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openintegrative · 5 months ago

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Does Grounding or Earthing Actually Work?

Grounding involves direct physical contact with the earth, which may support overall health.

Walking barefoot or using grounding mats can balance the body’s electrical energy.

Grounding may reduce inflammation, improve sleep, and lower stress levels.

It helps stabilize the body’s natural energy by connecting to the earth’s surface.

Several studies suggest grounding can boost mood and energy levels.

Introduction

Grounding, also known as earthing, is a practice that involves connecting physically with the earth’s surface.

Whether it’s walking barefoot on grass, sand, or soil, grounding allows the body to absorb the earth’s electrical charge.

What is Grounding?

Grounding is simply the act of making direct contact between the body and the earth. The earth carries a natural, negative electrical charge.

When you connect with it, free electrons are absorbed, helping to balance the body’s electrical charge.

Health Benefits of Grounding

Blood Pressure:

Grounding may also have positive effects on blood pressure by supporting the body’s natural ability to regulate cardiovascular function.

The practice of grounding helps reduce blood viscosity and red blood cell aggregation, which lowers the resistance to blood flow, potentially easing strain on the heart.

This improvement in blood flow can result in a reduction in blood pressure levels.

Reduced Inflammation:

Research suggests that grounding may help reduce inflammation by neutralizing free radicals, which can decrease oxidative stress in the body.

Improved Sleep:

Grounding has been shown to regulate the body’s sleep-wake cycles, helping people experience more restful and consistent sleep.

Enhanced Mood:

Connecting with the earth may help lower stress by regulating cortisol, a hormone that affects mood and anxiety levels.

Increased Energy:

Grounding can potentially help balance the body’s energy, leaving people feeling more refreshed and alert after spending time connected to the earth.

Methods of Grounding

Grounding can be done in several simple ways:

Walking Barefoot: Walking barefoot on grass, soil, sand, or even concrete is one of the most effective ways to ground. It allows for direct contact with the earth’s surface.

Using Grounding Mats or Sheets: If you are unable to go outside, grounding mats and sheets offer a way to experience grounding indoors. These devices mimic the electrical connection you would get by walking on natural surfaces.

Water-Based Grounding: Standing in natural bodies of water such as lakes, rivers, or oceans allows for grounding through water, as it is a conductor of electricity and facilitates electron absorption from the earth.

Science Behind Grounding

The earth’s surface carries a negative electrical charge, and human bodies are conductive.

When direct contact with the earth is made, electrons are absorbed, which helps reduce the buildup of positive charges that may contribute to inflammation and stress.

Some research suggests that grounding can lower blood viscosity, which supports heart health.

There is also evidence that grounding can help normalize cortisol levels, which helps the body manage stress more effectively.

Common Misconceptions About Grounding

Not a Replacement for Medical Care: Grounding is seen by some as a complementary wellness practice, not a substitute for medical treatment. It can be one part of an overall wellness approach, but not a cure for medical conditions.

Grounding vs. Other Wellness Practices: Grounding involves direct physical contact with the earth’s surface, which makes it distinct from practices like meditation or yoga, which focus more on mental and physical balance without requiring contact with nature.

Grounding In Daily Life

Grounding is simple and can be done daily:

Morning Walks: Take short walks barefoot on grass, sand, or other natural surfaces to connect with the earth early in the day.

Grounding at Home: Use grounding mats or sheets while working or relaxing indoors if going outside isn’t possible.

Post-Workout Grounding: After exercise, spend time grounding to help your body recover and balance its energy levels.

Conclusion

Grounding is a simple and natural practice that may offer physical and mental health benefits. From improving sleep to reducing inflammation, connecting with the earth’s surface through methods like walking barefoot or using grounding mats can support overall wellness. Grounding offers an easy way to feel more balanced and energized.

FAQs

What is grounding, and how does it work?

Grounding is the process of making direct contact with the earth, allowing the body to absorb electrons that help stabilize its electrical charge.

Can grounding improve sleep?

Yes, grounding has been linked to improved sleep by regulating the body’s natural sleep-wake cycles and lowering stress.

What are some indoor grounding options?

Grounding mats and sheets are good options for grounding indoors, offering a similar connection to the earth’s energy.

How long should I ground each day for benefits?

Grounding for 20-30 minutes a day may help reduce inflammation and improve energy levels.

Are there any risks with grounding?

Courtesy: Menigoz, W., Latz, T.T., Ely, R.A., Kamei, C., Melvin, G. and Sinatra, D., 2020. Integrative and lifestyle medicine strategies should include Earthing (grounding): Review of research evidence and clinical observations. EXPLORE, [online] 16(3), pp.152–160. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2019.10.005.

Research

Ayoub, J.-C. (2002). A comparison of three measures of the stress response: Endocrinological, psychological, and electrodermal (Ph.D. Dissertation, California Institute for Human Science).

Chevalier, G., Patel, S., Weiss, L., Chopra, D., & Mills, P. J. (2019). The Effects of Grounding (Earthing) on Bodyworkers’ Pain and Overall Quality of Life: A Randomized Controlled Trial. EXPLORE, 15(3), 181-190. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2018.10.001

Chevalier, G., Sinatra, S.T., Oschman, J.L. and Delany, R.M., 2013. Earthing (Grounding) the Human Body Reduces Blood Viscosity—a Major Factor in Cardiovascular Disease. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, [online] 19(2), pp.102–110. https://doi.org/10.1089/acm.2011.0820.

Chevalier, G. , Melvin, G. and Barsotti, T. (2015) One-Hour Contact with the Earth’s Surface (Grounding) Improves Inflammation and Blood Flow—A Randomized, Double-Blind, Pilot Study. Health, 7, 1022-1059. https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=58836

Chevalier, G. (2014). Grounding the Human Body Improves Facial Blood Flow Regulation: Results of a Randomized, Placebo Controlled Pilot Study. Journal of Cosmetics, Dermatological Sciences and Applications, 4, 293-308. doi: 10.4236/jcdsa.2014.45039.

Chevalier, G. (2015). The Effect of Grounding the Human Body on Mood. Psychological Reports. https://doi.org/10.2466/06.PR0.116k21w5

Chevalier, G., Mori, K. and Oschman, J.L. (2006). The effect of earthing (grounding) on human physiology. European Biology and Bioelectromagnetics, 2(1), 600-621.

Chevalier, G., Sinatra, S.T., Oschman, J.L., Sokal, K. and Sokal, P. (2012). Earthing: Health Implications of Reconnecting the Human Body to the Earth’s Surface Electrons. Journal of Environmental and Public Health, 2012, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1155/2012/291541.

Ghaly, M., & Teplitz, D. (2004). The biological effects of grounding the human body during sleep, as measured by cortisol levels and subjective reporting of sleep, pain, and stress. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 10, 767-776.

Koniver, L. (2023). Practical applications of grounding to support health. Biomedical Journal, 46(1), 41-47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bj.2022.12.001

Menigoz, W., Latz, T.T., Ely, R.A., Kamei, C., Melvin, G. and Sinatra, D. (2020). Integrative and lifestyle medicine strategies should include Earthing (grounding): Review of research evidence and clinical observations. EXPLORE, 16(3), 152-160. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2019.10.005.

Oschman, J. L. (2007). Can electrons act as antioxidants? A review and commentary. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 13, 955-967.

Oschman, J.L. (2023). Illnesses in technologically advanced societies due to lack of grounding (earthing). Biomedical Journal, 46(1), 17-29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bj.2022.10.004.

Oschman, J., Chevalier, G. and Brown, R. (2015). The effects of grounding (earthing) on inflammation, the immune response, wound healing, and prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. Journal of Inflammation Research, 83. https://doi.org/10.2147/jir.s69656.

Sinatra, S. T., Sinatra, D. S., & Chevalier, G. (2023). Grounding – The universal anti-inflammatory remedy. Biomedical Journal, 46(1), 11-16. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10105021/

Sokal, K. and Sokal, P. (2011). Earthing the Human Body Influences Physiologic Processes. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 17(4), 301-308. https://doi.org/10.1089/acm.2010.0687.

Sokal, K. and Sokal, P. (2012). Earthing the Human Organism Influences Bioelectrical Processes. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 18(3), 229-234. https://doi.org/10.1089/acm.2010.0683.

#Earthing #Energy #Electric Charge #ions

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fatehbaz · 20 days ago

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patience being tested. being forced by a bizarre unfortunate situation to adhere to university requirement technicality by taking this simple basic elementary "introduction to environmental history" class.

this class is from facilitators/program which do, like, "history of the American frontier" or "history of fishing and hunting" and still basically subscribe to that old-school twentieth-century idealization and celebration of characters like Teddy Roosevelt and reverence for a mythical arc-of-history-bent-towards-justice narrative of the often-clumsy but ultimately-benevolent US federal government and its mission to "save nature" through the miracle of "sustained yield," while heroic federal land management agencies and "heritage" institutions lead to way, staffed by exceptional individuals (appeals to nostalgia for the frontier and an imagined landscape of the American West; ego-stroking appeals to flattering self-image that center the environmentalist or academic). where they invoke, y'know, ideas like "ecology is important because don't you enjoy cross-country skiing in The Woods with your niece and nephew? don't you like hunting and fishing?" which makes it feel like a time capsule of appeals and discourses from the 1970s. and it invokes concept of "untouched wilderness" (while eliding scale of historical Indigenous environmental relationships and current ongoing colonial violence/extractivism). but just ever-so-slightly updated with a little bit of chic twenty-first-century flair like a superficial land acknowledgement or a reference to "labor histories" or "history from below," which is extra aggravating when the old ideologies/institutions are still in power but they're muddying the water and diluting the language/frameworks (it's been strange, watching words like "multispecies" and "Anthropocene" over the years slowly but surely show-up on the posters, fliers, course descriptions, by now even appearing adjacent to the agri-business and resource extraction feeder programs, like a recuperation or appropriation.) even from a humanities angle, it's still, they're talking at me like "You probably didn't know this, but environmental history is actually pretty entangled with political and social events. In fact, we can synthesize sources and glean environmental info from wacky places like workers' rolls in factories, ship's logs, and poetry from the era." and i'm nodding like YEP.

the first homework assignment is respond to this: "Define and describe 'the Anthropocene'. Do you think 'the Anthropocene' is a useful concept? Why or why not?" Respond in 300 words.

so for fun, right now in class, going to see how fast i can pull up discussion of Anthropocene-as-concept solely from my old posts on this microblogging site.

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ok, found some

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I think that the danger in any universal narrative or epoch or principle is exactly that it can itself become a colonizing force. [...] I’m suspicious of the Anthropocene as concept for the very reason that it subsumes so many peoples, nations, histories, geographies, political orders. For that reason, I think ideas like the Anthropocene can be a useful short-hand for a cluster of tangible things going on with the Earth at the moment, but we have to be very careful about how fluid and dynamic ideas become concretized into hegemonic principles in the hands of researchers, policymakers, and politicians. There’s so much diversity in histories and experiences and environmental realities even between relatively linked geographies here in Canada [...]. Imagine what happens when we try to do that on a global scale - and a lot of euro-western Anthropocene, climate change and resilience research risks doing that - eliding local specificities and appropriating knowledge to serve a broader euro-western narrative without attending to the inherent colonial and imperial realities of science and policy processes, or even attending to the ways that colonial capitalist expansion has created these environmental crises to begin with. While we, as a collective humanity, are struggling with the realities of the Anthropocene, it is dangerous to erase the specific histories, power-relations, political orders that created the crisis to begin with. So, I’m glad that a robust critique of the Anthropocene as a concept is emerging.

Text by: Words of Zoe Todd, as interviewed and transcribed by Caroline Picard. “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd.” 23 August 2016.

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The Great Acceleration is the latest in a series of human-driven planetary changes that constitute what a rising chorus of scientists, social scientists, and humanists have labeled the Anthropocene - a new Age of Humans. [...] But what the Anthropocene label masks, and what the litany of graphs documenting the Great Acceleration hide, is a history of racial oppression and violence, along with wealth inequality, that has built and sustained engines of economic growth and consumption over the last four centuries. [...] The plantation, Sidney Mintz long ago observed, was a “synthesis of field and factory,” an agro-industrial system of enterprise [...]. Plantation legacies, along with accompanying strategies of survival and resistance, dwell in the racialized geographies of the United States’ and Brazil’s prison systems. They surface in the inequitable toxic burdens experienced by impoverished communities of color in places like Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor of petrochemical plants running along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where cotton was once king. And they appear in patterns of foreign direct investment and debt servitude that structure many land deals in the Caribbean, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa [...]. [C]limatologists and global change scientists from the University of London, propose instead 1610 as a date for the golden spike of the Anthropocene. The date marked a detectable global dip in carbon dioxide concentrations, precipitated, they argue, by the death of nearly 50 million indigenous human inhabitants [...]. The degradation of soils in the tobacco and cotton-growing regions in the American South, or in the sugarcane growing fields of many Caribbean islands, for example, was a consequence of an economic and social system that inflicted violence upon the land and the people enslaved to work it. Such violent histories are not so readily evident in genealogies that date the Anthropocene’s emergence to the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, the onset of Europe’s industrial revolution circa 1800, or the Trinity nuclear test of 1945. Sugarcane plantations were already prevalent throughout the Mediterranean basin during the late middle ages. But it was during the early modern era, and specifically in the Caribbean, where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor (first indentured servitude, and later slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the basis of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human beings on a planetary scale. [...] We might, following the lead of science studies scholar Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing, more aptly designate this era the Plantationocene. [...] It is also an invitation to see, in the words of geographer Laura Pulido, “the Anthropocene as a racial process,” one that has and will continue to produce “racially uneven vulnerability and death." [...] And how have such material transformations sustained global flows of knowledge and capital that continue to reproduce the plantation in enduring ways?

Text by: Sophie Sapp Moore, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F. Gomez, and Gregg Mitman. "Plantation Legacies." Edge Effects. 22 January 2019. Updated 15 May 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Geologists and other scientists will fight over [the definition of the beginning start-date of the Anthropocene] in scientific language, seeking traces of carbon dioxide that index the worst offenses of European empire which rent and violated the flesh, bodies, and governance structures of Indigenous and other sovereign peoples in the name of gold, lumber, trade, land, and power. [...] The stories we tell about the origins of the Anthropocene implicate how we understand the relations we have with our surrounds. In other words, the naming of the Anthropocene epoch and its start date have implications not just for how we understand the world, but this understanding will have material consequences, consequences that affect body and land.

Text by: Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME An International Journal for Critical Geographies. December 2017. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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From Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Eduoard Glissant, through Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, and so many others, critical anticolonial and race theory has been written from the specific histories that marked the Black Atlantic. [...] Glissant also reminds us, secondly, of how cunning the absorptive powers of [...] liberal capitalism are - how quickly specific relations are remade as relations-erasing universal abstractions. [...] This absorptive, relations-erasing universalism is especially apparent in some contemporary discourses of […] liberalism and climate collapse - what some call the Anthropocene - especially those that anchor the crisis in a general Human calamity which, as Sylvia Wynter has noted, is merely the name of an overdetermined and specific [White] European man. […] [T]he condition of creating this new common European world was the destruction of a multitude of existing black and brown worlds. The tsunami of colonialism was not seen as affecting humanity, but [...] these specific people. They were specific - what happened to them may have been necessary, regrettable, intentional, accidental - but it is always them. It is only when these ancestral histories became present for some, for those who had long benefitted from the dispossession [...], that suddenly the problem is all of us, as human catastrophe.

Text by: Elizabeth Povinelli. “The Ancestral Present of Oceanic Illusions: Connected and Differentiated in Late Toxic Liberalism.” e-flux Journal Issue #112. October 2020.

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The narrative arc [of White "liberal humanism"] [...] is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story. […] The Anthropocene discourse follows the same coming-of-age [...] script, searching for a material origin story that would explain the newly identified trajectory of the Anthropos […]. Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. DuBois, and Achille Mbembe all showed how that genealogy of [White subjecthood] was [...] articulated through sixteenth- through nineteenth-century [historiographies and discourses] in the context of colonialism, [...] as well as forming the material praxis of their rearrangement (through mining, ecological rearrangements and extractions, and forms of geologic displacements such as plantations, dams, fertilizers, crops, and introduction of “alien” animals). […] As Wynter (2000) commented, “The degradation of concrete humans, that was/is the price of empire, of the kind of [Eurocentric epistemology] that underlies it” (154).

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Volume 11, Issue 3. November 2020.

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As Yarimar Bonilla suggests in regard to post-Irma-and-Maria Puerto Rico, “vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial condition.” Many in the Caribbean therefore speak about the coloniality of disaster, and the unnaturalness of these “natural” disasters [...]. Others describe this temporality by shifting [...] toward an idea of the Plantationocene [...]. As Moore and her colleagues write, “Plantation worlds, both past and present, offer a powerful reminder that environmental problems cannot be decoupled from histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism that have made some human beings more vulnerable [...].” [W]e see that contemporary uneven socioecologies associated with the rise of the industrial world ["the Anthropocene"] are based [...] also on the racialized denial and foreshortening of life for the sacrificial majority of black, brown, and Indigenous people and their relegation to the “sacrifice zones” of extractive industry. [...] [A]ny appropriate response to the contemporary climate emergency must first appreciate its foundations in the past history of the violent, coercive, transatlantic system of plantation slavery; in the present global uneven development, antiblackness, and border regimes that shape human vulnerability [...] that continues to influence who has access to resources, safety, and preferable ecologies [...] and who will be relegated to the “plantation archipelagoes” (as Sylvia Wynter called them) [...].

Text by: Mimi Sheller. “Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures.” Small Axe (2021), 25 (2 (65)), pages 169-170. Published 1 July 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Indigenous genocide and removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power becoming operationalized in premodernity [...]; it was/is a means to operationalize extraction (therefore race should be considered as foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures and of global space). [...] Wynter suggests that we […] consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the “sugar-slave” complex - a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people […]. Wynter argues that the invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese [and Spanish] travel to the Americas instigates at the same time “a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race. [...] The natal moment of the 1800 Industrial Revolution, […] [apparently] locates Anthropocene origination in […] the "new" metabolisms of technology and matter enabled by the combination of fossil fuels, new engines, and the world as market. […] The racialization of epistemologies of life and nonlife is important to note here […]. While [this industrialization in the nineteenth century] […] undoubtedly transformed the atmosphere with […] coal, the creation of another kind of weather had already established its salient forms in the mine and on the plantation. Paying attention to the prehistory of capital and its bodily labor, both within coal cultures and on plantations that literally put “sugar in the bowl” (as Nina Simone sings) […]. The new modes of material accumulation and production in the Industrial Revolution are relational to and dependent on their preproductive forms in slavery […]. In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners for their lost "property"] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain and its colonial enterprises and empire. [...] A significant proportion of funds were invested in the railway system connecting London and Birmingham (home of cotton production and […] manufacturing for plantations), Cambridge and Oxford, and Wales and the Midlands (for coal). Insurance companies flourished [...]. The slave-sugar-coal nexus both substantially enriched Britain and made it possible for it to transition into a colonial industrialized power […]. The slave trade […] fashioned the economic conditions (and institutions, such as the insurance and finance industries) for industrialization.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

#sorry for being mean #instructor makes podcasts about cowboys HELP ME #and he recently won a New Business award for his startup magazine covering Democrat party politics in local area HELP #so hes constantly performing this like dance between new hip beerfest winebar coolness and oldfashioned masculinity #but hes in charge of the certificate program so i have to just shut up and keep my head down for approximately one year #his email address is almost identical to mine and invokes enviro history terms but i made mine long before when i was ten years old #so i could log in to fieldherpforum dot com to talk about enviro history of distribution range changes in local reptiles and amphibians #sir if you read my blog then i apologize ive had a long year #and i cant do anything to escape i am disabled i am constantly sick im working fulltime i have NO family i have NO resources #i took all of this schools graduate level enviro history courses and seminars years ago and ran the geography and enviro hist club #but then left in final semester because sudden hospitalization and crippled and disabled which led to homelessness #which means that as far as any profession or school is concerned im nobody im a retail employee #i was doing conference paper revisions while sleeping on concrete vomiting walking around on my cane to find outdoor wifi #and im not kidding the MONTH i got back into a house and was like ok going back to finish the semester the school had #put my whole degree program and department in moratorium from lack of funding #and so required starting some stuff from scratch and now feel like a hostage with debt or worsening health that could pounce any moment #to even get back in current program i was working sixteen hours a day to pay old library fines and had to delicately back out of workplace #where manager was straight up violently physically abusive to her vulnerable employees and threatened retaliation #like an emotional torturer the likes of which i thought existed only in cartoons #and the week i filed for student aid a massive storm had knocked out electricity for days and i was clearing fallen tree debris #and then sitting in the dark in my room between job shifts no music no phone no food with my fingers crossed and i consider it a miracle #sorry dont mean to dramatize or draw attention to myself #so actually im happy you and i are alive

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