How Grounding Decreases Your Anxiety Immediately & Keeps It Down Long Term

I’ve been anxious my entire life.  I can’t remember a day when I did not wake up with a huge knot in my stomach that felt like death was gripped my solar plexus and sneered up at me.

Unfortunately the medical literature is pretty clear — anxiety has major health effects, but it’s equally clear that those deleterious health effects are actually reversible.  Meaning, if you suffer from anxiety, it’s very worth addressing, not just for the relief on a daily basis but also for the longevity benefits.

Published February 5, 2015 in the British Journal of Psychiatry, researchers found that anxiety increases the rate of aging and that treating anxiety helps reverse the aging process!  Telomeres are complexes of DNA that cap the ends of your chromosomes.  They shorten with age… so the length of your telomeres are considered a direct indicator of cellular and biological aging. Telomere shortening is accelerated when the aging process is accelerated.  This has been shown in other disorders such as depression, stress, increased cortisol levels, oxidative stress, higher levels of inflammation and now… anxiety conditions.

The study looked at 1283 patients with active anxiety disorders, 459 patients with a resolved anxiety disorder, and 582 control patients with no psychiatric disorders… over 2,300 patients total.  Telomere length typically shortens by about 14 base pairs a year.  Looking at telemeter length relative to chronological age, accelerated aging was found in all anxiety disorders including social phobias, agoraphobia, panic disorder and generalized anxiety disorders (GAD).  Even after controlling for sex, weight, health, lifestyle factors, smoking, drinking, etc… patients with active anxiety disorders had significantly shorter telomeres than those without anxiety (by 75 base pairs on average — over 5 years!)

But, here is the important part!  The good news is that participants who had their anxiety disorder adequately treated had telomere length almost the same length as their non-anxious counterparts… only a 7 telomere difference (about a 6 month difference.)  This shows the incredible resilience of our body to stress, disease and trauma.  After the anxiety was alleviated, telomere length returned to almost the exact length that non-anxious patients had!  And the longer the patient has been anxiety free, the closer it was in telomere length to those who had no history at all of any anxiety disorder.

Just as it is never too late to stop smoking, because there are immediate health benefits as the body quickly starts to repair, it is never too late to address anxiety, as the body is fully capable of reversing the aging effects of anxiety on our DNA.

 

 

Today, as someone who very much knows the felt sense of existential anxiety haunting me day in and day out, and someone who reaches for grounding to effectively help cope with this, I’d like to give you ten reasons why touching the earth should be included in your anxiety treatment plan.

Let’s run through all the ways that grounding can help with decreasing your anxiety to boost your health.

10 Ways Grounding Decreases Your Anxiety:

1.  Grounding instantly regulates heart and respiratory rate:

The next time you feel a panic attack starting, try going outside and touching the earth directly — through a fingertip, a toe, or even (my favorite when I’m feeling particularly overwhelmed with anxiety) your forehead, resting on the earth in child’s pose (as I’m showing you above) or leaning your full weight against a tree, letting it support you while you rest your face directly on it.

Thanks to immediate vagal tone support, you should feel your parasympathetic nervous system kicking in and calming your heart and respiratory rate, improving oxygenation, and smoothing out your digestion (reducing any nausea and abdominal pain that comes along with severe anxiety.)  And as we will talk about below, it will also begin to lower your blood pressure, shift your brain waves into a more calm brain wave pattern, lower muscle tension and many many other ways to reduce the total burden of anxiety you are feeling.

• Published in 2010 in the Journal of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine, researchers found that grounding for as little as 40 minutes stabilized blood oxygenation.
• And another study, published in 2011 in Integrative Medicine , shows that grounding is able to boost vagal tone and directly support healthy autonomic nervous system function.
• A medical review, published in 2012 in the Journal of Environmental and Public Health, reviews multiple medical studies that demonstrate how grounding provides a significant reduction in autonomic nervous system stress.
• A double blinded medical study published in the Open Journal of Preventive Medicine in 2015 found that grounding universally increased HRV (a marker of vagal tone) and this change was statistically significant with every single participant.
• And this study, published in 2017 in Neonatology , found that grounding premature infants in the NICU boosted their vagal tone by almost 70%.

2.  Grounding lowers blood pressure:

When you feel anxiety taking hold, your heard rate inching up and your blood pressure increasing as you transition into a fight-or-flight state, grounding can really help.  Not only will it start shifting you back into rest-and-digest mode, but routine use of grounding can help lower your blood pressure and keep it lowered.

Published in 2018 in Alternative Therapies. grounding was found to normalize high blood pressure, significantly reducing blood pressure for all participants in the study, with an average decrease in systolic pressure of 14%.

3.  Grounding loosens that knot in your stomach:

… or the heartburn or the irritable bowel symptoms or the feeling of wanting to throw up when you are anxious, all because of that vagal tone boost we talked about at the beginning of this article.  Grounding eases you back into rest and digest, out of fight and flight mode.

In fact, grounding was the one thing that immediately took my nausea away when I was recovering from having a tonsil abscess surgically repaired and really did not want to vomit, as my throat was in so much pain already.  I basically laid on the ground in my front yard for three days straight until the surgical wound had healed enough that vomitting would not cause it to start bleeding again.  Laying on the earth, I had no nausea and very little pain.  Every time I tried to go inside my home to rest, the nausea immediately returned.

The reason grounding helps soothe your digestive tract and keep it functioning at peak is because of that vagal tone boost — the vagus nerve innervates your entire digestive tract from you swallowing the food to all your the digestive organs — when you are anxious or stressed and in fight or flight mode, the vagus nerve gets shut down and so does your digestive tract, leading to poorly digested food, inflammation of the entire GI tract, bloating, sensitive stomach and more.  Supporting vagal function, getting you out of fight-or flight and back into rest & digest means your GI symptoms ease as you digestive tract function improves.

For more information on how grounding supports digestion (and for a video where I talk you through why you may want to consider grounding while you eat) hop over to this free article I wrote for you:

• Grounding While You Eat, A Game Changer For Your Digestion

Give it a try — read that article for suggestions on combining eating with grounding and see for yourself!

4.  Grounding releases muscle tension immediately

When you touch the earth outside, your entire body is instantaneously grounded because your entire musculoskeletal system is conductive — every muscle fiber, every tendon, every ligament, all the connective tissue, every joint and fluid in each joints — even your bones become grounded immediately.  This all leads to a near instantaneous effect of relaxing your muscles — decreasing muscle tension, muscle inflammation, muscle soreness, often capable of loosening trigger points in your neck and shoulders and stopping a tension headache in it’s tracks.

• Published in European Biology and Bioelectromagnetics in 2006, researchers found that grounding test subjects through the feet immediately and significantly reduced muscle tension in the neck and shoulder area.
• Another study, published in the Journal of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine in 2010, found that grounding patients who carried one-third of their entire body weight in barbells on their shoulders and did repetitive toe raises until their muscles were exhausted had significantly reduced muscle soreness and enhanced muscle recovery after exertion compared to ungrounded controls.
• Another study published in the Open Journal of Preventive Medicine in 2015 found that grounded subjects not only reported lower pain levels after a muscle loading challenge, but significantly lower blood cortisol levels (which means the grounded patients were less stressed from the injury) and significantly lower creatinine kinase levels (meaning they had less muscle damage.)
• Another double blinded medical study, published in the Open Access Journal of Sports Medicine in 2015 , found the same muscle sparing benefits when participants completed 200 knee bends, either grounded or sham grounded.
• And this grounding study published in 2019 in Frontiers in Physiology, where researchers found decreased muscle damage and improved muscle recovery when test subjects were grounded on a downhill stress test challenge as opposed to ungrounded control subjects. 

When you connect with the earth, your entire body is instantaneously grounded precisely because your entire musculoskeletal system is conductive — think of it as a conductive system that runs grounding instantly throughout your entire body, as easy as flipping a switch.  You can read more about grounding and musculoskeletal support here:

• Feel Immediate Relief With Grounding: Relax Your Muscles, Strengthen Your Bones

And some other tips on supporting your musculoskeletal system here:

• Why Your Fascia Is Your Best Friend + 3 Ways To Support It For A Lifetime

5.  Grounding calms your brain immediately

Connecting our electrically based central nervous system to the electrical output of the earth makes an immediate impact on how the human brain functions, which makes sense considering the human brain has been evolving for over 7 million years in cohesion with the earth’s electrical field.  Getting into the relaxed but alert alpha brain wave pattern, which is seen in calm, alert meditative states, is one of the hallmarks of grounding. Grounding allows us to feel calm and alert during waking hours, which can be incredibly helpful in a work environment where stress runs the day.

One study, published 2006 in European Biology and Bioelectricmagnetics monitored patient’s brain waves on EEG and noted an immediate shift of the central nervous system upon grounding.

And another study, published in 2011 in Medical Hypotheses , also found that grounding “significantly influences the electrical activity of the brain” on neuroimaging studies.

You can read a really good overview I published:

• Cerebrospinal Fluid and Brain Health: Optimized By Grounding, Laura Koniver MD
• Neurological Pathways Supported By Grounding, Laura Koniver MD

6.  Grounding improves mood

We’ve know for a long time (and honestly common sense and personal experience tells you this as well) that time spent outside lifts your spirits.  In fact a double blind medical study published in 2015 found that participants who were grounded had measurable improvements in mood that were significantly higher than the sham-grounded participants.

We also know that inflammation in the body worsens mood and even plays a role in clinical depression.  A medical study published in 2016 found that increased inflammation in the body worsens symptoms of clinical depression, and this one published in 2019 backs those findings up.  Researchers found that higher levels of blood markers of inflammation were found to be directly correlated with a variety of depressive symptoms, including sleep difficulty, decreased energy levels, decreased motivation and change in appetite.  And in this study, published May 2020 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, researchers found that inflammation lowers dopamine levels in the brain, that switches the brain from positive to negative thinking.

In a study published in 2009 in The Journal of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine, researchers found that grounded subjects had statistically significant decreases in blood markers of inflammation compared to non-grounded subjects.  We also know grounding specifically decreases the exact same inflammatory cytokines that have a direct impact on our dopamine levels. In this important study, published January 2019 in Frontiers in Physiology, researchers found that cytokines such as such as IP-10, MIP-1α, and sP-Selectin, all decreased in grounded subjects, compared to non-grounded controls. The average drop induced by grounding a patient was a 10 — 20% drop in inflammatory cytokine concentration.

And because of the newest research showing that inflammatory cytokines have a direct reflection in our mood and motivation levels, we can see a potential direct explanation for why grounding boosts mood. By decreasing inflammatory cytokines, it’s reasonable to suggest that grounding gives a natural dopamine boost to the brain.

This study, published in 2014, found that if you decrease inflammation, you can actually help more effectively treat depression. Researchers reviewed 14 randomized, placebo-controlled studies looking at over 6,300 patients and found that adding anti-inflammatory medications to a treatment plan helped to lessen depressive symptoms and resolve depressive episodes better than placebo alone and better than anti-depressants alone. This study, published in 2016, further confirmed these results.

The link between depression and inflammation is so concrete now that I feel no one should be treated for depression without also being treated for inflammation. Physicians should incorporate a medical evaluation for inflammation alongside any work up for depression or mood disorders, because inflammation from stress, poor sleep, infection, illness, diet, EMF exposures, total body burden of toxic exposures, etc… can all cause inflammation that contributes to depression.

By addressing inflammation along with depression you actually can help resolve depression more effectively.

7.  Grounding helps boost mental clarity

If you tend to ruminate or have intrusive thoughts when you are anxious, grounding is a great way to reorient you into the current moment and boost your cognitive clarity, all on top of improving mood. Imagine being as calm and centered as you are during meditation, even without meditating — this is the power of grounding, to help to center you.

The electrical output of the earth — the Schumann Resonance — acts as a globally available synchronization system to our brains, as discussed in articles like this one, published in 2003 in Medical Hypotheses.)  So in 2015, researchers used EEGs and Schuman Resonance frequencies to evaluate this interaction between our human brains and the earth’s electrical field.  Published in the Journal Of Signal and Information Processing, these scientists found that electrical activity from the earth makes a measurable synchronization in our cerebral cortex that allows for real-time coupling between the Schumann resonance and cerebral activity. 

The researchers postulate this activity is the exact amount of time, length of time, amplitude of signaling, and frequency of time required for a “ping” from the planet to our human brains to occur.   Researchers found that the frequency of this brain ping is once every 30 seconds, which is the brain’s short term memory decay time, indicating that the earth provides perfectly timed “micro-guidance”, re-orienting us in a subtle way that provides meaning and clarity but not long enough as to disrupt cognitive thought as we navigate daily life.

The duration of coherence was long enough to give rise to the possibility that the earth itself may send electrical signaling, or electrical information our brain, just long enough to allow an intuitive insight, or a flash of understanding to occur, but not long enough to disrupt our stream of consciousness. In other words, it’s possible that the earth boosts our ability to receive orienting information without disrupting cognition.  

Even more exciting, the highest cohesion between the earth’s Schumnn Resonance and our human brains is in the parahippocampal gyrus of the brain’s cerebral cortex — this in an area of the brain that provides spatial awareness and navigation.  Research into the parahippocampal gyrus of the brain utilizing fMRI has found that brain damage to that area of the cortex results in patients being able to generically identify images and items that are viewed, but not be able to meaningfully interpret these images. 

Victims of stroke or other damage to the parahippocampal areas of the brain have a feeling of being lost, disconnected, or un-anchored from the deeper meaning of visual cues and lose purposeful and relevant life navigational tools.   This area of the brain is also a highly sensitive early indicator of Alzheimers disease, showing signs of atrophy prior to other areas of the brain showing changes.

For example, if you have damage or atrophy in your parahippocampal gyrus, you may recognize that a person is standing in front of you, but not know that it is actually your own child.  Or you may recognize that there is a car parked in front of you, but not know it is actually your car.

The parahypocamppal gyrus is responsible for accurate and meaningful interpretation of our surroundings, our environment, and for support in making life decisions in a contextually appropriate way.   This gives a very real explanation for why time spent in nature, on the earth, grounded, helps to give rise to a feeling of centeredness, helps to give a deeper perspective on our personal life’s journey, and may even help open our subconscious up to reframing and refocusing our life’s meaning through these environmental “pings” from our planet.  

Have you ever spent time in nature when you are mulling over a big life decision, or feeling distraught, overwhelmed or confused, and then you suddenly have a deeper insight, a gut feeling, a pull, or an intuition that provides greater clarity?  These studies suggest a direct pathway for the earth to enhance and support our not only our daily decision making, but also connect to our deeper understanding and even our intuitive capabilities through earth-to-brain coherence.

I think of grounding as hitting a reset button, a chance for a pause that brings clarity into focus.  By connecting with the earth, we can shift the brain from high strung beta waves to calming alpha wave patterns, decrease inflammation to help improve mood, even possibly help provide greater clarity or boost intuitive navigation in our lives, all naturally. 

More on this here:

• Why You Think More Clearly When You Spend Time Outside

8.  Grounding reduces over all brain stress

Beyond improving mood and boosting mental clarity, grounding has also been found to directly decrease over all brain stress and boost cognitive function.  Published in 2024 in The Korean Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology, researchers followed three groups of participants for 12 weeks to determine if walking barefoot outside for 40 minutes in the morning, four times a week, had any impact on their cognition compared to controls.

Using an EEG to record brain wave patterns before and immediately following the 12 weeks, participants were asked a series of questions and performed tasks to examine spatial perception, memory, cognitive speed, concentration, and levels of brain stress.

Researchers found that only the barefoot group showed significantly boosted alpha waves and significantly decreased beta waves, and they found that this translated cognitively into a significant increase in cognitive speed and concentration along with a significant decrease in brain stress. The control group that did the same walking activity but wore sneakers the entire time, had no significant change in any of the mental performance tasks. The researchers conclude that barefoot walking activated cognitive ability, particularly in information processing and complex reasoning, while simultaneously reducing mental stress and brain fatigue.

You can read more about grounding and cognitive brain function in this recent article I’ve published:

• Could Grounding Improve Cognition?  Laura Koniver MD

9.  Grounding reduces over all body stress

When you are anxious and stressed, your muscles become tense, your heart rate is elevated, circulation is constricted, your digestion shuts down, your adrenaline and cortisol surge, and your sleep is disrupted.  As we’ve already discussed, getting grounded immediately begins to transition you out of “fight or flight” mode and calms you, improving vagal tone, improving  oxygenation, decreasing cortisol output and more.

Acute stress causes a physical reaction:

• your muscles become tense
• your heart rate is elevated and circulation is constricted
• your digestion shuts down and mouth gets dry
• your adrenaline & cortisol surge
• your sleep is disrupted

Long term this leads to:

• pain from muscle tension in the form of chronic tension headaches, tooth grinding & TMJ, restless leg syndrome, fibromyalgia and other pain syndromes
• heart disease, increased risk of heart attack and stroke
• inflammatory disorders of the gut, malabsorption, heartburn, reflux, irritable bowel
• an increased risk of autoimmune disorders
• adrenal fatigue, circadian rhythm disturbance, sex hormone imbalance, even early menopause or menstrual irregularities
• insomnia, memory problems, structural brain changes

Grounding directly addresses these issues, providing you with:

• a near instantaneous decrease in muscle tension
• improved heart rate variability (HRV) and enhanced circulation
• boosted digestion and vagal tone
• decreased inflammation
• normalized cortisol levels
• and deeper, more restorative sleep

Grounding your body is at work here, decreasing your whole body inflammation, decreasing the stress hormones (like cortisol) in your bloodstream, even naturally reducing inflammation throughout your body.  One study published in 2004 in the Journal of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine found that grounded subjects had a complete normalization of their cortisol patterns, suggesting a profound recovery from stress.

Watch this quick 8 min video below to see exactly why grounding is in a unique position to erase stress from your physical tissues, and why I feel that grounding is an absolutely mandatory part of a trauma healing plan:

Trauma Recovery With Grounding (click to watch the video directly on YouTube)

Or read the details of these studies and watch that video, along with more free healing tips on how to release trauma from your body and improve your health, in a blog post I wrote for you here:

• How Grounding Mitigates Trauma And Protects Your Body From Long Term Stress

10.  Grounding improves sleep quality

Most people believe that our circadian (day/night) rhythm is dependent 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.

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 major 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 the sleep wake cycle of several hundred test subjects over a two month period of time, researchers 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 internally 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. Based off of this, 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.

A study on grounding and sleep published in the Journal Of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine in 2004 found that participants who had a history of sleep disturbances had completely normalized cortisol after grounding for just 8 weeks. They had such a dramatic improvement in their sleep that not only did their sleep improve, but they reported feeling less stress and experienced less pain as well.

Another study published in Healthcare in 2022 found that patients with Alzheimers Disease had significantly improved sleep quality (an average improvement of 62% on PSQI, Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index) after 12 weeks of sleeping grounded.  And because inflammation is now being linked with cognitive disorders such as mild cognitive impairment and dementia (including Alzheimers,) the long term effects of grounding to protect cognition may come from it’s ability to decrease inflammation and potentially decrease neuroinflammation over time.

You can find more support to help you sleep in this article I wrote for you here:

• 12 Things To Do Throughout The Day Today, To Improve Your Sleep Tonight

Over all, grounding can help protect your longevity

One of the reasons we want to treat anxiety in the first place is because that alone will help decrease your rate of aging and even reverse telomere shortening.

But there are lots of other ways, beyond treating anxiety, that grounding helps protect your longevity.  I run you through them in this free healing article (along with a free video where I talk you directly through them) right over here:

The Immense Anti-Aging Benefits Of Simply Touching The Earth

Or you can just watch the video right here, right now:

I hope all of these medical studies and resources help you feel inspired to include grounding in your anxiety relief plan.  From touching the earth outside immediately when you feel a panic attack coming on, to sleeping grounded nightly to treat long term anxiety and boost restorative sleep, to eating one meal a day outside grounded to release that knot in your stomach, to stepping outside to touch a tree to release muscle tension on your lunch break during a tense day at work, there are lots of ways grounding can help calm and center your body and mind.  Feel free to share these resources with others who suffer from anxiety and anxiety related health issues.

Questions for me?

Join my next live Q&A session right here — in it, we spend about 20 minutes together relieving anxiety with gentle body stretches and grounded mindful meditation, then I host a 40 minute live Q&A to answer all of your questions personally.

I’d love to see you there.  Join me by signing up here:

Dr. Koniver’s Live Monthly Q&A

xoxox,

Laura Koniver MD