What Grounding Is and Why It Matters
The claims about grounding: being outside with your bare feet on the ground to discharge electrical currents from your body into the floor. The claim is that it reduces inflammation, improves sleep, improves stress, and that it neutralizes the free radicals in your body by balancing the body’s electrical charge.
The reality is that it is legit by the looks of it. Early stages in the research makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, too. I think it passes level one of the sniff test.
The Research Evidence
- When someone is sleeping on a grounding mat, researchers found reduced measured cortisol, which is interesting
- Generally, women respond better to that as an intervention and it helps them to synchronize their sleep cycle
- There are improvements seen in the stickiness of red blood cells, blood glucose management, and immune markers
There’s probably part of the benefits is just from being outside and it’s hard to separate the two unless you put someone in like a black box, stand them outside, which is a bit weird.
Going for a walk in nature is quite relaxing – and it’s hard to isolate that from the grounding effect itself.
Modern Feet and Loss of Function
I was trying to think about and pinpoint the last time that I walked without shoes on. I only noticed it when I went to the spa a little while ago and had a massage. Now, as soon as they touched my feet, I realized how much tension there was in there. We have so much tension in our feet.
I don’t spend an awful lot of time with my shoes off. It’s January in England, but I would imagine that the effect of you having to actually use your feet for walking – which actually we don’t do because we wear these really supportive essentially marshmallows – if you’re wearing spongy trainers, you don’t have that contact. And for me, my feet are really tense. I would imagine if you didn’t have the shoes on and you had to actually use your feet for their purpose that it would actually be quite relaxing.
The Toe Spreading Exercise
There’s an exercise from Kit Laughlin that we did at his weekend stretch workshop. You get your foot and then with your hand, you interlace your knuckles all the way in between your toes – left hand with right foot, all the way to the knuckles. And it’s pretty painful because you’re not used to spreading your toes that far. And just roll them around and twist them and bend them. Doing that as a daily practice, you will improve your toe spread and your sense of being grounded. If you suffer from tight muscles in your feet or fascia, it can be a nice little thing to try and loosen up those tissues.
Comparison to Tribal Populations
There’s tribes where they’re really good at climbing trees. If you think about it, every single day they’re spending time climbing up trees, they only have a couple of points of contact – their hands and their feet have to be doing more than our western Nike-covered feet. They actually have a wider spread and the actual digits themselves are muscular. It’s the most bizarre thing you’ll ever see.
Considerations With Grounding Mats
I’m hesitant to say go out and buy a grounding mat to sleep on because if you are in a Wi-Fi zone, even from your neighbor’s router and that kind of stuff, what it can do is turn you into an antenna for all of the signals and actually worsen the EMF stuff. I don’t understand enough about electrophysiology to know how to minimize that, but you just got to be a bit careful if you’re getting one, especially a grounding mat that you plug into the mains, that you’re not making things worse.
Some people just use a mat that plugs into just the earth pin and there’s no power going to it. But yeah, this stuff’s a rabbit hole.
The simplest version of grounding costs nothing: take your shoes off outside and stand on the ground.