hp-dave-logo.svg
Subscribe

What is Earthing? Here’s Why Going Barefoot Benefits Your Body

What is Earthing? Here’s Why Going Barefoot Benefits Your Body

by

[tldr]

  • Is there science behind earthing and grounding techniques? Yes, and it’s solid enough to make you want to dig your toes into the grass daily.
  • Every chemical reaction, any rearrangement of molecues that happens anywhere ever, involves electrical charges, attraction, and repulsion.
  • A growing body of scientific evidence shows that disruption of the body’s charge is a health concern, and doctors should start paying attention.
  • Read on to dig through the science behind earthing and learn some techniques to try along the way.

[/tldr]

When you were little, did you ever shuffle your socked feet along the carpet, then zap your little brother with just a light touch?

Of course not. Kids don’t do that. 😉

If you did, hypothetically of course, you’ve felt the effects of earthing, or grounding.

Chances are, the concept of this article sounds a little hippy dippy to you. You may have pictured someone standing barefoot outside to be one with the earth’s energy, and you wonder what the point is.

Is there science behind earthing? Yes, and it’s solid enough to make you want to dig your toes into the grass daily. Read on to find out about the benefits of earthing and how you can use grounding mats, grounding sheets, earthing shoes, and the good ‘ol outdoors to reset your body systems.

What is earthing

Earthing The Case for Going Barefoot_What is earthing

Before we get into what it all means, there’s a basic premise of physics that helps it all make more sense: you, and all people, animals, plants, and inanimate objects are electrical beings living in an electrical world. Everything that’s made of atoms (so…everything) has a net charge that’s either positive, negative, or neutral.

Every chemical reaction, any rearrangement of molecules that happens anywhere ever, involves electrical charges, attraction, and repulsion. Without atoms’ strong attraction to each other through energetic bonds, you and the device you’re using to read this would dissipate into particles.

So, when your body’s overall charge is off, chemical reactions happen that shouldn’t, and reactions fail to happen when they should. A growing body of evidence shows that disruption of the body’s charge is a health concern, and doctors should start paying attention.[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17572456/”] More on how your charge gets messed up in a minute.

Earth has a cyclical pulsed negative charge

Earthing The Case for Going Barefoot_Earth has a cyclical pulsed negative charge

The earth naturally has an endless supply of negative electrons that pulse out in a pattern.[ref url=”https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/1999JD900117″] Natural rhythms of radiation from the sun, lightning, and the earth’s orbit recharge this supply in a cycle.

The earth’s surface conducts energy, except in super arid desert areas. That’s why electricity wants to find the ground through the path of least resistance. Think about touching a metal pole and getting a little shock. That surge is the static electricity leaving your body, taking a ride down the pole and eventually getting into the ground. Grounding means discharging built-up static electricity either directly into the earth, or through a conductor and into the ground. Earthing is a little more specific. When your body is in direct contact with the earth, without a barrier like shoes or carpet, you’re earthing.

Why you should ground yourself: the benefits of earthing

Your normal day-to-day builds up a positive charge in the body. Until the last few hundred years, people spent a lot of time in contact with the earth, either walking or sleeping on the ground without anything blocking the transfer of electrons. That was a natural mechanism for getting back to neutral throughout the day and while they slept.

We don’t get that these days. Things like wearing shoes and walking around in buildings prevents you from discharging the charge you’ve built up into the ground.

The benefits of grounding yourself

Earthing The Case for Going Barefoot_The benefits of grounding yourself

So, why bother earthing? Some of the science-backed benefits of grounding include:

  • Regulates cortisol, your body’s main stress hormone[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19083655/”] (better regulation means you recover from stress quickly, instead of having feeling anxious long after the stressful event)
  • Neutralizes free radicals,[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19524846″] which are highly reactive molecules that damage cells
  • Reduces inflammation[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19524846″]
  • Reduces stress[ref url=”http://www.next-up.org/pdf/ACM_Journal_The_Biologic_Effects_of_Grounding_the_Human_Body_During_Sleep_as_Measured_by_Cortisol_evels_and_Subjective_Reporting_of_Sleep_Pain_and_Stress_2004.pdf”]
  • Improves sleep[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15650465/”]
  • Reduces some risk factors of cardiovascular disease[ref url=”https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/acm.2011.0820″]
  • Reduces pain[ref url=”http://www.next-up.org/pdf/ACM_Journal_The_Biologic_Effects_of_Grounding_the_Human_Body_During_Sleep_as_Measured_by_Cortisol_evels_and_Subjective_Reporting_of_Sleep_Pain_and_Stress_2004.pdf”]
  • Shifts the body from the stressed fight-or-flight mode to the restorative rest-and-digest mode[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20064020/”]

Grounding techniques

The best way to ground yourself is to go outside in the dirt or sand barefoot. If you have a concrete or ceramic tile floor in your basement, that works too as long as it’s sitting on a concrete slab and not on plywood boards or other insulators. If you want a little extra earthing action, or live in a big city where soil is scarce, you have a few options.

Earthing sheet

Every house has a network of grounding wires that connects the electrical source to the ground. This helps complete the circuit using the ground instead of your body, so you can touch your TVs and blenders and whatnot without getting a zap.

An earthing sheet plugs into a normal outlet and connects to the grounding wires in your home’s wiring (not the electrical source, so don’t worry about plugging in all night). Since it conducts energy all the way into the ground, you can get in a full night of earthing in without sleeping in the grass. It’s usually made of cotton and fine silver thread for conductivity, so the sheet will deliver negative electrons from the earth to your body and neutralize the positive charges.

Earthing shoes

Earthing shoes have a small conductor in part of the sole, usually the ball, providing an electric path to the ground. These are popular as casual shoes to provide all-day grounding or as minimalist exercise shoes to increase endurance. Not all minimalist shoes are earthing shoes, though. Rubber soles are insulators, so you have to have a conductive material either woven into the sole or as an embedded disc that connects the soles of your feet to the ground.

Earthing mat

All electronic devices emit EMFs which can disrupt your charge. You can use an earthing mat under your forearms or under your bare feet when you’re working on your computer to reduce rattling your system with EMF exposure.

So, does it work?

Preliminary evidence points to yes. Honestly though, do you need a pointy-head scientist’s absolute certainty to kick off your shoes? Going outside and running around barefoot just makes you feel good. If you notice positive changes over time, even better.

Cancer-linked Weedkiller Glyphosate Found in Common Foods, Says New Report

by

The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) reportedly found traces of glyphosate, the active ingredient commonly used in herbicide products like Roundup, in a variety of foods, including crackers and granola, according to internal emails obtained by The Guardian through a Freedom of Information Act request. Glyphosate, which kills off weeds without killing crops, presents numerous health risks to consumers[ref url=”https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-016-0070-0″], including celiac disease[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24678255″], hormone disruption[ref url=”https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300483X09003047″], and even cancer[ref url=”https://www.thelancet.com/action/showFullTextImages?pii=S1470-2045%2815%2970134-8″]. Learn what the Guardian reported on the FDA findings, as well as how to protect yourself from glyphosate and detox from it.

Internal emails reveal glyphosate is in a variety of common foods

The FDA has been testing glyphosate in food samples for the past two years but hasn’t released any official reports, according to The Guardian.

In an internal email dated January 2017, FDA chemist Richard Thompson wrote to colleagues: “I have brought wheat crackers, granola cereal, and cornmeal from home and there’s a fair amount in all of them.” Broccoli was the only food he found to be free of glyphosate.

Another FDA chemist, Narong Chamkasem, found “over-the-tolerance” (6.5 parts per million) levels of glyphosate in corn — the legal limit is 5.0 ppm. Normally, illegal levels are reported to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). However, in a separate email from an FDA supervisor to an EPA official, it was noted the corn was not considered an “official sample.”

An FDA spokesman told The Guardian that the agency did not find any illegal glyphosate levels in corn, soy, milk or eggs — the four foods of their “special assignment.” He didn’t speak to the unofficial findings contained in the emails.

The FDA will release its official findings later this year or in early 2019, since reports are typically released at least two years after the data is collected, according to the Guardian.

Glyphosate in the US and Europe

In this Bulletproof Radio (iTunes) podcast episode, Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Stephanie Seneff, PhD, said glyphosate is hard to avoid since it’s everywhere. In fact, annual use of glyphosate in the US exceeds 200 million pounds, according to the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know[ref url=”https://usrtk.org/pesticides/not-just-for-corn-and-soy-a-look-at-glyphosate-use-in-food-crops/”]. “There’s glyphosate in the air, in the rain, on the fields next door. [You] can’t avoid it, so you’re not going to be glyphosate-free in this country, unless you’re in some wilderness area and living off of local animals, remote from any civilization.” Meanwhile, despite a petition from more than 1 million EU citizens, Europe voted last year to reauthorize the pesticide for another five years.

How to limit glyphosate exposure

Although it’s hard to avoid glyphosate completely, there are steps you can take to minimize your exposure and flush the controversial herbicide from your system.

Eat organic

The foundation of a Bulletproof Diet is organic food, which helps you steer clear of environmental toxins like glyphosate. An organic diet rooted in sustainable farming practices doesn’t allow for chemicals in soil and water. For a vibrant body and mind, do your best to keep glyphosate out of your food, away from your skin, and clear of your soil.

5 steps to glyphosate detoxification

Since it’s nearly impossible to avoid glyphosate entirely these days – even if you do eat organic most of the time — knowing how to detox from it is key. These steps not only help you to detox from glyphosate, but they also help repair gut lining damage from the chemical.

  •    Take activated charcoal. After eating a meal with questionable ingredients, take one to two charcoal pills to help your body bind and excrete any possible toxins.
  •    Drink water. Your liver, kidneys, and skin will thank you if you keep them hydrated. Water helps them do their job to excrete chemicals from your body, so drink up.
  •    Eat a high-fat diet of undamaged fats. Glyphosate irritates your gut and causes unnatural gut permeability. A high-fat, low-carb, low-sugar diet is key to gut health, so learn more about how to restore your gut with diet.
  •    Support bile flow and heal your gut. Try Restore, a soil-derived supplement designed to support the health of your intestinal walls that are damaged by glyphosate exposure.
  •    Buy organic as much as possible, though get to know which conventional produce carries the highest toxic loads. Review EWG’s 2018 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce.

Related Link: The Sneaky Place Glyphosate Is Hiding in Your Food

 

Build Better Muscle Memory, Faster

by

Silly as it sounds, your muscles have an amazing capacity to remember. Let’s say you’re weight training and you take some time off. Days or even weeks later, you get back into the gym and fall right back into your groove. Your muscles respond positively to the weights, as if they’re on autopilot. After a few days of training, you might even lift more than you could previously.

Muscle memory, a type of motor learning called procedural memory, happens in the brain, of course. Through the act of repetition, your brain cements that action into its neural pathways so that the movement becomes second nature. It’s the science behind why you never forget how to ride a bike. Even if you haven’t pedaled in decades, your brain remembers which muscles to fire next. With enough practice, you shift from conscious activity to automatic movement.

Likewise, your muscles retain core information. However, if you want your muscle to grow, you must continue to challenge them. Muscular adaptation, or the increase in muscle strength due to lifting a heavier load is shown to be common to every human being[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1827108″]. Study after study reports that muscle cells gained through training sessions are not lost if training stops for up to three months[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20713720″][ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18440990″].  Instead, when training resumes, your muscles grow more rapidly because you’ve already built muscle cells from your previous workout sessions.

Well, your brain works in a similar fashion when learning new skills. Though it takes mindful concentration to learn a new skill. While experts don’t necessarily agree on how long it takes to master a new skill, in the book “Outliers: The Story of Success,” Malcolm Gladwell asserts that it takes 10,000 hours or nearly 10 years.However, much like building a new muscle, there are some hacks you can take to expedite the process.

In fact, if you want to train your brain to play the piano, swing a golf club, or even practice archery, Daniel Chao, co-founder and CEO of Halo Neuroscience, has a new technique which primes the brain to drastically reduce how long it takes to master skills.

In a recent Bulletproof Radio (iTunes) podcast episode, Chao explained how his wearable device called Halo Sport delivers electrical stimulation to your brain to build muscle memory faster. Worn before or during practice, the headset sends electrical currents into the brain’s motor cortex — the area that controls movement — and puts neurons into a state of heightened receptivity. This helps your brain and muscles work together more efficiently.

The process, called neuropriming, builds brain plasticity[ref url=”https://elifesciences.org/articles/02798″] – that’s what enables your mind and body to work together. Double-blind trials with the U.S. ski team show the Halo can build skill faster and even improve muscle strength.

Intrigued to test out Halo Sport for himself, Dave met up with Chao for a series of physical exercises that Dave had never done before. To see how Dave did under neurostimulation, watch the video above.

Even if you don’t have access to external stimulation like the Halo Sport to activate your brain’s circuitry, you can still improve your ability to learn new skills simply by challenging it. Tomorrow, try driving a different way to work or brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand. By doing so, you’ll set yourself up to problem solve and creatively find solutions toward mastery. As these activities trigger your brain to expand with possibility, much like training your muscles, your mind (and muscles) adapt to the challenges and grow. So keep building that brain plasticity and you’ll reap rewards for years to come.

 

Your Brain, But Better: Neurostimulation – Dr. Daniel Chao #488

by

Biohacking at its Best.

In today’s episode of Bulletproof Radio we’re talking to a leading neuroscientist about how to actually replace drugs with electricity, and how to increase your brain’s neuroplasticity using a new technology.

Dave Asprey and Dr. Daniel Chao, Co-Founder and CEO of Halo Neuroscience go deep into the past, present and future of neurostimulation.

Enjoy the show!

Listen to the episode on itunes

Follow Along with the Transcript

Your Brain, only Better. Neurostimulation – Dr. Daniel Chao #487

Links/Resources for Daniel Chao

Website
Instagram 
Twitter 
Facebook
YouTube
Blog 

Show Notes

  • How Dr. Chao got his start. “When you talk about drugs for the brain, so psychiatric and neurologic conditions, the wheels kind of come off. The list of side effects are often as bad as the disease it’s trying to treat. So, it really, to me, begged the question, could we be doing something better? Let’s think beyond drugs.”
  • “It got me starting to think about electricity. The brain, we’ve long known, is computer circuit, right? It’s wired and it’s got different processing centers. There’s cables going the processing centers. I really started to think about the brain as a computer chip, and what we could do with electricity to interface with the brain to treat human disease, and potentially to enhance otherwise healthy people.”
  • Dave on making healthy people even better! “But, with Halo now, you’ve gone a step longer and said, “We’re not actually curing a disease here. We’re doing something different, which isn’t necessarily medical, because when you’re increasing performance in someone who isn’t sick, all of a sudden, that’s not what doctors do. That’s what someone else does.”
  • Dave on coming up with the word Biohacking. “I couldn’t find a name. I sort of made one up. Bio-hacking is that art and science have changed the environment around you and inside of you. So, they have control of your own biology. That means if you’re not sick, and wanna be better, that’s just control.”
  • Dr. Chao on how Halo Sport works. “The core technology that drives Halo Sport is a technology called TDCS, or Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation. You’re exactly right. It involves creating a current that runs along your scalp, but the important thing is that this current creates an electric field that is strong enough to get through the skull while gently interacting with your cortex. In the case of Halo Sport, we target the electricity, this electric field, at the special part of the brain called the motor cortex, this part of the brain that controls movement in our bodies.”

 

 

 

Use This Guided Meditation to Clear Your Mind and Find Happiness

by

Meditation, the practice of focusing your attention on your breath, a fixed point, or a phrase (called a mantra), helps eliminate stressful and distracting thoughts, so you can be present, calmer, and more aware of your surroundings. From this place of clarity, you connect more easily to the present, instead of dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. This kind of mindfulness practice has been shown to bolster happiness by reducing negative thinking.

Guided meditation, a particular form of meditation in which someone else leads you through a visualization or breathing exercise, helps to get you into the practice and remain focused, particularly if you’re new to it.

The benefits of meditation abound, as there are nearly 3,000 studies demonstrating its powerful effects on the mind and body. Here are some of the most intriguing findings of meditation:

  • Reduces anxiety[ref url=”https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/da.21964″]
  • Treats depression[ref url=”https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/248807.php”]
  • Increases concentration[ref url=”https://www.psyn-journal.com/article/S0925-4927%2810%2900288-X/abstract”]
  • Improves attention to detail under stress[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361002/]”]
  • Increases threshold for pain[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3090218/”]
  • Benefits memory recall[ref url=”https://psychcentral.com/news/2013/06/23/meditations-effects-on-emotion-shown-to-persist/56372.html”]
  • Fosters creativity[ref url=”https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00116/full”]

To learn how to meditate or even deepen your practice, check out this free guided meditation with Barry Morguelan, MD, a double-board certified gastroenterologist and internal medicine doctor, who believes in the healing efficacy of mindfulness practices. As Morguelan articulates in a recent Bulletproof Radio (iTunes) podcast episode, you can use the increased energy gained from this particular meditation to set clear and intentional goals afterward. If you are ready to start now, turn off the lights, get comfortable, close your eyes, and dive inside.

Guided meditation video above, the audio-only version below.

 

Viral Comedian Ali Spagnola Says More Women Should Be Biohacking

by

Ali Spagnola, a musician and performer known for her viral videos that give fans so much to laugh about, has a fabulous daily habit. Every morning, without fail, she makes Bulletproof Coffee while she calls her mom. Some days may be more chit-than-chat, though they talk regardless.

Two years ago, Spagnola moved to Los Angeles and proclaimed she’d be an online artist. She began with the goal of publishing one musical performance video online every Thursday. She hasn’t missed a day yet, and now posts twice a week. Her content includes livestreams of her performances as well as livestreams of her entire day. Spagnola commits to making art daily and professes that her love for creating and making people laugh reward her most.

Spagnola is also her own personal health guru. She loves Olympic lifting to the point where she’s sworn off cardio entirely. When she hits the gym, she heads straight for the big weights. To that end, Spagnola believes that finding the right answer to your health goal is a personal quest. “You really need to try things out until your body responds to figure out your own formula.”

If you didn’t guess, Spagnola is an ardent biohacker and believes there’s a place for women in what some people perceive to be a boys’ clubs. “Women are taught to absolutely avoid fat. I was living a life of only protein and carbs and eating a lot of carrots to get my vegetables in. But the belief that fat is bad for you is absolutely not true,” says Spagnola.

With a high-fat diet as her mainstay, Spagnola works all morning on her creative endeavors and works out in the afternoons. When it comes to what allows her to get through her days with all that vigor and zest, Spagnola tips her hat to Bulletproof Coffee.

 

footer-tab-img.png

Get on
“The Inside Track”
with Dave

Subscribe to become an “Insider”, and receive weekly biohacking tips and tech directly from Dave to start hacking your way to stronger mental performance and physical results.

See What Trouble Dave’s Getting Into on Social

GO TOP
hp-dave-logo.svg

Terms of service | Privacy Policy | Affiliate Disclosure & Health Claims |
Dave Asprey 2024

influex-logo-footer.svg

Start hacking your way to better than standard performance and results.

Receive weekly biohacking tips and tech by becoming a Dave Asprey insider.

By sharing your email, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Subscribe