“Grounding.”

There are some things that I am absolutely certain I never would have paid attention to had I not hit a brick wall in terms of health. Grounding is one of them.

There is a wonderful advantage to being on “hair trigger,” so to speak, health-wise, and that advantage is whenever I wonder if something actually has an effect on me, I can tell almost right away, or at least within a day or two. Not only do I have a pretty predictable routine that I can (by now) forecast and compare against, but also, if I get a reaction, good or bad, I can tell pretty quickly – it was related to that thing that I did. Obviously, I might be misinterpreting what happened – but something definitely happened, whatever it was.

“Grounding.” When I first came across Dr. Mercola talking about it, I had no idea what it was – was this eating dirt or something? Turns out, the hypothesis here is pretty simple: your body is full of energy currents, electricity. Just like your ear canals have to equalize when you’re coming up out of deep water, your body’s electrical currents has to equalize and sync with the magnetic fields of the earth around us – and, similar to your ears in water, if they don’t, bad things happen.

That’s all well and good, but it sounded a bit hokey to me. And this is where I never would have done anything about it, had I not been in dire straits. I realized: I’m sitting right next to an outlet, that has a ground connection (a “ground” connection, for those who don’t do electrical stuff, is literally a circuit that’s routed back into the breaker box, and from there routed into a rod that’s driven about 8-10 feet into the earth – literally into the ground. That way, if a short were to happen, the excess blast of electricity dissipates into the earth instead of, say, into you, or causing a fire, etc.). Now. I wouldn’t recommend doing what I do here. But I nevertheless indeed did it – I monkeyed with the outlet, and hooked up a copper wire to the outlet ground (yes, theoretically if something went south I could get shocked – I know). The outlet is also right by my bed, so whenever I’m lying in bed trying to sleep, I could grab the wire end and – well, “ground.” Again – why not? I figured I’d give it a shot.

Here’s the report, some interesting things I’ve noticed:

• Especially when I firsts started doing it, I would get a tingling sensation. Now, almost never. (Now, that could be from the fact that this ground wire is running alongside a bunch of live wires – but who knows lol). I don’t get that sensation anymore though.
• When I’d ground myself, and then touch my wife, she would get a tingling sensation.
• My circulation in my hands is horrible – until I started sauna-ing, I had ridiciulously cold hands all the time (probably from the autoimmune stuff – Sjorgen’s syndrome). Before I started grounding, I’d wake up every night with both of my hands falling asleep (that nasty static feeling), multiple times a night. After a few nights of grounding, holding the ground wire for ~15 minutes or so every night with my right hand only – my right hand stopped falling asleep, but my left hand kept falling asleep. I was curious, so I switched hands – I stopped holding the ground with my right hand, and held it only with my left. After only two nights, my left hand stopped falling asleep – and the next night, my right hand was back to falling asleep again, while my left hand was now fine. The last test: I held the ground wire with both hands – and since then neither of my hands have fallen asleep since. Heck yes.
• I haven’t noticed any other effects – my feeling is that grounding is very localized – i.e. just grabbing it with your hand doesn’t seem to make your whole body necessarily equalize (at least in any meaningful time, eventually it might if you held the wire long enough). It would also make sense to me that grounding works best on the feet – so I’m actually driving in a dedicated ground rod next to our sauana in our basement foundation, and I’m going to wire it to an aluminum plate (just a thrift store pan lol – but it has to either be aluminum or copper, because nothing else comes close in terms of conductivity) which I’m going to fix to the floor of the sauana. That way, we can ground our feet while doing sauna. Presumably grounding won’t be an issue this summer, especially since I plan on being intentional about it, but I figure a little extra grounding can’t hurt, especially in sync with a sauna session.

[*little footnote on that: we just got a Sauna, and I’ve used it twice now – once for 5 minutes, and once for 10 minutes, at 135 degrees. I’m blown away: in just two uses, my circulation is back to full-blown most of the time – I haven’t had warm hands and feet in months, and now I’ve already have warm hands and feet all day. Go Sauna!]

So, there you have it. My 2-cents on grounding. I don’t know that I would have been able to ascertain the effects had I not have been in “hair trigger” health, and had an intentionally constant regiment, but I suppose I should be happy I can take advantage of that while it lasts (hopefully not long! Say some healing prayers!). I went from skeptic to absolutely a believer.