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Toes wriggling in warm sand, grass cool underfoot, release from tight suffocating leather… I have always loved being barefoot. In the years when I bothered with pretty shoes, I slipped them off the minute I reached the office. I was nicknamed, no doubt with a few eye rolls, the barefoot contessa, and my shoes were regularly stolen and hidden, usually just before important meetings. A prim, matronly type did try to lecture me on hygiene, but I figured everybody else was safely shod, and I was happy to take the risk.
So I am disposed to love this newfangled practice called “earthing.”
A friend tells me about it and urges me to watch The Earthing Movie. And so, bare feet propped up, I do. The idea is that we should ground ourselves, not emotionally but literally, the way an electrical circuit is connected to the earth to avoid voltage spikes and shocks. I would quite like to avoid voltage spikes and shocks. Can I really do this just by standing outside, bare feet on bare earth?
The claims are astounding. “By planting your bare feet on the ground, you will begin to heal yourself,” says Clint Ober, a cable installer turned innovator whose book Earthing started this movement. “If the body is grounded, you can’t have inflammation.” I sit up. Did I hear that right? Yep. He holds up a sneaker, its rubber sole shielding the wearer from the electrical current that flows through the planet, and proclaims it “the single greatest cause of inflammatory disorders.” Heart trouble, insomnia, arthritis—so many of our miseries, fixable?
“We accidentally disconnected from the earth,” Ober continues. Shoes, elevated beds, high-rise buildings—what we call civilization and count on to keep us safe has separated us from nature’s way of neutralizing free radicals and reducing inflammation. “Heart, lungs, brain—this is all electrical equipment,” he points out. Earth’s surface carries a constant negative electric charge, and walking barefoot allows electrons to flow between the ground and the human body, rebalancing us.
I go outside, slip off my shoes, and stand in the moonlit yard, waiting for the magic. The ground is cool, a little lumpy, the grass damp and soft. My breathing slows and deepens. I stay quite a while, entranced by the fireflies—and bitten raw by mosquitoes. Back indoors, I slather on Benadryl cream and start factchecking. A handful of studies report lowered markers of inflammation, pain, and muscle damage, improved blood flow and muscle recovery. But the studies are ludicrously tiny: in one, ten participants, and they all did swell. Most of these studies are written by the same people. There are conflicts of interest. There is money to be made here, a cottage industry of grounding pads to place beneath you in bed or to lay beneath your feet when you sit at a computer.
Yet the real benefits seem linked to the time spent outdoors.
Walking barefoot keeps your feet flexible, improves muscle tone, lets the body sense its location and movement, and increases blood circulation. Being in nature lowers blood pressure, heart rate, and stress hormones.
In short, I doubt earthing’s extreme claims are true. Yet there is wisdom in them nonetheless.
“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet,” says Thich Nhat Hanh. Root yourself, says t’ai chi, in the stability and energy of the ground beneath you. Chinese medicine has long recommended walking barefoot to stimulate the flow of energy throughout the body. There are barefoot parks in Europe. Many religions and customs urge the removal of shoes. Socrates and Diogenes made a point of going barefoot, as do the Amish, to shun luxury and live with authenticity. A woman going barefoot after a gala, high heels dangling from one finger, is a romantic trope that says she is now carefree. And look at our language: we have long spoken of someone being “grounded” or having “both feet on the ground.”
But back to the claims. Is it true that “because we are not grounded, we absorb too much electromagnetic energy from our devices?” It is true that our bodies act as antennae for electric fields, and being grounded helps dissipate the voltage they pick up. But grounded or not, our bodies absorb very little electromagnetic energy from our devices. X-rays should worry us; they can damage DNA. Our cellphones cannot.
It is also true that any conductive object—in this case, the body—can discharge excess static electricity by contacting the ground. But there is no evidence that static electricity is harming us, unless you count the spark and tingle when you shuffle on carpet then touch a metal doorknob.
There are a few solid studies, though. One confirmed that being barefoot outdoors lowered blood pressure. Another found that people did experience less pain after spinal surgery when they slept on grounding pads.
I land far outside both the science and the gimmickry: being barefoot feels healthy, so I say we do it as often as possible. Commercial products seem suspect, based on a theory too good to be true, so for now, I will cheerfully ignore them. Who knows what we will learn as time goes on. All that Victorian advice to take a rest cure at the seaside turned out to be brilliant, because salt water and sea breezes are antimicrobial, ocean waves soothe the brain, and relaxation helps recovery. Look for age-old advice, then figure out why it worked.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
