I’ve dedicated a significant portion of my professional career to sharing the latest medical research with you on grounding, and today I want to highlight a study I have not yet blogged about. Today’s the day to share this good news. I’m excited about this research, because high blood pressure is affects almost half of the adults in the United States (47%) which is roughly 116 million people in the United States alone.
If you get my weekly newsletter (and if you don’t, you can sign up for it here!) then you already know that grounding is extremely heart healthy — more on that below. But today I can add another way that grounding supports our cardiovascular system, and that is by lowering high blood pressure, naturally.
Published in Alternative Therapies In Health And Medicine, patients were asked to ground roughly 10 hours daily — easily attained by including time spent sleeping grounded at night. The participants blood pressure was monitored at baseline and monthly in a clinical setting, as well as routinely submitting at home blood pressure measurements three times a week for the entire 12 week period.
The results were a statisically significant reduction in blood pressure for all participants, with an average decrease in systolic pressure of 14%. Patients had a responses ranging from an 8% reduction in blood pressure up to a 23% reduction in blood pressure — just by adding grounding into their health care routines!
Your cardiovascular system is entirely electrically based — that classic heartbeat you may be familiar with is a beautiful DC energy output from your heart, which in turn drives the circulation through your body.
Because the earth has an electrical heartbeat of its own that outputs the same measurable DC energy that your heart runs on, this relationship has been extensively studied for the effects of grounding.
What have previous medical studies revealed about the heart health benefits of grounding? Let’s run through them !
4 Ways Grounding Supports Your Cardiovascular Health:
1. Improved Circulation
The first study I want to tell you about was a double-blinded, placebo-controlled study of 40 patients. Half of them were grounded for one hour (the other half were sham-grounded for one hour) and the blood flow through their facial skin capillaries was imaged in real time. All the grounded patients had significantly increased capillary blood flow, and all the ungrounded patients had no change in blood flow.
In another double-blinded, placebo-controlled study, researchers studied 28 participants who performed strenuous yoga exercises for an hour straight, and half were grounded and half were sham grounded. They cycled through a series of 10 strenuous yoga exercises over and over again for an hour straight, while their blood viscosity was measured. Researchers found the viscosity (the thickness) of the blood was decreased, so the blood actually ran more smoothly through their muscles. Blood flow was enhanced both systolically and diastolically, which means when the heart was squeezing, the blood flow was enhanced and also when it was at rest between beats, the blood flow was still enhanced.
2. Boosted Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
Possibly even more importantly, grounding has a direct effect on your actual heart itself by supporting vagal tone, which affects the function of many of your organ systems, including your heart. Supporting vagal tone supports heart rate variability (HRV) which is a positive indicator of heart health. HRV measures the variability between your heart beats and an increased HRV is a fantastic indicator that your heart is healthy and is functioning well, that it’s receptive, responsive, tuned into your autonomic nervous system, tangibly taking in information about the environment and the stressors that you’re under and responding directly to them.
When the HRV decreases (as it does during times of stress, after trauma, after a heart attack, after a heart transplant, in premature infants, in PTSD patients and much more) the heart reverts to a robotic beat with less responsiveness. It’s no longer in a flexible state where it can change and respond and adapt to your body’s needs. And as I’ve blogged about in the past, the strength of your heart relies on its flexibility. Read that article here:
A low HRV means your heart is in robotic survival mode and this is an indication of an increased mortality rate and heart failure risk, so physicians look at the HRV (particularly after a heart attack, heart transplant and premature birth) because it predicts the risk of death. They also look at the HRV to predict a positive outcome as well, for example, there is a better prognosis in cancer patients with an increased HRV. So a higher HRV enhances long term survivability, enhances recovery from major diseases, predicts a longer lifespan and decreases stress and wear and tear on the heart.
Research has found that grounding directly boosts your HRV.
In the yoga grounding study mentioned above, participants who were grounded for 40 minutes during strenuous yoga exercises universally had their HRV increased, but the moment they stopped grounding, their HRV went back to baseline. This was statistically significant with every single patient, so when they were grounded, their HRV was enhanced, and when they were ungrounded, it wasn’t.
Researchers followed that study with an even more recent study on the HRV in some of the most vulnerable human beings of all — premature infants in NICU incubators. And here too, grounding for just 40 minutes boosted markers of survival by boosting HRV for these neonatal infants.
3. Decreased Clotting
The last pieces of the puzzle to talk about is the blood itself. It’s amazing to see how one system can be impacted by grounding, not just in one way but in multiple ways… the heart works better, the blood vessels deliver blood more easily, the viscosity of the blood goes down so it flows more freely, and now studies tell us that the red blood cells themselves are less likely to clot, and here’s why:
The zeta potential represents the electrical potential on the outer membrane of your red blood cells. The more negative the zeta potential is, the more likely your blood cells are to flow smoothly. When the zeta potential increases, your blood cells are more likely to clot, clump together and aggregate, increasing the risk for stroke, heart attack and other clotting diseases.
So researchers measured the zeta potential of 10 patients, before and after grounding them for two hours. Ungrounded, the zeta potential of red blood cells increased, making it much more likely to clump and move slowly but after two hours of grounding the zeta potential decreased, allowing the red blood cells to flow freely and decrease the risk of clotting. That’s really the goal of aspirin therapy, which more than one-third of all adults (and four out of five patients with heart disease) routinely take to reduce the risk of clots.
Grounding does that naturally… and it does it for free… and without the gastrointestinal irritation! Grounding naturally allows blood to flow more smoothly, for red blood cells to stick together less and not to clot as much, for HRV to be enhanced, and for the flow through your entire vasculature system to be open and free.
4. Lowered Blood Pressure
And as mentioned at the beginning of this article, we can also add a fourth way that grounding supports your cardiovascular system, and that is by significantly decreasing blood pressure. The patients in that study slept grounded, and although many of the positive effects of grounding happen within minutes (for example the study on HRV in infants in the NICU found these positive results after only 40 minutes of grounding) if you want to be sure to be grounded as long as the participants in the blood pressure study, you’ll want to consider sleeping grounded.
Here are the grounding tools I recommend, because they are non-toxic for you and eco-friendly for the earth. Hand crafted from natural and organic materials, I have personally developed these based on my 20+ years of focusing specifically on grounding for better health, and offer them in my Grounding Boutique right here.
I also am the only practitioner that offers you an EMF filtering protective PureGround ground cord, which is important if you experience electrosensitivity — this is an important step to eliminate any chance of dirty electricity on the ground line and ensures your grounding experience is pure DC earth energy, nothing else. Find that protective ground cord right here:
Share this article with anyone in your life that you care about that has high blood pressure or any other cardiac risk factors! In addition to following their cardiologist’s guidance, grounding is a natural way to provide holistic support that is complimentary to conventional medical treatments.
Today, enjoy going outside and touching the earth to support not only your heart health but the blood flow throughout your entire body, your blood pressure and so much more.
xoxox,
Laura Koniver MD
