Now that Labor Day is over and it’s back to work, I thought I’d write up an article about grounding in the workplace. If you are not sure what grounding is, I bet you know how it feels. If you have ever felt the relief of walking on the beach or spending an afternoon gardening, then you already know how supportive grounding can be and how it can help mitigate stress.
Especially at work, especially when you are putting in hour after hour in artificial light, you are likely to feel disconnected from the natural rhythm of the earth. It’s super common for folks who work indoors to have sleep issues because of this disconnect. In fact, we need time in contact with our planet because this is what helps us feel oriented to not only our day/night rhythm but our seasonal rhythm as well, it helps us think more clearly, and it also helps us keep our brains healthy.
Click to read any of these articles I wrote for you for more on how grounding can help boost your focus and re-orient you to a healthy day/night pattern:
- Why Grounding Works, No Matter Where You Live In The World
- The Real Reason Grounding Works: The Healing Power of the Earth, Finally Explained
- Why You Think More Clearly When You Spend Time Outside
- A Super Easy Way To Support Your Brain Health That You Can Do Right Now
So if you are feeling disconnected, uninspired, absent minded, brain fog creeping in or insomnia taking over, consider adding grounding into your daily health routines.
Luckily, you can connect to the healing energy of the earth even if you are indoors, even if you are working at a desk, even if you are pulling an all nighter at your computer. Indoor grounding tools use a special ground cord to make sure your beautiful, conductive body does not need to be disconnected from our beautiful, conductive earth.
Here are my top 10 favorite reasons why grounding at work might be the best thing you ever do to maintain long term health:
10 Reasons To Get Grounded At Work:
1. Grounding Boosts Your Mood:
Feeling grumpy at work? A study published in Lancet Psychiatry on May 10, 2018, suggests that occupation alone might cause as many as one out of every 7 new cases of depression, anxiety, and other common mental disorders. A job that requires high intensity, a job that moves at a fast pace, a job that has high risk, a job that gives you very little control over your duties, and/or a job that doesn’t allow you to make your own decisions were all factors that contributed to the mental strain a job can bring.
If you are thinking… yes my job is stressful but I really love it, it’s not enough. Even a very high job satisfaction was not protective of the strain that job stress can put on mental health. Although ideally we would all have meaningful, soul satisfying jobs, even those can actually still be toxic, stressful, high paced, and put us at high risk for mental illness. And let’s face it, many times jobs simply are not in the slightest bit soul fulfilling at all and yet still are so stressful that they raise mental illness diagnosis, all for a job you don’t even enjoy. But there are ways to help protect yourself and your mental state. You might like some of the tips I share with you in this article I wrote a few years ago:
Grounding to the rescue. In a study on grounding and mood, researchers followed 40 patients in a double-blind, placebo-controlled study. The results of this double blind medical study were published in Psychological Reports in 2015 , and what researchers found was that participants who were grounded had measurable improvements in mood that were significantly higher than the sham-grounded participants. Every single grounded subject had a measurable improvement in their mood assessment while the ungrounded ones did not.
Grounding is the most natural way I know of to boost your mood, keeping your workday flowing and your outlook brighter.
2. Grounding Decreases Stress:
When you are stressed, your muscles become tense, your heart rate is elevated, circulation is constricted, your digestion shuts down, your adrenaline & cortisol surge and your sleep is disrupted. Long term this leads to pain from muscle tension (and often chronic pain conditions such as chronic tension headaches, tooth grinding, TMJ, restless leg syndrome, fibromyalgia and other pain syndromes) as well as 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 and more.
Getting grounded immediately begins to get you out of “fight or flight”mode and calms you, improving vagal tone, deepening breathing and oxygenation, decreasing cortisol output and more. Medical studies back this us. For example, 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. 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 in your body… no drugs necessary!
More on that here:
3. Grounding Protects Your Heart:
From increasing our heart rate variability (the key to the health and resiliency of your heart function) to increasing the circulatory perfusion of our capillaries (the key to getting oxygen and nutrients to all the organs in your body, including your brain!) to decreasing the risk of blood clots (which reduces our risk of heart attack and stroke,) the earth is essential to keeping your cardiovascular system functioning well.
A low heart rate variability (HRV) actually has been shown to decrease lifespan. It’s 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. And you guessed it, grounding improves your HRV in clinically meaningful ways.
One study, published in Integrative Medicine in 2011 , found significant improvements in HRV during grounding. This was followed by a double blinded medical study, published in the Open Journal of Preventive Medicine in 2015 , where participants who were grounded for 40 minutes during strenuous yoga exercises universally had their HRV increased, and this change was statistically significant with every single participant.
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. Published in Neonatology in 2017, researchers found grounding boosted markers of survival, including HRV for these neonatal infants, confirming the results found in the original study on adults.
In addition, published in 2018 in Alternative Therapies , grounding was found to normalize high blood pressure, with an average decrease in blood pressure of 14%. And another very important medical study, published in 2013 in the Journal of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine , shows that grounding for only 2 hours significantly reduced clotting risk, by decreasing the zeta potential on red blood cells and making them flow through the circulatory system of the body more smoothly. The zeta potential of the red blood cells were boosted by an average of 270%. This in turn increased the average blood velocity of the patients by 260%. In addition, grounding significantly decreased red blood cell aggregation, dramatically dropping the number of red blood cells that clumped together in groups of 4 or more by more than half. This suggests that the risk of developing a serious blood clot may be decreased dramatically with routine grounding practices.
4. Grounding Helps You Maintain a Healthy Weight:
Gaining weight (or losing weight) unintentionally is a common response to chronic or acute stress, much of which happens at work. Because grounding boosts your vagal tone (which supports the function of your entire digestive tract, from your esophagus to your colon and everything in between!) and boosts your basal metabolic rate it can help you lose weight naturally. Researchers found that grounding for just 40 minutes was enough to significantly boost your basal metabolic function (published in the Journal of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine in 2010 ) which means you burn more calories
at rest.
Grounding also helps support thyroid function and stabilizes blood sugar (published in The Journal of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine in 2011 ) so that you have less of an afternoon slump and don’t crash and grab that sugary or salty
afternoon snack to get you through your work day.
I ran an informal study with my own patients because I wondered if, by boosting our digestion and metabolism through touching the earth, we would see a change in weight over time, without any dieting or exercise. So I personally enrolled a dozen overweight patients into an informal private study on grounding and weight loss. I followed them for 10 weeks, measuring weight, energy, mood, sleep, and pain, with weekly weigh-ins and assessments. Their instructions were to ground to the earth for 15 minutes a day, and that was it. I told them not to change their diet at all, to eat everything they had eaten before in the same quantities and in the same fashion. I told them not to start new activities or to change their activity intensity at all. I wanted to see metabolic changes from short periods of daily grounding over time. Following those patients with weekly weigh-ins and weekly assessments was very, very interesting. What I found was that the majority of patients
lost a clinically significant amount of weight, 60% of them losing between 4 and 15 pounds in the 10 week study period doing nothing more then adding in daily grounding for just 15 minutes a day.
More on my clinical experience with grounding and weight loss here:
And more on how stress affects your weight, plus tips to help you lose it, here:
5. Grounding Helps Boost Your Focus:
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.
Imagine being as calm and centered at work as you are during meditation — this is the power of grounding, and you can bring that into your work place.
6. Grounding Keeps You Motivated:
In a very interesting study published May 2020 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, researchers found a direct correlation between inflammatory markers in the blood and motivation. Specifically, that inflammation lowers dopamine levels in the brain, which switches the brain from positive to negative thinking. As dopamine drops, you can go from feeling capable and motivated to feeling incapable and unmotivated.
Basically, inflammation gives you a motivational impairment, and prevents you from thinking optimistically as well as keeps you from accurately assessing what you are capable of. Even if you fully are capable of doing something, your brain will tell you that you are not. Your motivation tanks and your outlook dims as a result of chronic
inflammation.
We know with absolute clarity that grounding decreases whole body inflammation. 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. In addition, decreases in inflammation as a result of grounding are well documented using medical thermography imaging. And an overview of how grounding decreases whole body inflammation was also published June 2014 in the Journal of Inflammation Research.
We also know grounding specifically decreases the 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 were 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. By decreasing inflammatory cytokines, it’s likely that grounding gives a natural dopamine boost to the brain, which is how it can keep you motivated through a long work day. This powerful, natural anti-inflammatory effect is the mechanism of action behind the earth’s ability to elevate mood, boost energy, and brighten outlook.
You can read more about grounding and brain function in either of two recent articles I’ve published on grounding in these medical journals:
- Cerebrospinal Fluid and Brain Health: Optimized By Grounding
- Neurological Pathways Supported By Grounding
7. Grounding Boosts Oxygen and Blood To The Brain:
Published in 2010 in the Journal of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine , researchers showed that grounding for as little as 40 minutes boosted respiratory rate and stabilized blood oxygenation. And another study, published in 2011 in Integrative Medicine , shows that grounding is able to boost vagal tone and directly impact autonomic nervous system function, which has a direct impact on lung function. The vagal nerve not only impacts airway perfusion and secretion, it also directly impacts breathing pattern and even lung inflammation.
Grounding may be the easiest holistic therapy to directly support lung function and blood oxygenation that we know of. In fact, a study published in 2017 in Neonatology , found that grounding premature infants in the NICU boosted their vagal tone by almost 70%. Getting that fresh oxygen and nutrition to not only your brain, but throughout your entire body, can help give you an edge at work if you incorporate grounding into your daily habits.
In a double blinded medical study, published in The Journal of Cosmetics, Dermatological Sciences and Applications in 2017 , researchers measured blood flow changes during grounding. What they found was that within minutes, all the grounded
patients had significantly increased capillary blood flow in their facial skin, and the patients who were ungrounded had no change in their facial blood flow. This is a real, nearly instantaneous physiologic change in the circulatory system just from using an indoor grounding tool.
If you want to see the enhanced blood flow for yourself, I highly recommend that you watch the film Heal For Free — which you can watch right here on YouTube. In this film, you can see first hand how a patient’s blood flow in the back of their eye changes dramatically after grounding through the bottom of the foot, just like the patients in the study above. This is a really beautiful way to capture what’s happening in the capillaries because the blood flow in the back of the retina looks very similar under the imaging study as it does in your skin, and all through every organ in your body. The patient in this film had macular degenerative disease in the back of his eye, which is a disease that is usually irreversible, yet with grounding there was a significantly enhanced blood flow even to the damaged macula of his eye. The retinal specialist was in shock, having never seen increased blood flow like this before. And this response — of increased blood flow through capillaries while grounding — helps your entire body, including your brain, function at its best.
8. Grounding Can Decrease Aches and Pains:
When you touch the earth outside, your entire body is instantaneously grounded because your entire musculoskeletal system is conductive. The first medical study to reveal this (published in the Journal of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine in 2010) was a beautifully designed study that looked at what happens to a grounded body when muscles and tendons are pushed to their limit and are purposefully strained. It was a scientifically rigorous, double-blinded placebo-controlled study, in which patients carried one-third of their entire body weight in barbells on their shoulders and did repetitive toe
raises until their muscles were exhausted. Researchers measured laboratory parameters that included creatinine kinase, white blood cell counts and cortisol levels at baseline and at one, two and three days after this fatiguing trauma to the muscle, and found that grounding during exercise significantly reduced muscle soreness and
enhanced muscle recovery after exertion.
In another double-blinded, placebo-controlled study, published in the Open Journal of Preventive Medicine in 2015, researchers studied participants who performed strenuous yoga exercises for an hour straight — cycling through a series of 10 strenuous yoga exercises over and over again, while their blood viscosity was measured. Without fail every single ungrounded subject not only reported significantly more pain and a longer recovery time but they also had higher blood cortisol levels, higher creatinine kinase levels, and higher white blood cell counts. In contrast, every single grounded subject recovered faster after the muscle damage, not only reporting lower pain levels, but significantly lower blood cortisol levels (which means the grounded patients were less stressed from the injury), significantly lower creatinine kinase levels (meaning they had less muscle damage) and lower white blood cell counts. Another double blinded medical study, published in the Open Access Journal of Sports Medicine in 2015 , found the same muscle saving benefits when participants completed 200 knee bends, either grounded or sham grounded.
Does grounding help improve muscular function when you are not even exerting yourself, but just at baseline muscle tension? This type of muscle fatigue is very common in the work place, leading to tension headaches, muscle stiffness and muscle
soreness in the neck and back. And the answer is yes, grounding helps with that too.
Published in European Biology and Bioelectromagnetics in 2006 , researchers grounded participants and monitored their brainwaves through EEG imaging and their muscular tension through EMG monitors. The EMG (electromyogram) was placed on the trapezius muscle, which is the large triangular muscle spanning the upper back, shoulders and neck (the muscle that is involved in fibromyalgia, tension headaches, neck pain and more). The researchers then grounded the patients through a grounding patch on the sole of their foot, and instantly, with no discernible lag in time, their muscle tension decreased in the neck and shoulder area.
Grounding immediately reduces muscle tension — near instantaneously. 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:
And some other tips on supporting your musculoskeletal system here:
9. Grounding Helps Improve Your Sleep:
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 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.
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. Every single one. They had such a dramatic improvement in their sleep that not only did their sleep improved, but they reported feeling less stress and experienced less pain as well.
You can find more support to help you sleep in this article I wrote for you here:
10. Grounding Can Boost Immune Function:
There is a reason why students in school, inmates in prisons, and employees at work get sick more often, and that is because of communicable disease. Working in close proximity to others, often in an indoor environment, increases the amount of pathogens that you are exposed to, which increases your risk of picking up a cold, the flu, or other viral infections. Grounding may help decrease this risk by boosting your immune system function.
Published in 2011 in Randomized Controlled Trials , researchers found that grounding increased concentrations of immunoglobulins (α1, α2, β, and γ) which suggests that connecting to the earth accelerates the immune response and may have very real world applications in reducing communicable illness and enhancing the body’s response in
fighting infections.
Another study, published in 2015 in the Journal Of Inflammation Research , back this up, finding statistically significant and measurable changes in white blood cells, cytokines, lymphocytes and neutrophils, all crucial elements in the immune cascade. Less time spent feeling sick and run down? That’s a win, so you never have to use up a vacation day as a sick day ever again.
More on how grounding helps support your resiliency to viral infections here:
Hopefully this review can encourage you to give grounding at work a try. You are likely to find that you have more energy, more stamina, more motivation, less aches and pains, and may even sleep better at night by adding grounding into your daily work hours.
Want To Ground Outside?
I highly recommend getting outside whenever you can to get grounded directly to the earth. From eating lunch outside with feet on the ground to taking a very quick break to step out and touch a leaf on a tree or bush, grounding for even a few minutes will reap health benefits.
If you work in an urban setting and want to see dozens of ways to get grounded even in the middle of a large city, I created this video for you.
For more ideas on how to fit grounding into your busy work day, you might find both of these articles I wrote for you helpful:
- 7 Quick Ways The Earth Can Reset Your Mood Whenever You Need It
- How Grounding Boosts Your Mood + 10 Ways It Fits Into Your Day Today
If you prefer books, I wrote a book listing hundreds of ways to go outside and get grounded.
That’s because just like brushing your teeth or wearing a seatbelt, grounding is another one of those non-negotiable health care practices. So I’ve got you.
I wrote The Earth Prescription to tell you about how to get outside not matter what the season, no matter what the weather, no matter what the location, no matter if you have green spaces outside or not, no matter if you have 5 minutes or 5 hours to ground, urban settings, winter temperatures, no matter what the circumstance.
It’s an easy, uplifting read filled with tons of easily actionable ways to stay connected to our planet and boost your health during 2022 and beyond.
Order signed copies directly from me right here, or find it anywhere books are sold:
Want To Ground Inside Your Workplace?
If you’d like to try an indoor grounding tool at work, I recommend eco-friendly, ethically made grounding tools. Grounding tools made from natural fibers that don’t harm the earth like plastic “leatherette” items that will sit in a landfill for 500+ years.
I could not find any reliable source of eco-friendly grounding tools on the market, so I created my own. I have custom made, individually hand sewn, boutique quality grounding tools made locally right here in the USA using eco friendly, environmentally conscious materials like hemp and organic cotton, and superior quality conductive elements like stainless steel:
Eco-Ethically Hand Crafted Grounding Tools
In my opinion, these are the longest lasting, most eco-friendly and non-toxic grounding tools on the planet, I even ship them with non-toxic, biodegradable packaging. Healthy for you, healthy for the earth! You might find this article helpful in guiding you which tool to select:
Another Tip For Indoor Grounding
If you suspect you are electrosensitive, you may feel better using a PureGround grounding cord instead of a standard ground cord if you are grounding at work. That’s because in a work environment there is likely to be electrical fields present where you are grounding.
Although these electrical fields impact your health even when you are not grounded, many folks can not feel them until they get grounded. That’s because when you ground in electrical fields there is a very small amount of AC current that can reach you through a standard ground cord.
Although your body is still in a grounded healing state, you may feel this minuscule amount of AC current exposure — this is exactly why electrosensitive individuals may feel tingling or other sensations while grounding in an electrical field.
For more on this, read either of these articles I wrote for you:
- Is It Safe To Get Grounded Around EMFs?
- The Secret Behind A “Grounding Detox” — What Your Symptoms Are Really Telling You
The solution to this is simply to switch to an electrosensitive cord that filters out the AC current, so that nothing but the earth’s energy — the natural DC energy of the earth’s electron flow — can reach you.
This cord is called the PureGround grounding cord and is available here.
Now that Labor Day is over and we are in for a fall and winter full of artificial lights and workplace stress, I hope these tips helped you consider prioritizing getting grounded even as the world gets colder, and even at work.
Next I will be blogging about ways to stay grounded even going outside in the cold this fall and winter (think grounding gloves, grounding hiking sticks, grounding shoe stickers and much much more) as well as an article on the 10 things I do each fall to boost my health before winter arrives.
So if someone forwarded you this email, make sure you are signed up for my newsletter so you will get these next holistic health article directly into your inbox and don’t miss a thing:
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xoxox,
Laura Koniver MD