#163 - Can Grounding Improve Your Sleep? The Misinformation Has Begun ...
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To humans, ‘Grounding’ is defined as “having direct contact with the Earth such as walking barefoot or lying on the ground.” The idea is that electricity energy - in the form of electrons - transfer from the Earth to your body.
The idea that the human body has electrical energy is not far-fetched. For example, polsysomnography (PSG) is the best way to measure sleep, especially because gold-plated electrodes attached to your scalp with conductive paste pickup the electricity energy that transfers through your brain, tissues, bone and skin - and with an amplifier - displays this electrical energy as ‘brain waves’.
When the brain sends signals to your limbs to move, it sends electric energy down the nerves to communicate with them.
And when it comes to general health, toxins in your body known as ‘Reactive Oxygen Species’ are like the Tasmanian Devil from the Looney Tunes cartoons. These f#ckers are ready to damage the cells of your body - all because they are missing an electron and want an electron from a healthy part of your body.
Thus, the logic behind grounding is that by making contact with the Earth, electrons flow to the body, and in turn will effectively be a ‘chill pill’ for all those Tasmanian Devils.
If you haven’t heard of Grounding yet - you will. There are many folk who are claiming its health benefits. And as you can see from the above line of logic, it sounds like a somewhat plausible theory.
But could Grounding help you sleep better? That’s the question … technically, it’s a research question. A question that could be tested.
Any good theory is one that is not only testable and explanatory, but also supported by good evidence.
Take for example the two-process model of sleep, which is a theory comprised of two processes (circadian and sleep homeostatic pressure). Put together, this theory explains how and when people are most likely to sleep and conversely, when they’re most likely to be awake. This theory has been supported by scientific studies time and time again.
HOW TO TEST IF GROUNDING IMPROVES SLEEP?
According to the definition, you would have one group that touches the Earth and another that doesn’t. In other words, one group gets the Intervention, the other one doesn’t. You measure sleep before this change occurs - as well as after the intervention has stopped. Ideally, you’d also measure sleep a while after the intervention has stopped so you can see how long the sleep benefits last.
But the other important aspect is that you need to be able to ensure that if sleep improved, that it was due to the intervention (ie, Grounding) and not some other reason.
So imagine you and a friend try this experiment. One of you stays indoors every day for a month. One of you does the same, except goes outside for 30-minutes per day and lies on the ground. At the end of the month, the person who went outside reports better sleep.
But, here are now a bunch of reasons that could explain the better sleep for the person who went outside:
A placebo effect
Getting natural light
Better air quality
Less exposure to EMFs inside the house
As you can see, this makes it hard to ascertain whether any improvement in sleep is due to Grounding - and not something else, or a combination of something elses …
BUT IS THERE ANOTHER WAY?
Grounding Mats are a method that scientists have used to be more certain that improvements can be attributed to Grounding.
They’re a mat with a cord attached to them that goes into the ground. They state that this cord can transfer electrons from the Earth, to the mat, and then to a human who is sitting or standing on the mat. Thus, if you use a different cord that is not conductive - and therefore does not transfer electrons - then this is an excellent ‘sham'-control’. This method essentially rules out the placebo effect.
And by having two groups of people standing on these mats, with half the mats truly a grounding mat, and the other half not, and they do this indoors, then it takes care of all those other reasons above that could explain improvements. That’s because they all stayed inside.
So let’s …
HAVE A LOOK AT THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE
I wanted to get a sense of what work had been done when it comes to grounding for various aspects of health, as I am becoming more interested in health behaviours linked to sleep (eg, alcohol, cancer, skin health, etc.).
A core mechanism for connecting Grounding to health is mitochondria - a multi-billion-year old little dude taking care of the health of our cells. So I entered the words ‘grounding’ and ‘mitochondria’ into Google Scholar.
Interestingly, I was met with several studies testing Grounding’s anti-inflammatory effects. I scrolled down to see if any were trials - in other words, studies that mentioned in their titles that they separated people into different groups (Grounding vs Not).
As I scrolled, I was met with a lot of titles that look like reviews. Reviews are great … when you have enough studies to actually summarise their work into a review. But it doesn’t look like there has been very many studies.
So I changed my search terms to ‘grounding’ and ‘trial’ - and found …
4 TRIALS. 1 ON SLEEP …
The single trial on sleep tested Grounding with a group of older people with mild Alzheimer’s Disease.
OK - so the title suggests Grounding will improve sleep for patients with mild AD - but this may not necessrily mean it generalises to other people.
But let’s keep going., In other words, let me take you on a journey of how I analysed this study:
I read the Abstract:
which showed they had two groups and used the sham vs real mats inside (great).
they had objective measures testing the transfer of electrons (great).
they used the PSQI questionnaire to measure sleep (I think that measure is not so great, as it asks people to reflect back on the past 4 weeks of their sleep - can you do that with any accuracy?).
they did grounding for 12 weeks (great - this means a chronic enough dose, right?).
only 15 patients were tested (not good - because a small sample can mean that Grounding mats do work, but your statistics cannot see the benefits because you have too few people in your study. But, this can be overcome if Grounding is truly outstanding).
anxiety and depression did not improve (well, that might be because the sample size was too small ..).
sleep significantly improved, with the change for the sham group being 0.3 points and the intervention group being 3.0 points (this got me thinking where did each group start from. For example, if the intervention group started 3 point lower than the sham group, this dampens my confidence that the improvement was solely due to Grounding).
Next, I skipped the entire Introduction, This was going to be a quick scan of the key parts of the study.
Next, was the Methods, and this is where you can find the juicy details:
I read the Study Design, Grounding Methods, Blinding Procedures, and learned about the Electrochemical Analyzer, as I didn’t know about this last one. This is how they do an initial test to see the amount of electron transfer occurred for the Intervention group compared to the Sham Group.
I skipped the anxiety, sleep and depression stuff ‘cause I know about that.
I read the Data Analysis which sounded reasonable. I noted that they didn’t mention whether they controlled for the ‘before-study sleep measure’, as sometimes this is asked by reviewers. This is a method that helps to ‘equate’ the sleep scores between groups, if they are different from one another at the start …
Next was the Results - and the researchers did a really good thing …
They analysed the electron transfer data. This is called a ‘manipulation check’ - meaning, in this case, you’re testing to see whether the Intervention group got more electron transfer than the sham group. There was no difference. None at all. Nada …
So I stopped scanning the article …
I’D MADE MY DECISION
There is only 1 study testing whether grounding improves sleep - and - according to the Title and the Abstract - it does - but only in older people with mild AD. We don’t know if this happens for the population at large.
But grounding didn’t even pass the 1st step - increase electron transfer. This means, even if the sleep score improved for the Intervention group compared to the sham group, it wasn’t due to grounding.
So what did the sleep results say?
In Table 4 of the study, it became clear to me that i read the numbers wrong in the Abstract. They were 'not ‘change in score’, but ‘final scores’. The sham group got worse by 1-point (moved from 2 to 3 [higher scores mean worse sleep quality]) - whereas the Intervention group got better by 1.6 points (from 1.9 to 0.3). As stated in the Abstract, there was a statistical difference.
First, know that there’s a cut-off score for the PSQI. It’s 5. So if you score under 5 you’re considered a ‘good sleeper’. Thus, in the real world, the people in this group were sleeping well, and both groups ended up sleep well.
CONCLUSIONS?
If I was a reviewer of this study, I would actually be in favour of it being published, as we need to know whether something works or not by applying scientific methods to it - as opposed to f#cking hearing it from an influencer.
But … I would demand that the researchers change any reference to Grounding improves sleep quality - which is in both the Title and the final sentence of the Abstract.
In fact, a more accurate interpretation is that sleep statistically changed in this study, but the change cannot be attributed to grounding. Nevertheless, more studies are needed, using a similar research design, but with improved methods (eg, sample size, measures, etc.).
So if you hear an influencer or coach f#ckin’ claim loudly through your screen, telling you grounding improves your sleep, this is your final chance to stop what will be another tsunami of sleep misinformation.
Because - guess what happens when you Google … not Google Scholar … but Google ‘grounding’ and ‘sleep’?
The misinformation tsunami has already begun …
- Prof MG
