, I saw it wasn’t conducting. This is why I think a tester is essential, as I mention below.
Additional Note: I later learned the explanation of why a mattress cover “should” work under a sheet is that, after a little while, your body’s perspiration and the humidity it creates, will make the cotton sheet conductive enough to connect you to the grounding mattress. However, if you wear pajamas, then that will probably make it too many layers to conduct. So if you sleep mostly naked, this approach might work for you. Again, you would need to test. I personally think you might as well skip this, and just buy the sheet.
I also purchased the Earthing Essentials Kit from this company (which I believe is connected to Clint Ober, who did the original research and started the grounding movement).
https://www.earthing.com/collections/all
The essentials kit includes a mattress pad for the bed and a grounding pad for your daily work environment, plus a grounding product tester (which is essential) and grounding patches for healing specific injuries.
With every order of the kit they include a copy of his book, and they also give you two pairs of grounding flip flops, so you can ground while you are walking outside without being barefoot.
I am now grounding most of the day.
I got the flipflops which I am wearing pretty much every day while it is warm enough. I am now grounding on a sheet while I sleep, on a pad under my feet while I’m working at my desk, and when I’m outside either sitting or walking in the grass, or walking with my flip flops.
I also occasionally actually lie down in the grass in my undies for 10 mins or more, maximizing the contact with the earth. The electrical grounding part is important, but I also think there is more to this than electrons. I recognize that the complex relationship between our human biome and the biome of the earth is really only beginning to be understood, and I suspect that there are many exchanges in addition to electrons.
I suggest the following as a starting point:
- One grounding fitted bed sheet for everyone in your home.
- One small pad for your daytime workplace, which you use in any way that your skin contacts it, for example, under your forearms at your computer, or under your feet.
- One product tester to make sure they’re grounding
If this is financially prohibitive to you, don’t give up. There are really good ways to “McGyver it”. Check out Youtube. A trip to the hardware store and some ingenuity can provide you with a lot of grounding resources.
(If you find some good ones, please share them with me, and I’ll add them below.)
Note: If you want to use a multimeter to test grounding here are comprehensive instructions that are pretty interesting for the geeks in the room. However, the product testers are simpler to use for those who are less technically minded.
Additional Links
Below are some links with details about grounding including
- Videos from one doctor who has made grounding a huge part of her practice
- Links to various descriptions of the details of grounding.
- Links to actual medical studies on the effects of grounding.
Laura Koniver, MD
She is a physician who has made grounding one of the main focuses of her practice. There is lots of information about it on her site, including a link for scientific studies, an ebook, etc.
She has LOTS of videos that each focus on one aspect of grounding. This one felt especially helpful:
How Quickly Does Grounding Affect Your Body
- Note: she redid this video 6 years later. Here’s the second version. I haven’t watched the second one.
How Quickly Does Grounding Start To Benefit Your Body?
She also made a video explaining ways you can ground outdoors that are more accessible than putting your feet in the grass:
15 Ways To Ground Besides Grass - How Many Of These Do You Touch Daily?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDh0QG8XhCg&t=0s
I find this page really interesting. She provides a list of various resources and studies. I picked a couple and pasted them below.
https://intuition-physician.com/safe-grounding/
A Crucial Factor For Grounding Success
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzfvgGK30nM&t=40s
Think You Are Grounded Outside? Think Again!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60zF49JoySQ
Her E-book
https://intuition-physician.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/2018-Grounding-Idea-Book.pdf
Premier issue of Earthing Magazine
https://indd.adobe.com/view/20df926a-746d-4466-b21e-7536b7e29598
If you prefer to read in a magazine format, there’s lots of info in here. It’s a light version of the info, generalizing a lot of the benefits, but does contain some good info, especially toward the end.
Some scientific studies on grounding for those who want the data
I picked out just three and put them below with a short excerpt. I found all of these on this page: https://intuition-physician.com/safe-grounding/
One-Hour Contact with the Earth’s Surface (Grounding) Improves Inflammation and Blood Flow—A Randomized, Double-Blind, Pilot Study:
https://www.scirp.org/Journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=58836
Excerpt:
Thermal imaging showed clearly improved circulation of fluids (including blood) throughout the torso, which in turn, translates into enhanced delivery of blood to the head and improved blood circulation in the face as well. The results of this innovative study demonstrate that even one-hour contact with the Earth appears to promote significantly autonomic nervous system control of body fluids and peripheral blood flow that may improve blood circulation in the torso and face, facial tissue repair, skin health and vitality and optimize facial appearance
Earthing the Human Body Influences Physiologic Processes: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3154031/
Excerpt:
The continuous earthing of the human body decreases blood glucose in patients with diabetes…Earthing the human body influences human physiologic processes. This influence is observed during night relaxation and during physical activity.
Grounding e The universal anti-inflammatory remedy:
Excerpt:
Multiple clinical investigations indicate that grounding the body generates broad, beneficial, and significant physiological changes. The source of these effects is believed to be the mobile electrons omnipresent on the surface of the earth, which are responsible for the planet's negative charge. Lifestyle changes have disconnected most humans from this primordial health and healing resource, creating what may be an unrecognized electron deficiency in the body, an overlooked cause or contributor to chronic inflammation and common chronic and degenerative diseases. High blood pressure, disturbed HRV, and hyperviscosity are potentially destructive cardiovascular situations that can be improved with grounding.
Please, let us know if you try Grounding!
I hope you find this helpful. There is a TON more info out in the world, but I offer this to get you started on understanding the benefits and methods.
Please reach out in the Blissipline Facebook group and let us know if you have any experiences of grounding or if you have any questions.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/Blissipline
To your good health!
~ Mary Cordelia
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