Winter is literally designed to ensure you repair your sleep. Any sleep deficit you build up over the course of the year gets this one, perfect chance to be eliminated. The entire world grows darker, your body is gearing for hibernation, and fixing any sleep issues, getting back into a health day/night pattern, is exactly what you need to emerge this spring feeling better than ever.
Most people believe that our circadian 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. Which is so important to understand because in the winter, it’s not as important if you get that bright sunlight on your face as it is that you keep grounding to the earth.
I created a video to walk you through this, what the medical literature has to say about grounding and circadian rhythm, I hope you enjoy it and don’t let one day of this upcoming winter go by where you are not fixing your sleep deficit and deeply restoring your health.
Grounding & Circadian Rhythm:
Grounding & Circadian Rhythm (click to watch on YouTube)
How do we know the earth is every bit as important as the sun in helping us sleep well at night?
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. They also found that every single test subject that became unsynchronized was in the bunker that was completely shielded from the earth’s energies — every single one of them — and no one from the sun-only shielded bunker became unsynchronized like this.
Researchers then experimented with introducing different electrical and magnetic fields into the shielded bunkers, and only one restored normal sleep/wake patterns… you guessed it, the one that is our 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. So then researchers began to study the effect that grounding has on supporting sleep. 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. Here is what they look like, dancing in concert with each other:
The bottom line:
Sun exposure regulates melatonin
Earth exposure regulates cortisol
You can take high quality melatonin supplements (in addition to getting AM sun exposure, or using a light box each morning, plus wearing blue light blocking glasses after 6 pm each evening) and for regulating cortisol, the good news is that 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.
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. It also decreases muscle tension immediately, helping relax you into sleep more easily as well as decreasing symptoms of restless leg syndrome, grinding of the teeth, and other issues with muscle tension interrupting sleep at night.
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.
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. And be sure to 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, truly. Hop over here to read through all of the medical studies on grounding that show benefit based on how long you are grounded:
For example, one study published in Healthcare in 2022, found that Alzheimer’s Dementia who slept grounded significantly improved their sleep quality by an average of 62%. And you can actually do both — boost melatonin by supplementing your melatonin levels, and normalize your cortisol by sleeping grounded, for synergistic sleep benefits.
To your body, grounding is like plugging into the most soothing, comforting heartbeat of the earth. As you plug back into the earth’s global electrical circuit, you become an open flowing part of this DC energy circuit, not a closed container, and you feel yourself come back into balance.
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, and meanwhile the silver fibers in the polyester are the most minimal percentage possible to still ground the fabric, and they stop working quickly as they wear and tear easily. so those sheets head to the landfill even faster.
How’s that for treating Mother Earth? Not so great. I figure if we are reaching out to the earth for healing support, we probably should be using eco-friendly materials when we do. I have them in my Grounding Boutique right here:
Eco-friendly for people, eco-friendly for the planet.
xoxoxo,
Laura Koniver MD
