There is a beautiful relationship that our brain has with the energy of mother earth.
This helps support everything our brain helps us to do — from enhancing our mood to maintaining a healthy weight to deepening our restorative sleep.
Most people believe that our circadian (day/night) rhythm is dependant on sunlight to set that pattern for us, but scientists have actually known since 1970 that the earth’s energy field has as much, if not more, to do with our sleep/wake pattern than even the sun.
Here’s how:
Researchers built two underground isolation chambers that completely cut the occupants off from any evaluation of time passing. Both chambers were light proof, sound proof, temperature controlled bunkers, with one difference…
While one was allowed to be connected to the electromagnetic field of the earth, one was completely shielded so that all connection was severed between the earth’s energy and the occupants of the bunker.
Looking at several hundred test subjects for up to a two month period of time, researchers looked at sleep wake cycles and found that participants who were in the bunker that still allowed the earth’s field to reach them kept patterns that were close to a 24 hour rhythm, while those in the bunker that was completely shielded from the earth’s energies became completely desynchronized and experienced significantly longer, more irregular rhythms.
Researchers then experimented with introducing different electrical and magnetic fields into the shielded bunker, and only one restored normal sleep/wake patterns… you guessed it, the one that is our Mother Earth’s natural energy, the Schumann frequency.
From this the researchers postulated that it is actually the frequency of the earth that regulates our natural biorhythms.
Based off of this understanding, it’s easy to understand how directly connecting to the earth, grounding our body with our planet, can help enhance restorative sleep at night and boost daytime wakefulness.
In the first study to directly examine grounding and sleep, researchers looked at twelve participants who had a history of sleep disturbances. They measured cortisol levels and tracked sleeping patterns while these patients slept grounded every night on a grounded mattress pad for two months.
After eight weeks, the cortisol production of every single one of these patients had normalized. Every single one.
Cortisol is really important, signaling to our body in the morning (when levels are highest) that it is day… and then slowly decreasing all day long while levels of melatonin rise by evening to signal to the body that it is night.
It’s really crucial to have normal cortisol pattern and a normal melatonin pattern or your sleep becomes disrupted.
But the good news is, grounding can correct this in just a few weeks’ time. This is why one of the original applications of grounding was to treat jet lag to get you quickly into the new day/night rhythm of the new time zone you’ve travelled to. That just shows you how resilient the human body is.
Grounding is not going to be like a sleeping pill. It’s not going to make you go to sleep. It is going to improve the quality of the sleep you do have. It’s going to heal your body so that you get natural sleep. Restorative sleep.
Beyond normalizing cortisol levels, being grounded directly calms and supports your brain wave patterns so that when you are sleeping grounded you are spending more time in restorative alpha brain wave patterns. The feeling of having had a good night’s sleep where you had time to process and release the events of the previous day and have rested your body helps you wake up with a new possibility, a fresh start.
That’s the feeling of having a prolonged alpha brain wave pattern.
That’s why meditation is so helpful.
Meditation is an ancient healing practice, and we now know the reason it is so effective is that meditation puts your brain into that alpha wave pattern.
That is the state of healing, and there are essentially three ways to get your brain into that alpha brain wave healing state:
1 — You can do it through meditation
2 — You can do it while falling asleep
and
3– You can do it through grounding.
Better yet, you can combine sleep and grounding. That’s the most powerful way to do it, which is why these sleep studies are so awesome and why every single participant in them reaped such significant benefits.
Good quality sleep is so good for our brain it is actually protective against dementia. A recent study reported that even when study participants were sleeping but the quality was decreased (meaning they weren’t cycling through the really healthy sleep patterns that include alpha brain waves) than they had a five times increased risk of dementia. Five times higher dementia risk!
And it’s really not about the length of time spent sleeping, because in that study, many of the participants who had the longest time in bed actually had the poorest sleep quality. Even though they might be lying in bed for 10 hours it didn’t increase the time that they spent in those relaxing brain waves patterns.
Your melatonin level naturally decreases as you age, so it’s very natural for your sleep quality to actually go down as you get older. Poor sleep becomes more and more common with age.
While you absolutely can supplement with high quality melatonin, you can also directly ground to the earth daily, because then you’re directly linking your central nervous system activity to the calming, centering, healing benefits of the earth’s electrical activity. And you can actually do both — supplement your melatonin levels as well as sleep grounded, at the same time, for synergistic sleep benefits.
Another reason that your brain really needs that deep sleep is to maintain your ideal healthy weight.
A recent medical study showed that people who were sleep deprived gained weight. The sleep deprived participants didn’t lose weight, and they didn’t just stay at the same weight, they actually gained weight nine times faster than the people in the study who slept well. Nine times faster!
I consider grounding a great way to prevent weight gain as you get older, and much of these effects are likely to be from a lifetime of deepened sleep. I have personally conducted my own grounding and weight loss studies and found that even with absolutely no change to diet or exercise, my grounded patients lost weight simply by grounding outside for 15 minutes or more every day.
Click over here to watch a video where I explain in detail about that study and why grounding will help promote a healthy weight by boosting your metabolism.
Grounding is a great way to maintain an ideal weight, to prevent diabetes and metabolic syndrome and much more.
Another recent study looked specifically at grounding and mood. Researchers followed 40 patients in a double-blind, placebo-controlled study. Twenty patients were grounded for one hour and twenty thought they were grounded but were only sham-grounded. Every single grounded subject had a statistically significant improvement in their mood assessment while the ungrounded ones did not.
And I want you to know that even if you sleep grounded and you don’t notice that you fall asleep any faster and you don’t notice that you sleep any longer, what you do have is an increased quality of the sleep you are getting.
To your body, it’s like plugging into the most soothing, comforting heartbeat of the earth.
The earth resonates at the exact same frequency of the healing brain waves in the alpha state, the same brain waves as a person in deeply healing meditative states, the same brain waves we cycle through in stage 1 of sleep.
It’s called the Schumann frequency and it’s the frequency of the earth, it is the frequency of a healthy calm brain, and when we connect with the earth, we resonate with its healing pattern.
It’s how a baby feels when it hears the heartbeat of the mother when they are growing inside their mom’s body.
It’s like that for us because we’re then connected directly back again to the heartbeat of mother earth.
That energy that she pulses out at the same frequency that our brain needs to be in to restore and heal.
Our brain needs to be in that frequency to repair.
Our brain needs to be bathed in that frequency in order for us to be in the mode of well-being.
There’s no way to move forward with poor sleep. Study after study has shown that a lack of sleep does everything from causing weight gain, to shortening our lifespan (click over here for me to tell you more about that incredibly important medical study,) to increasing the risk of dementia.
There’s no way around it.
You have to get good quality sleep. And grounding can help you do that. You might not have the luxury of sleeping longer, but you can make the sleep you do get be of the very highest quality.
Take time to head outside and connect with the earth every single day, striving for 30 minutes a day but knowing that any amount of time is better than none.
And if you can’t fit in time to ground outside during the day, at least get grounded sleep.
If you are interested in sleeping grounded, I have developed the only eco-friendly, organic, hand sewn, USA made, artisan grounding tools in the world, and they are waiting for you right here.
Other grounding tools are made overseas in factories out of the cheapest possible materials. Leatherette? Yeah that’s just vinyl that will sit in a landfill for 500+ years. Silver fibers running through cheap polyester? That synthetic fabric don’t biodegrade either and will be sitting right next to the leatherette in your landfill.
How’s that for treating Mother Earth?
I figure if we are reaching out to the earth for healing support, we probably should be using eco-friendly materials when we do.
Eco-friendly for people, eco-friendly for the planet.
Why would you ground any other way?
Then meet me back here next week as we look into the benefits of grounding on your heart and entire circulatory system!
xoxoxo, Laura