 It sounds like common sense, right? A walk in nature is great for you, and has tons of benefits, both mentally and physically. Almost every spiritual system in some way has expressed a sense of power in the natural world. So it's a real wonder why something as profound and amazing as Earthing has taken this long to get recognition in the scientific community. But in recent years, it has. This episode was inspired by an amazing movie by Josh and Rebecca Tickle here on YouTube about this new healing method. After watching this, make sure to check it out. We'll share a link in the comments below. It's fantastic. So I know, to some of us, this sounds like a no-brainer. The fact that our planet has the ability to regulate and balance out our own biological systems like it does for basically every other ecosystem really doesn't seem that crazy. But until recently, a large number of people laughed it off as this kind of New Age pyramid scheme. Wink, wink. In a nutshell, Earthing, a.k.a. grounding, is the amazing, magical, super-efficient way of healing yourself by none other than walking barefoot on the Earth, or just lying down in some grass. It's legit that simple, and yet numerous studies, all pilot, blind, double-blind, and control, have shown measurable psychological, physiological, and bio-electrical results. Now, the umbrella term nature therapy, or environmental medicine, has a long history of study, but they usually focus on interactions between human health and the environment, including stuff like compromised air and water and toxic chemicals, and how they cause or mediate disease. But until recently, the positive and beneficial effects of the environment on humans weren't really looked at very much. So how does this stuff work exactly? Well, before we start talking about the Earth itself, we need to do a quick high school science lesson. From physics class, you probably remember the three subatomic particles, protons, which have a positive charge, neutrons, which are neutral and have a zero charge, and electrons, which have a negative charge. These three charge carriers make up every atom in existence, which in turn make up all of the molecules and elements in the universe. Super simply, if an atom has more protons than electrons, it'll be positively charged, and if it has more electrons, it'll be negative. And if it has the same amount, the charge will be neutral and balanced. See? Physics is easy! Now, where it gets interesting is that the Earth itself actually has a negative electrical charge, and is even conductive. Basically, the Earth's surface has a limitless and continuously renewed supply of free electrons. How that happens is still up for debate, but the two main theories are that the changes and geological events in the core produce the different charges, or that the negative charge is maintained by the global atmospheric electrical circuit, aka the ionosphere and lightning strikes. Which also, fun fact, was the main premise behind Nikola Tesla's idea of free and wireless electricity, that we could use the Earth as a big natural conductor by plugging resonance rods into the soil. The history of grounding is actually pretty interesting, with a legend going all the way back to Sirius the Great in Persia, who, after seeing the disconnection from nature that his capital city caused, built the oldest paradise garden in the middle of the city in an effort to reconnect people with nature. Much more recently though, the discovery of modern earthing is thought to have come from a man named Clint Ober, who wrote the 2010 book, Earthing, the most important health discovery ever, but he was working on it long before that. See, Clint was a cable company engineer way back in the 60s, who used to work on grounding electrical cables when installing them in houses, as any electrical engineer knows that grounding a cable provides a return point in the circuit and completes the system. In other words, you make the cable maintain at Earth potential. Now, in theory, if a TV cable wasn't grounded, you'd either get a bad picture, or you'd get a knock at the door from the communications divisions of the government, saying that it was interfering with local communication and radio waves. So, it used to be a pretty big deal. Clint had the amazing idea that if an ungrounded cable would affect or even be affected by its environment, what kind of effect would all of the electromagnetic waves that are bombarding us in modern society have on an ungrounded human? As, after all, we're kind of like big receivers ourselves, even producing a bioelectric field. He saw that in ancient times our natural state of being was closer to the ground. We would walk barefoot and sleep on animal hides right there on the ground. Since the 1960s, though, we've increasingly worn insulated rubber or plastic-sold shoes, instead of the traditional leather fashion from hides. Although we probably could just use hemp plastic as a modern substitute, you know, but anyway. As a result, he thought, our modern lifestyle is more disconnected from the natural Earth than ever before. You've probably heard that common saying that parents should let their kids play in the dirt, because it helps build up the immune system. But is there something more to that than we're currently considering? Turns out, this was a huge deal. During recent decades, chronic illness, immune disorders, and inflammatory diseases have increased dramatically, and some researchers have cited environmental factors as the cause. Now, there's a lot more to cover about the history and stuff, but we're going to leave that for the movie, because in this video we want to look at some of the more recent studies themselves. When Clint first discovered the process, he wanted to get authentication from a respected science source. So he went to the guys over at UCLA to see what was going on, and they pretty much laughed him out of the door because grounding sounded so ridiculous. At the time, not being able to find anyone to do a study for him, Clint pulled the most pro-gamer move ever and did one himself. In a blinded pilot study, he recruited 60 subjects, 22 males and 28 females, who suffered from self-described sleep disturbances and chronic muscle and joint pain for at least six months. All of the people were randomly divided for a month-long study, in which both groups slept on conductive carbon-fiber mattress pads. Half of the pads were connected to a dedicated earth ground outside each person's bedroom window, while the other half were sham-grounded to account for placebo. While you can read the amazing results in his paper, which we'll link below, for the most part, grounded people described symptomatic improvement while most of the people in the control group didn't. Some people even reported significant relief from asthmatic and respiratory conditions, rheumatoid arthritis, PMS, sleep apnea, and hypertension while sleeping grounded. It didn't end there, though. Over the next few years, people started to catch on and do more and more studies. A 2004 experiment showed that cortisol levels, as well as sleep dysfunction, pain, and other mental health issues were all reduced after spending a night sleeping grounded. In fact, all 12 participants of this study reported waking up fewer times at night and having a better night's sleep. The benefits of earthing go way beyond just helping you sleep, though. There's even a wide body of research that shows that walking barefoot on the earth not only facilitates the free movement of electrons into the body, but also that the body's electrical potential becomes equalized with the earth's, leading to internal balance. It's long been suspected that electrons could act as a form of antioxidants in the body, helping to stabilize cell environments and contribute to a healthy immune system. In fact, a 2013 study showed that the effects of earthing on the electrodynamics of red blood cells significantly reduced blood viscosity, allowing for better oxygen delivery to the tissues, which is one of the theories behind why earthing works so well at treating inflammation. Like inflammation, earthing apparently also has a big effect on the immune system response. In a 2010 study, a team measured the blood markers of men would just come back from a session of intense exercise and had bad muscle soreness. Probably from pumping too much iron or something. IDK, I have no idea what goes on inside gyms. But you could probably check out the mechanics and methods used in the study below, but the results were pretty cool. They showed that grounding the body to the earth actually changed measures of immune system activity and pain. With the ungrounded men, there was an expected, sharp increase in white blood cells at the stage when the muscle soreness is known to reach its peak, which meant a greater perception of pain. In contrast, all of the grounded guys only had a slight decrease in white blood cells, which meant less pain and a shorter recovery time. In short, maybe they should just make outside gyms more common, or like, make the floors grass, or just at least ground them, I don't know, something like that. Either way, it looks like something is going on here that is way beyond just a placebo effect. We'll link a few more studies in the descriptions below, but seriously, if you just look up earthing or grounding and start reading on the web, you'll be amazed, seriously. Naturally, even after all of this awesome work coming out on earthing, people still weren't convinced and tried to group it in with other wishy-washy natural therapies, which is what this 2012 meta-study tried to do when they said that there were methodological problems with most of the studies. But a new meta-study in 2018 actually overruled that and showed that over 143 different studies showed that green space exposure is associated with numerous beneficial health outcomes in intervention and observational studies, both psychological and physiological. The bottom line is, there's something amazing about connecting to the Earth with our bare skin, and the recent publications in a lot of major journals seems to indicate that it has something to do with sharing of electrons and interaction with our own biological-electrical field. As with any alternative medicine though, don't just give up established Western medicine in place of it, but rather act like our own natural mother and work towards a balance of medical and natural therapies in healing yourself. Is walking around barefoot gonna hurt you in any way? Well, of course not. Well, unless you like, you know, step on a bee or something. So, you know, watch where you're going. But really, there's nothing to lose by trying it out. And who knows, you might just get the best night's sleep of your life while healing yourself along the way. So with that, thank you so much for watching. Go outside if you can, sit, lie down, walk, smell, do basically anything on some grass or some dirt, and go feel great about it. Breathe in all that good Prana and just be in harmony with nature. Perhaps it's the cure that we really all need right now. Toodles!