What is grounding and what are the health benefits?

Earthing, also called grounding, means making contact with the earth to bring your body's natural electrical charge back into balance. Outside you do that barefoot on grass or sand. Indoors you do the same thing through the earth connection of your socket, with Earthle's earthing products.

How does earthing work?

The earth is a huge source of negatively charged free electrons. Through contact those electrons can enter your body and help neutralise the build-up of positive charge. That is what earthing does: it evens out the voltage between you and the ground beneath you.

In daily life that almost never happens any more. Shoes with rubber or plastic soles do not conduct, and we spend most hours of the day indoors, above a wooden floor or a mattress. The contact that used to happen by itself is gone.

Indoors you restore it through the earthing contact of an earthed socket. No current runs through your product; only the earth wire is used, never the live wire, and the plug contains a 100,000 ohm resistor. How that works is set out in earthing: safe and effective.

If you have no earthed socket, it works without one. The earthing rod goes into the ground outside, and the crocodile clip goes on a bare heating pipe. Earthing without an earthed socket lists every option, including a flat without a garden.

What the research shows

Earthing has been studied over the past twenty years and published in scientific journals. The studies are small, so the number of participants is given each time.

• Cortisol and sleep. Ghaly and Teplitz had twelve people sleep earthed for eight weeks in 2004. Their cortisol dropped at night and the daily curve returned to its natural shape.
• The blood. Chevalier and colleagues measured in 2013, in ten participants after two hours of earthing, an average 2.7 times higher charge on the red blood cells, making them clump together less.
• Mood. Chevalier had forty people sit for an hour in 2015, half earthed and half sham, with nobody knowing who had what. Only in the genuinely earthed group did mood improve significantly.
• Voltage on the skin. Passi and colleagues saw skin voltage fall from 415 to 19 millivolts in twenty-six premature babies in 2017.

What the literature says goes through the research point by point, with references to the original publications so you can read them yourself.

Earthle does not sell medical devices and does not replace treatment.

What people come for most

What customers tell us varies, but these four come up most often:

• Sleep. By far the most cited reason. You earth all night without thinking about it. A sheet or a sleeping mat lies loose on your mattress; a fitted sheet stretches around it.
• Calm and tension. Settling the nervous system and the cortisol curve are exactly what the research above measured. More on that in earthing and stress.
• The hours at a screen. If you sit at a desk all day, the desk mat goes under your wrists. On radiation from devices, see earthing and EMF.
• Sport and recovery. The yoga mat rolls out wherever you want. Why athletes use it is in sports performance and earthing.

Whether you feel anything yourself differs from person to person. One notices it the first night, another notices little or nothing, and that does not mean nothing is happening. What you can reasonably expect is in what you can feel and expect.

How do you start?

Outside you can start today: barefoot on grass or sand, at no cost. For indoors, every product comes with the earthing cable and plug in the box, so you need nothing else. Thirty to forty minutes a day is enough; in bed you get there without trying.

Just starting out? Earthing for beginners walks through what you need to know, step by step.

Which product suits you?

They all earth equally well. The difference is how they fit into your life: whether you want to earth while you sleep or while you are awake, how wide your mattress is, and whether there is an earthed socket in that room.

At the bottom of the shop page there is a product finder that asks you a few short questions and then shows which product and which size fit your situation. Also if your mattress is an unusual size or there is no earthed socket nearby.

If you are unsure, start small. A pillowcase is the smallest step: you change nothing about your bed and you have thirty days to decide.