Why I stopped Grounding

tl;dr: Tried for 3-4 months and it didn't do anything

man, grounding

If you hang around alternative health Twitter long enough, you’ll soon encounter all sorts of theories and factors people worry about. Here are just a few:

• PUFAs

• Protein

• Gluten

• Animal foods

• Microplastics

• Nanoplastics

• Aluminum

• Plant foods (they’re trying to kill you!)

• Oxalates

• Niacin

• Vitamin A

• Vitamin D

• Carbs

• Fructose

• Blue light/red light

• Deuterium (I had to look up what that is)

• Seasonality

• Sauna

• Ice baths

• Electrical grounding

One of these that kept coming up was grounding.

What is grounding?

Grounding refers to the electrical current in any given object having a path back to the earth.

The idea is that, in the stone age, we used to walk largely barefoot on the bare ground, and that this was conductive (*snortle*) to us being almost constantly grounded against the earth. If you think about it, a wild animal is probably never more than a few seconds or minutes away from being grounded.

If you’ve ever walked around in shoes with plastic soles, e.g. on carpet, and then gotten zapped when you touched a metal door knob, that was the grounding.

You had built up quite a bit of electrical potential (am I using that right?) in your body without being grounded, and once you did get grounded, it all came out at once.

If the magnitude of this is big enough, it can kill you. Think lighting storms. The clouds are not grounded, and eventually, the current “spills over” the previous barrier (moist air) and finds a way to ground itself. If the clouds were connected to the ground with a long copper wire, there wouldn’t be any lightning. Very, very frightning.

To prevent this “buildup” of electrical potential and subsequent, dangerous “zap,” all modern electrical outlets have a ground wire. That’s why outlets have 3 plugs, not just 2 (for negative/positive). The third one literally goes straight into the ground.

Proponents of grounding for health say that our modern world, with its cars (rubber tires) and shoes (plastic/rubber soles) and tall buildings (non-grounded concrete/vinyl floors) are unhealthy because we are not grounded nearly enough.

They also claim there are studies for this. I will admit, I haven’t read the studies. There are enough studies about PUFAs that I won’t finish in a lifetime.

Different Grounding tribes

It seems there are at least 2 tribes of grounding proponents. I’ll mention them here because I only tried 1 version of it.

On the one hand, there are people who say it’s purely about the electrical grounding component. You can live on the 50th floor of a skyscraper and stay inside all day, but if there exists a path for the current to ground you through a mat and an electrical outlet, you’re golden.

The other, more naturalistic tribe, scoffs at this. They want you to walk in grass, barefoot. Step into a river. Go for long walks barefoot and literally “touch ground.”

I only tried the pure electrical grounding strategy.

Expected Value says try it

Upside: it does something positive/healthy
Downside: wasted $200 once (and 0.0001% chance to get electrocuted?)

I thought: this is easy enough to try. There are grounding mats you can buy and plug into the ground of an electrical outlet. They come with a weird plug where the positive/negative prongs are made of plastic (so you don’t connect yourself to the grid, lol), but the ground wire is a real metal prong.

This plug runs via a cable to a mat made from a conductive material, typically some plastic with copper fibers woven in. You can actually test if you’re grounded with a multi meter. The one I ordered came with a cheap test meter. You could hold it up to your mat when it was plugged in vs. when not, and you could see the light go on/off, indicating the mat was grounded.

These mats come in different shapes and sizes, but the technology is super simple, and so pretty affordable. I went with a somewhat reputable brand instead of cheap Amazon knockoffs even though this was just a test, because even the name brand was quite affordable, and… electricity is maybe the part where you don’t want to skimp on quality.

I purchased a small grounding mat for my desk, so my feet would be touching it at all times when I was at my desk. And I purchased a queen-sized mat for my bed, which went under my fitted sheet.

This way I was grounded about 8h per day when sleeping, and at least another 8h while working. Even when not working, I spend a lot of time on the computer (typing furiously into this blog post, for example!) and so the total time grounded was probably closer to 20h a day.

I thought that doing this for 2-3 months should be a reasonable experiment.

What would success even mean?

I honestly didn’t have a very clear definition of success. The benefits touted by supporters are extensive, including pretty much every metabolic factor under the sun.

I would have counted it as a success if my weight loss plateau had magically gone away during grounding. Maybe there would be benefits I hadn’t even expected, many of which proponents report: feeling better, having more energy, mental clarity, whatever.

If pretty much anything positive would happen, paying a one-time fee of $200 is a pretty decent deal.

Nothing happened at all

I recently threw away my grounding mats. After giving it a good 3-4 months, I simply didn’t feel or notice any difference at all.

If going from being grounded pretty much 0% of the time to 80% of the time doesn’t produce any visible results, I don’t know what will. And yes, I tested my outlets were correctly grounded and the mats themselves were, too.

It could be that the metabolic benefits of grounding work via mechanisms that I’m already tapping via diet, or sunlight, or something else.

Or maybe grounding just doesn’t do anything, at least for me.

Surprising downside: discomfort

I hadn’t considered this in my initial EV (expected value) calculation, but sleeping with a plastic mat under your sheet is surprisingly uncomfortable. It gave my normally comfortable bed a sort of cheap, plasticky feel, I was sliding around on the sheet a lot, and it made that sort of crinkly plastic noise from time to time.

It wasn’t terrible and I still slept well, but it just drove down the perceived quality of my bed from 100% to maybe 80%.

Had I gotten amazing benefits from grounding, I might’ve accepted that hit. But given that I didn’t see any upside at all, I decided that enough was enough.

After giving it a fair shot, I threw all my grounding mats in the trash.

Successful Experiment

One thing I liked about this experiment was how cheap & simple it was to do. Compared to de-PUFAing yourself for 4-8 years, sleeping on a mat for 3-4 months is trivial.

The monetary cost is pretty low compared to joining a gym, or eating only meat (carnivore), or honestly even getting an OmegaQuant. I spend more on OmegaQuants per month ($100/mo) than I did on this experiment ($250 w/ shipping / 3-4 months).

In that sense it was a cheap experiment to run, and one that didn’t interfere with my diet experiments during that time. Sounds like a win to me.