Guest post by Amelia Waters, certified personal trainer and owner of Double Paws Digital
Modern science has made amazing breakthroughs when it comes to improving mental health and wellness. Today, there are numerous medicines and supplements that provide relief for depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders. With a variety of alternative solutions like cannabis, vitamin D, therapy, Reiki, aromatherapy, massage and energy work, people are looking outside western medicine to feel better inside and out.
In recent years, scientists have found that helping our mental health goes back to our roots. Connecting with the earth, or what’s called grounding, has been found to improve peoples’ energy and provide relief from a variety of mental health disorders.
What is grounding?
Grounding, also known as Earthing, is a therapeutic technique that involves activities that ‘ground’ or connect one to the earth. Some examples include walking barefoot and/or meditating on grass or sand. Even swimming in a lake or ocean can recharge the body and provide energy.
To dive deeper into what grounding is let’s look at the science of it – physics to be exact. The science in grounding explains how directly connecting to the earth recharges our bodies. Negative ions from the earth rush into our bodies to discharge any free radicals or toxins we’ve picked up from daily life. Free radicals or toxins have been linked to disease, aging, and inflammation.
What are the Benefits of Grounding?
Not only does grounding help our mental health but is good for our physical health as well.
The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine found in a 2013 study, that grounding reduces blood viscosity and clumping. Working as a natural blood thinner, grounding has been found to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and heart attacks.
It Slows the Aging the Process
Since grounding reduces free radicals and toxins we pick up in daily life, it helps slow the aging process by helping get rid of junk in our system that is connected to disease. Not only are there positive health effects on cardiovascular health, grounding helps reduce inflammation. So next time you go for a swim in the ocean or lake you can call it the fountain of youth!
If you are still skeptical if grounded helps – try it! It’s free! I encourage you to get outside and touch your bare feet to the ground! Even in the winter months I try to get outside, I don’t touch my bare feet to the ground, but the fresh air and sun on my face in January definitely boosts my mood!
One of my favorite places to get grounded, and where all these photos were taken, is at Five Rivers Educational Environment Center in Delmar, NY. I find this place rejuvenating to go to no matter what time of year. With a variety of paths, benches and small lakes, Five Rivers is full of spots to relax. As I wrote about in my last blog, upstate New York has plenty of spots to get away and be in nature. One reason why I enjoy living in upstate New York.