Grounding (Earthing)

Grounding sandals maintain earth connection daily

Saladino discusses grounding sandals as a way to stay connected to the earth without going barefoot.

"How cool is this? So, if you don't want to go barefoot, you don't want to cut your feet, you can be grounded to the earth. You can get that electrical conductivity, that electrical normalization with the earth that I talked about in the grounding episode with a pair of shoes on. So how cool is this? This is totally incongruence with ancestral wisdom. And man, it just feels good to be grounded and it doesn't feel good to cut your feet. Again, they're a minimalist soul, a vibrant soul, full range of healthy foot motion with improved weight."

Morning sun + barefoot grounding as daily routine

Saladino shares his protocol of standing barefoot on the ground in sunlight for 5-10 minutes each morning to combine grounding with light exposure.

"If you've seen my reels, I turn the Wi-Fi on and I go outside in the sunlight and I stand on the ground. So I am grounding first thing in the morning. I did a podcast a few weeks ago with Clint Ober on grounding, and one of the most interesting parts of that podcast was this idea that as the Earth rotates on its axis, there appears to be a testable, reproducible electrical signal in the earth that is different. So there may be some circadian rhythmicity to grounding as well, which means I'm not just going outside and sitting on my deck, wood deck. I want to touch the earth with my feet and ground first thing in the morning. I'm also now using a grounding mat when I'm sleeping and And when I am doing the podcast, I'm grounding as much as possible. I'm really fascinated by this. Again, refer to the podcast with Clint Ober if you're interested in that. But as I go to Greece, I'm going to do an experiment on jet lag and this idea that will my jet lag be worse? I think Greece is nine hours ahead of where I am in Costa Rica right now. So it's quite a significant jump. Will my jet lag be any worse or better if I try and ground? So the goal is to fly to Athens and get in the ocean as soon as possible for 15 to 20 or 30 minutes to try and ground in Athens."

Grounding during sleep normalizes cortisol rhythms

A study of 12 subjects showed grounding during sleep synchronized morning cortisol spikes, suggesting benefits for sleep and jet lag.

"Some coalescence of a peak at 8 a.m., but after grounding, there's a clear pattern towards synchronization of this morning cortisol awakening spike."

Grounding is both therapy and EMF mitigation

Grounding provides DC negative ions as therapy, but also routes AC electricity through your body, creating a secondary EMF effect.

"Grounding can also be a therapy. You get grounding DC therapy, separate from the AC electricity that is mitigated and rerouted to the ground."

Grounding sheets route electricity through you

Grounding mats lower your body voltage reading but actually route household AC electricity through your body to ground.

"Interesting. I want to ask you about grounding and earthing. And I've been using the grounding sheets since I think since 2010, like pretty much since I got into human health. And I think the messages with a lot of people now when I watch interviews, they say, oh, just turn off the breaker in the bedroom, you know, for the grounding sheets on your bed so that you're not having that electric field coming out from the wall and interacting with the"

Grounding practice for brain and recovery

Jim Kwik describes starting his morning by going barefoot on the ground as the first step in his brain optimization routine.

"First thing I do is I just go outside. I get grounded. It just makes me feel good to be barefoot on the ground."

Grounding mats for inflammation and sleep

Greenfield explains how grounding mats in the bedroom connect the body to the earth's electrical field, reducing inflammation and improving sleep quality as part of a holistic bedroom optimization strategy.

"So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you just want to shed a few pounds, get ready for non-run-of-the-mill cutting-edge content from beng Ben Greenfield fitness.com. So biohacking an unbeatable environment is what I'm going to talk to you about today. And before I scare anyone away with the term biohacking, I think a lot of times we hear that word and we conjure up images of like, you know, some guy with electrodes attached to his head or putting like eight sticks of butter and a dead chicken and whatever else into your morning cup of coffee. And really all biohacking is, is it's just tweaking your environment or tweaking your biology to make yourself more efficient or to allow your body to do something more quickly or better perform whatever it is that you want to do. And a big, big part of biohacking is your environment. Frankly, a lot of us spend our day-to-day routine experiencing things like brain fog, slow cognitive performance, weak reaction times, et cetera. And it's because our kitchens, our bedrooms, our bathrooms, our offices, our gyms, they're not tweaked to really enhance physical performance or mental performance, and in many cases, they're holding us back. So what I'm going to do today, and this is going to be fun. I never like to give the same talk twice, so this will be a new one for me, and what I want to show you guys today is just like everything that you can do in your home, in your office, in your workout environment, as far as like little tweaks that you can introduce to make yourself just that much better, right? To get that 5%, that 10%, in some cases, even more than that advantage. So I will allow ample time for Q&A afterwards for anything that I show on the slide as well as anything you guys want to talk about after. So let's just jump right in. Oh, and resources. I made a resource page for you at bengreenfieldfitness.com slash unbeatable14. You enter your credit card information and no, I'm just kidding. It's just all there. And we'll jump right in. So we'll start with the bedroom. Mark sent me a photo of his bedroom just so I could use that as an introduction for this slide. Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it. It's very homey. I like it. So a lot of us, hopefully, especially after Dr. Parsley's talk last night, we spend a lot of time in our bedrooms now that we know just sleeping and having sex. But it is a place where you spend a lot of your time. And I want to talk about some of the hacks you can use in your bedroom. And we'll just jump right in. Okay, light is the first one. You learned about blue light and its ability to disrupt your ability to release melatonin while you're asleep at night. Exposure to blue light is one of the biggies in people's bedrooms. And even if you're going into your bedroom at night and you're getting ready to sleep and you're making it a point not to have your laptop and your phone and stuff like that on, as you've already learned, a lot of people's lights, like the lights in here, et cetera, they're still releasing blue light. Like most LED and modern fluorescent lighting, there's a big amount of light from the blue light wave spectrum. So one of the things that I recommend you do in any area of your house where you need relaxation, this would primarily be the bedroom, is get lights that don't have the blue light wave spectrum on them. The ones that I have in my house, they're made by a company called Lighting Science. They're called Good Night Sleep Bulbs, and they've eliminated all the blue light from the spectrum, and I can just plug those into the sockets in the bedroom. The other thing that you can do if you want that works a little bit similarly is infrared. You can get a fancy infrared lamp like this, and you can also buy a cheaper infrared bulb off of like Amazon for 10 bucks. And these infrared lights, they're like warming heat lamps. They're like what a farmer would use to hatch chicks or something, right? You'd try to add an egg to keep it warm. You can put it next to your bed. You can plug one of these up above your bed at night, but it's really cool. They've done studies. They did this really interesting study in athletes where they exposed them to infrared light before they went to bed at night, and they increased sleep time by almost 20 minutes in the morning just by basking in this infrared glow. So you kind of get double benefit, a double whammy. You eliminate blue light when you use red light in your bedroom. And if you get one of these infrared lamps or an infrared light and you shine it on your body, like as you're reading a book or doing whatever you're doing in bed at night before you go to sleep, it has that added effect of eliminating blue light and helping you sleep longer in the morning. So the lighting in your room and adjusting the lighting in your room is really important. Somebody asked a really good question last night during Dr. Parsley's presentation about what do you do if you wake up at night and you got to go to the bathroom or whatever and you don't want to disrupt your circadian rhythm, right, by flipping on the light in your house and getting exposed to blue light. This works really well for that too. Like if you need to see your way into the bathroom or you need to flip a light on next to your bed, you keep one of these little infrared lamps on, you put that on and you get no blue light. You get no disruption of your sleep cycles when you get up at night to go to the bathroom. So just a super simple fix. And again, you can jump into that game for nine, 10 bucks off of Amazon for an infrared bulb. This is another really important one, and one that I just introduced recently, the mattress. And I was actually talking last night at dinner to a few guys about mattresses and how much they affect your sleep and your health. How many of you in here are familiar with electromagnetic fields, like Wi-Fi routers, cell phones, and how there's a lot of talk nowadays about being kind of careful with that stuff, about its potential for being a carcinogen, for disrupting the electrochemical gradient in your cells, things along those lines. Well, mattresses that have springs in them, they act as very efficient EMF conductors."

Earthing technology in minimalist shoes

Saladino discusses shoes with grounding technology that use metal elements through the sole and laces to maintain electrical connection to the earth.

"Simple sole wrapping in lace. It's one of the oldest designs in history. They upgraded it with vibrum soles and earthing technology. It's the most minimalist, natural, and grounded shoe experience you've ever tried. It's awesome because they actually wrap some metal elements through the sole and into the laces. So you are grounding, electrically connected to the earth, naturally connected to the earth."

Stress blocks restorative sleep by keeping you in sympathetic dominance

Ben Greenfield opens with the core insight that chronic sympathetic nervous system dominance prevents restorative sleep, which blocks cellular detoxification and immune repair, effectively stressing you to death over time.

"stress kills you very simply and it's over the course of time the key here is balance the autonomic nervous system is a zero-sum game and most of us are not getting enough parasympathetic nervous system dominance"

HRV data shows parasympathetic activation improves sleep quality

Discussion of HRV research showing that lowering the LF/HF ratio (sympathetic to parasympathetic balance) from 4.8 to 1.0 represents a 500% increase in parasympathetic tone, which directly improves sleep quality.

"person's LF the stress response number"

90-95% of disease is created by unresolved stress

Research from Stanford and Harvard Medical School cited showing that 90-95% of all disease is created by stress, underscoring why activating the parasympathetic nervous system through interventions like grounding is critical for long-term health.

"if you look at the research from Stanford that says 90% of all disease is created by stress or Harvard Medical School says 95% disease is created by stress people intuitively understand that but no one really knows why"

Grounding primarily supports the immune system

Saladino introduces Clint Ober and explains that grounding is free, available to everyone, and historically humans were always grounded.

"And historically, just like eating the organs of animals and never wasting these, an ancestrally appropriate diet, like an animal-based diet, we would have almost always been grounded as humans. The consequences for this at the level of our immune system, at the level of inflammation are massive. So enjoy this podcast with Clint. And I think that many of you will benefit by, just like me, thinking more about grounding on a day in and day out basis. If those of you out there are suffering, So enjoy this podcast with Clint. Also, I'm going to give a shout out to my sponsors, this podcast, who make it possible. Appropriately, this podcast is sponsored by Earthrunners. You can find them at earthrunners.com. What are Earthrunners? Well, they're an ancestrally consistent sandal with a hirache design. That's how the laces are, but they're a grounding sandal. They haven't. They have a copper earthing plug on the bottom of the sandal, pretty much close to the K1 acupuncture position at the bottom of the foot. And they have conductive laces so that you can walk on the ground in sandals and not cut your feet and still be grounded. How cool is that? They're also a very minimalist design, which I love. So I think they're a really cool product that is very consistent with this podcast. You know, our ancestors always had a connection with the earth, like I talk about in this podcast with Clint, and wearing rubber-soled shoes."