Grounding — what it is, how it works and why standing barefoot in the grass can radically change your deep health

I'm sitting in a chair outside writing this with my bare feet in the grass. It's important to practice what you preach 😉 and I am absolutely astounded by what I have learned this past week about the benefits of Grounding — the power of bare skin contact with the Earth. Of course, we shouldn't be surprised really. Our bodies have a deep evolutionary relationship with the Earth and all its forces, from gravity, to the soils and microbiome, to the atmosphere and also to something we hear and think much less about —the electromagnetic environment of the Earth.

What is Grounding

Grounding refers to the realisation that bodily contact with the Earth's natural electric charge stabilises our physiology at the deepest levels. More than 20+ scientific studies have been done over the past few decades on the impacts of Grounding, which have clarified how connecting the conductive human body to the Earth's subtle surface electromagnetic field influences specific bioelectric functions in the body. This includes reducing inflammation, improving blood flow, and reducing stress by activating the parasympathetic nervous system.

The Earth's electric field

The surface of the Earth is affected electrically by lightning strikes, solar radiation and other atmospheric dynamics which give it a continuously renewing supply of free electrons. This means the Earth has a natural negative charge at its surface. All living things have evolved in direct contact with this electric field which provides a 'universal regulating force' by regulating and restoring the natural internal bioelectric environment of plants and animals. This happens because the free electrons at the Earth's surface are able to be transferred into the body through contact with the ground and instigate rapid physiological change.

A little review

To understand it all, we have to remember a few key science facts:

• Electrons have a negative charge. (At an atomic level, these negatively charged particles exist in the energy field surrounding the nucleus of the atom.)
• Same-charge particles repel each other and Opposites Attract. (That means if two particles are negatively charged they will move away from each other and keep their space. Remember a magnet...same poles repels each other and opposite poles attract. Same concept here!) Oppositely charged particles will be attracted and stick to each other. It also means any positively or negatively charged particle will go around looking for its opposite. So a positively charged particle can 'steal' a negatively charged electron from another source.
• Electromagnetic fields of energy are simply energy created by the movement of negatively and/or positively charged particles.

Here's how Grounding works — your body is a bioelectric organism

In addition to our skeletal structure, our muscles and organs, our nerves and biochemistry...our body also relies on 'bioelectrics' to maintain health. For instance, as we learned during our strength training mini course, our bone health is maintained by the piezoelectric effect. When our bones experience a mechanical stress, meaning pressure or impact, they create an electrical (negative) charged field around the bone which signals osteoblast cells in our bloodstream to become attracted to the area and lay down more bone cells there, making our bones stronger. The mechanism of communication for our bone health is a negative electric charge.

Our red blood cells which carry oxygen molecules to our cells for cellular respiration should also have a negative charge on the surface of the cell. This helps maintain the spacing of red blood cells in the bloodstream (because same-charge repels each other) allowing the red blood cells to slide past each other rather than getting stuck to each other. The greater the negative charge on the surface of your red blood cells, the better your blood flow. However if the red blood cells lose that negative charge on their surface and become positively charged, they start to stick together and clump. This impacts their ability to carry oxygen to the cells and impedes blood flow.

Yet another area where bioelectrics are important in the body involve Free Radicals (positively charged molecules) also known as 'Reactive Oxygen Species'. You may not have heard of them...but I bet you've heard of Antioxidants which are what we need to combat and neutralise Free Radicals! (We've been told that lots of our favourite foods including dark chocolate, coffee, blueberries etc. are all high in antioxidants. Hurray!) 

Free Radicals are a bi-product of a natural cellular process (I'll explain more in a minute), but they are freely roaming positively charged molecules that bounce around a cell stripping electrons from healthy tissue and causing lots of damage.

**Notice...we need a lot of negatively charged fields in our bodies to maintain health. That's what all those free electrons on the surface of the Earth are good for!! 🌍

How Grounding reduces Inflammation

We may not realise it, but modern life including pesticides, processed foods and higher levels of stress mean that most of us are experiencing low levels of chronic inflammation. Inflammation doesn't just happen when we have an obvious injury (although Grounding seems to work brilliants for that too!). Inflammation is also an issue at the cellular level because of those Free Radicals.

In order to understand this, we need to have a brief understanding of how our cells get their energy. Because although we eat foods that are broken down by our digestive system into simple carbohydrates which are then sent to the cells, our human cells can't use energy in this form. We need those little microbes called mitochondria (we have up to several hundred in each cell!) to break the carbon-bonds of those carbohydrates and release the sun's energy stored in those bonds. To do this, the mitochondria take the simple carbohydrates down the 'electron transfer chain' and transform the energy into ATP which is the energy source of all cellular processes. 

What you need to know is this — whenever the mitochondria are under stress...whether that's due to exposure to toxins from our food system, or attempting to deal with the complex molecules of our processed foods, they get overloads and 'misfire' Free Radicals into the cell. These positively-charged Free Radicals wreak havoc on the inside of the cells, damaging healthy tissue (by stealing their electrons). The damage to cells caused by Free Radicals is the source of chronic inflammation in the body.

What we need is extra free electrons so they can combine with these positively charged Free Radicals to neutralise them rather than allowing the Free Radicals to steal electrons from healthy tissue. What we need is the Earth's abundance of free electrons, and getting them is as easy as making contact with the ground.

Speaking of inflammation, here are some amazing heat imaging photos of before & after Grounding. The first is a person experiencing knee pain before and after 30 minutes of Grounding. (Warm colours like red and yellow represent heat and inflammation.) The second is a person experiencing chronic back pain before and after two nights of sleeping on a 'grounding sheet' in bed. 

photos and research from this article https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1550830719305476?via%3Dihub