Have you heard of ‘grounding’ or ‘earthing’? What it is and why it’s getting attention.
- Earthing (or grounding) is the practice of placing your bare feet on the ground for health purposes.
- Being barefoot can help your body absorb Earth’s electrons and in theory offers health benefits.
- People who practice earthing say they have found both physical and mental health benefits.
Jeannie Sindicic remembers being just 4 or 5 years old when she would feel a sense of calm and belonging by simply planting her bare feet on the Earth.
“I loved being barefoot. Anytime I was barefoot – walking on soil, walking on grass – it made me personally feel at a very young age very connected to Mother Earth,” she says, recalling how her grandmother would tell her anytime you’re barefoot on the ground you’re “vibrating with the natural frequency of the earth and the benefits of what that was.”
It wasn’t until much later that Sindicic, now an intuitive life coach based in the Midwest, learned the name for this very practice: Earthing.
“We would call it grounding,” she says, another term people still use for it today.
And she is far from alone.
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Earthing, or grounding, is a practice that has likely existed in certain communities for generations even if there wasn’t an exact label for it. Now, thanks to an interest in natural healing and further discoveries in this area, the practice is gaining more attention. On social media platforms like TikTok, the hashtag #earthing has more than 66 million views and #grounding has 199 million. The 2019 documentary “The Earthing Movie: The Remarkable Science of Grounding” has 4.6 million views on YouTube.
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While Ober is credited as discovering earthing and bringing it to the masses through his work, he acknowledges the act of connecting to the ground in this way is not something he necessarily invented. Instead, he was inspired from his knowledge of electrical stability in the communications industry as a retired pioneer of the American cable TV industry and his childhood growing up near Native American communities.
He recalls one time being at the home of a Native American friend whose mom told them to take off their shoes.
“They’ll make you sick,” he recalls her saying, a concept that stuck with him as he later began thinking about the potential consequences of people no longer being naturally grounded to the Earth with the invention and use of rubber or synthetic soled shoes.
According to an article shared on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences website, Sicangu and Oglala Lakota author and educator Luther Standing Bear, writing in the 1930s, noted: “The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth … The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing.”
USA TODAY has reached out to Native women-led organization IllumiNative for comment.
What benefits can ‘earthing’ provide?
Once Ober started playing around with the idea of electrical charges in the home, body and ground, he started to note the “very apparent” effects he found, including improved sleep and reduced body pain.
Now 78, he says he stays grounded about 80% to 90% of the time with both outdoor grounding as well as tools he’s helped develop that allow people to ground from indoors through grounding rods and says he doesn’t suffer from any inflammation-related health disorders.
There is plenty of research on the benefits nature can have on someone’s mental health, but less on earthing specifically, especially in terms of physical health.
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In a study published in 2012, researchers found “emerging evidence shows that contact with the Earth – whether being outside barefoot or indoors connected to grounded conductive systems – may be a simple, natural and yet profoundly effective environmental strategy against chronic stress, ANS dysfunction, inflammation, pain, poor sleep, disturbed HRV, hypercoagulable blood, and many common health disorders, including cardiovascular disease.”
Critics argue there are too few studies and not sufficient evidence to support these claims, pointing to a potential placebo effect that makes it difficult to validate from a scientific point-of-view.
“Unfortunately, we probably won’t have the type of robust randomized-control trials on earthing that we would have for other medical and wellness interventions, but that doesn’t mean there’s no benefit,” says Dr. Michael Daignault, an emergency room doctor based in Los Angeles and USA TODAY medical columnist.
But for those like Sindicic who practice earthing, she tells skeptics to look at what the soil can provide for proof.
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