We all know massage therapists and bodyworkers are prone to burnout and injury if they don’t practice valuable self-care techniques. Cumulative wear and tear on the body forces many therapists to bail on a profession they love, long before they should. Does drained or burned out describe how you sometimes feel after a day of bodywork?
To prevent injury, burnout, and attrition, experts emphasize strategies like proper technique, ergonomically sound body mechanics and posture, a user-friendly workspace, adequate rest between sessions and workdays, an energy-boosting diet, a realistic client load and schedule, continuing education, and seeking treatment at the first sign of injury.
Yet, with all these good measures, the fallout and burnout continue. What’s missing from these strategies, in my opinion, is Earthing: grounding the body to the earth.
Grounding for Protection
Earthing (also known as grounding) refers to physical contact with the natural frequencies pulsating throughout the surface of our planet. These frequencies are caused by the motion of subatomic particles called electrons. A virtually unlimited and unseen reservoir of these energetic electrons gives the earth’s surface a gentle, negative charge. You make contact with this natural energy, for example, by going barefoot outside and/or sleeping, relaxing, or working inside while using conductive grounding products.
Emerging research is showing that such simple contact has major health and healing benefits. It restores and stabilizes a natural electrical state within the complex circuitry of your bioelectrical body. Your self-regulating and self-healing mechanisms become more effective. You get head-to-toe improvements like better blood flow, reduced inflammation, less pain, more energy and calmness, and deeper sleep. For many people, the effect is dramatic, mimicking what happens when you charge a run-down battery.
Because of these effects, Earthing is creating a significant buzz in the health world. Earthing: The Most Important Health Discovery Ever! (Basic Health Publication, 2010), has been published in 15 languages.1 I have written extensively about this discovery since 2004 and participated in some of the more than 20 peer-reviewed studies published during the last 15 years.2
Earthing offers great potential for bodyworkers—an utterly simple, natural, yet profound strategy for protecting one’s body, energy, and career longevity, which also can be easily incorporated into the work setting.
Grounded and Ungrounded—A New Meaning
Earthing gives a new meaning to the concept of being grounded or ungrounded. These terms refer typically to a holistic perspective that takes into account subjective qualities like the mental and emotional state of individuals, their connection with themselves and their surroundings, or the level of stress they experience. Psychological calmness is sometimes equated with being grounded.
Ungrounded people are sometimes described as frenzied, scattered, stressed-out, or uncomfortable. They may be fatigued, imbalanced, injury-prone, pale, or uncoordinated. Often, it is their inflamed and painful bodies that bring them for treatments. These individuals may also be described figuratively as “disconnected from the earth.”
With Earthing, the concept of groundedness takes on a literal meaning: a connection between the earth’s surface charge and your bioelectrical body. When thus grounded, your body absorbs electrons from the ground, stabilizing and benefiting your body in multiple ways.
The Vital Electron
Feedback from massage and bodywork practitioners, along with Earthing research, is yielding a new perspective about why so many therapists drop out of the profession and why those who stay often suffer chronically—like the clients they treat—from pain and energy issues.
The feedback and research indicate that typical clients come to the table with considerable inflammation, and that the inflammation is literally draining electrons from the therapist working on them.
We know this because inflammation and the inflammatory response are the origin of all pain.5 And medical thermographic imaging shows rapid resolution of inflammation as electrons flood into injured tissues.6 These electrons can be drawn from any source: from the earth or from someone who is touching them.
Electrons are vital to your energy. Among other things, they play a central role in mitochondria’s generation of energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). ATP is the energy currency of the body and powers digestion, excretion, muscle contraction, nerve conduction, and virtually every other physiological process, including all of the cellular processes involved in injury repair: amino acid uptake, immune cell migrations, protein synthesis, and tissue regeneration.
“Giving up” your electrons to your clients during treatments may help them feel better, but can also leave you with less “juice” to make it through a strenuous day, and life in general. A study done on rat skin by N. Cheng and colleagues at the University of Louvain in Belgium found that adding electrons to rat skin increased ATP production three to five times, while also stimulating amino acid uptake and protein synthesis. It would then seem logical that by providing an abundance of electrons, grounding the body would enhance ATP production. In introducing their work, Cheng and colleagues summarized the processes that benefit from introducing electrons into organisms. These processes include bone growth, inhibition of bacterial growth, plant growth, stimulation of tissue repair, surgical wound healing, and treatment of ulcers.7
Electron loss can also cause your immune system to malfunction and dramatically increase your predisposition to acute or chronic disorders and the effects of aging. Fortunately, such losses appear to be readily preventable through grounding.
Electrons and Inflammation
To further understand the role of electrons in all this, let’s examine the concept of inflammation for a moment. Medicine defines inflammation as a localized response to trauma or infection that can wall off damaged tissues until the immune system removes foreign matter, damaged cells, and/or bacteria. When the inflammatory response does not completely wind down, palpable inflammatory pockets can persist for many years, slowly damaging organs and tissue anywhere in the body. This phenomenon was described by stress researcher Hans Selye in his classic 1956 book, The Stress of Life, and in various articles he published in The Journal of the American Medical Association and other periodicals.8
Selye’s work tied inflammatory responses with stress and the activity of cortisol, the stress hormone. The existence of walled-off areas, described by Selye, is known to bodyworkers. In her book Rolfing, Ida P. Rolf wrote, ‘‘In practically all bodies, in one muscle or another, small lumps or thickened nonresilient bands can be felt deep in the tissue. The lumps may be as small as small peas or as large as walnuts.’9
One of the important benefits of massage and bodywork results from pressure literally melting the walls of these inflammatory pouches and eliminating their potential long-term pathological effects. This melting effect occurs because the walls of the pouches contain solidified ground substance gel, which depolymerizes or falls apart under pressure. This was demonstrated in classic studies conducted by MIT physicist Toyoichi Tanaka.10
A Disconnect With the Earth
Based on research on inflammation and Earthing, we can better understand why massage therapists and bodyworkers might feel drained after treatments and precisely what burnout is and how to avoid it.
It’s apparent that too many modern lifestyles largely eliminate ordinary physical contact with the surface of the earth. Walking barefoot outdoors—on the wet sand of a beach or on a grassy lawn—feels invigorating. Earthing research explains in detail why this is. Contact with the ground is vital for our health. It allows the rapid transit of vast numbers of electrons into our bodies that then generate systemic benefits, including bolstering immune responses to injury or disease, generating ATP, and promoting physiological efficiency. This is the natural grounded state where the body becomes stronger and stabilized.
This, however, is no longer the common state of humans. Seventy-five years ago, 95 percent of all shoes had leather soles. Today, 95 percent of all shoes have composite, plastic, or rubber soles. Importantly, leather is somewhat conductive to electrons, whereas rubber and plastics are not; they are insulators. Research has led to the simple but profound suggestion that this disconnect from the earth’s electrons is a major factor in the dramatic rise in chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases over the decades. Moreover, we no longer live on the ground. We live above the ground and even in high-rise dwellings far off the ground. All these factors have disconnected us from a foundational aspect of nature: the electric charge of the planet and its virtually unlimited supply of electrons. We’re disconnected. We’re ungrounded.
Is Your Work Making You Electron Deficient?
Electrons have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, and our bodies have system-wide reservoirs that store these electrons. When an injury or infection takes place, stored electrons are delivered to the trouble area, where they protect healthy tissue from reactive oxygen and reactive nitrogen species (free radicals). The pathway for delivery of these antioxidant electrons is the systemic semiconducting living matrix composed of the connective tissues, cytoskeletons, fascia, and nuclear matrices—the very fabric of the body.11
It appears that acidic and positively charged inflamed tissues strongly attract negative electrons to them, pulling charge from any source available. Electron flow to sites of inflammation is suggested by the results of medical infrared imaging showing very rapid resolution of inflamed tissues within minutes after grounding.12
So, when a therapist makes skin contact with an electron-deficient client, electrons will be drawn away from the therapist to the person receiving the treatment. This is an energy transfer, a major component of feeling drained by the end of a busy day.
The physical laws of electrostatics require that this charge transfer begins immediately and continues as tense, painful, and inflamed tissues are relaxed. As the walls of inflammatory pockets dissolve under the therapist’s skillful hands, more free radicals are released, leading to more charge transfer from therapist to client. The process obviously helps clients feel better, but who is paying the price?
The energy transfer compromises the therapist’s mitochondrial energy production and makes the therapist more vulnerable to cumulative overuse or other musculoskeletal issues. It can also accelerate latent infections by interfering with immune responses. Overuse problems are especially significant during physically demanding forms of massage and bodywork, and can affect a therapist’s back, elbows, fingers, hands, shoulders, and wrists. Grounding the client can help the therapist avoid these issues by shoring up electron reserves, naturally draining static electrical charges and emotionally charged stress, and reducing the consequences of inflammatory and infectious conditions.
Grounding—Serving Both Client and Therapist
Many articles have been written about how to avoid injury and contagious diseases in the health-care environment. Sensitive and intuitive practitioners have described how “toxic conditions” can be absorbed from their clients, although there has been little science to explain such phenomena until now.
Concepts such as “draining my energy,” transfer of “bad energy,” maintaining proper “polarity of energy flows” from the therapist to the client, and protection by surrounding oneself with “white light” are often mentioned. Intention is a powerful factor in therapeutic interactions, but these concepts have little basis in current science, with the exception of “draining my energy.”
We now have a likely scientific explanation, based on simple physics, for describing the loss of electrons and consequent reduction in ATP production when a client’s inflammation pulls electrons from a therapist.
Inflammation is one of the most widely studied phenomena in medical research: a search for “inflammation” on PubMed (www.pubmed.gov) shows nearly 500,000 articles published between 1819 and 2015. By far, the most significant finding in all of this research is the nearly universal relationship between inflammation and virtually every chronic disease. An unsolved mystery has been why this correlation exists. Our research offers an explanation: disconnection with the earth.
While science is still attempting to determine what causes chronic pain, we know from Earthing research that grounding offers a natural and effective solution. Specifically, Richard Brown and his colleagues at the University of Oregon studied the effects of Earthing on delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS), the muscular pain and stiffness that takes place hours to days after excessive, strenuous, or unfamiliar exercise—overdoing it, in other words. DOMS is widely used as a research model by exercise and sports physiologists. Brown’s study showed that “grounding the body to the earth alters measures of immune system activity and pain,” suggesting that grounding appears to speed recovery from DOMS.13
Physicians and practitioners of a wide variety of bodywork, energy, and movement therapies are aware of the necessity of protecting themselves from picking up pathologies through skin contact with their clients. Since the work of Ignaz Semmelweis, Louis Pasteur, and Joseph Lister in the 1800s, handwashing to prevent the spread of infection has become routine. Earthing research has revealed that inflammation, like infection, may also be contagious. Grounding clients greatly reduces inflammation and its side effects, and may very well prove more important to the therapist than handwashing.
How to Get Grounded
A simple grounding pad placed on the treatment table can prevent the draining of electrons from the therapist. The pad is connected via a wire to the grounding terminal of a wall outlet. A sheet can be placed on the pad. Soon after the client lies down, perspiration creates a conductive pathway through the sheet to the pad and, from there, to the ground. Any inflamed areas will draw electrons from the ground rather than from the therapist. Moreover, the therapist becomes grounded every time he or she makes hand contact with the client. For more information about how to obtain a grounding pad for use on massage and bodywork tables, visit www.groundedbeauty.com.
There are many ways therapists can ground themselves if they feel depleted or “toxic” after working with a client with a lot of inflammation, but use of the grounding pad will prevent this from happening in the first place. Hand washing in cold running water is often recommended. Water comes through metal pipes in the ground, so hand washing or taking a shower will partially ground you. Satisfied clients can continue their grounding experience after a treatment by using various methods that bring the benefits of grounding into their homes.3 Fashionable and comfortable grounding shoes are also available.4
Notes
1. Clinton Ober, Stephen T. Sinatra, and Martin Zucker, Earthing: The Most Important Health Discovery Ever! (Laguna Beach, CA: Basic Health Publications, 2014).
2. The Earthing Institute, “Earthing Research,” accessed February 2016, www.earthinginstitute.net.
3. Accessed February 2016, www.earthing.com.
4. For grounding shoes, visit www.pluggz.com.
5. Sotaa Omoigui, “The Biochemical Origin of Pain—Proposing a New Law of Pain: The Origin of All Pain is Inflammation and the Inflammatory Response,” Medical Hypotheses 69, no.1 (2007): 70–82.
6. William Amalu, “Clinical Earthing Application in 20 Case Studies,” The Earthing Institute, accessed February 2016, www.earthinginstitute.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Amalu_thermographic_case_studies_2004.pdf.
7. N. Cheng et al., “The Effects of Electric Currents on ATP Generation, Protein Synthesis, and Membrane Transport of Rat Skin,” Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research (Nov–Dec 1982): 264–72.
8. Hans Selye, The Stress of Life, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978).
9. Ida P. Rolf, Rolfing: Reestablishing the Natural Alignment and Structural Integration of the Human Body for Vitality and Well-Being, revised ed. (Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 1989).
10. Toyoichi Tanaka, “Gels,” Scientific American 244 (1981).
11. James L. Oschman, Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Elsevier, 2015).
12. William Amalu, “Clinical Earthing Application in 20 Case Studies.”
13. Dick Brown, Gaétan Chevalier, and Michael Hill, “Pilot Study on the Effect of Grounding on Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 16, no. 3 (March 2010): 265–73.
James Oschman, PhD, has an academic background in biophysics and cell biology, and has made pioneering studies on the science supporting massage and bodywork techniques. He has published more than 100 articles in leading scientific journals and in principal journals of complementary, alternative, and integrative medicine. Oschman has written three books on the science supporting energy medicine. His latest is a second edition of his popular Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis (Elsevier, 2015). He lives in Dover, New Hampshire, and lectures and presents workshops internationally. For more information, visit www.energyresearch.us.