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Earthing (Grounding) and Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
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Earthing (Grounding) and Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
I just had to share this image. It shows I hit an almost incomprehensible high of 253ms HRV during sleep recently.
I have an Apple watch I am using to track heart rate variability (HRV) while I sleep. In the past month I started sleeping on grounded bedsheets. Ever since I started sleeping on grounded bedsheets, I have been seeing these huge HRV scores during the night. These never happened before the grounded bedsheet.
Let me demonstrate. I asked copilot “How rare is an HRV of 253ms?”
Answer:
An HRV of 253 ms is extraordinarily rare — far above typical physiological ranges seen in healthy adults or athletes. Most published ranges place high HRV around 70–100 ms, with elite endurance athletes sometimes exceeding 120–150 ms. Values above 200 ms are almost never reported in clinical or fitness literature.
Typical HRV Ranges
– Young, healthy adults: 50–100 ms
– Older adults: 30–50 ms
– Athletes at rest: 100–150 ms (occasionally higher, but rarely above 180 ms)
– Clinical concern (low HRV): <30 ms
My theory here is that all of our HRV statistics are based on samples of people who are not grounded. Today it is fairly rare to find a person who is grounded for any portion of the day. Therefore, we may not know today what “normal” healthy HRV values are.
What we do know is that HRV is an indication of health, the higher the better. It indicates parasympathetic tone. Meaning, your body’s ability to rest, digest, and heal itself.
My HRV average for the entire past year has been 36ms. As you can see from the chart above, “Older adults: 30-50ms”, my HRV is a bit below average for an older adult. Until recently I’ve had many sleepless nights of waking up in a state of terror, usually around 3AM when these episodes would hit… while cortisol is supposed to rise in the body. Due to spikeopathy and the associated dysautonomia, my body has been in a state of fight or flight for quite a while (a sympathetic nervous system that is operating unchecked and unbalanced by an injured parasympathetic nervous system).
During the day I use a Nuropod (tragus/ear based vagal nerve stimulation) device to help with HRV during the day. During the night however, grounding is proving to be the trick. Grounding is proven to improve cortisol, parasympathetic tone, and blood viscosity.
Recently my cardiologist had me wear a Zio heart monitor for 2 weeks. During those two weeks I was sleeping on grounded bedsheets. The cardiologist called me with concern “Your heart rate dropped significantly during the night; did you experience any dizziness?” I said “No, I was sound asleep.”
What I suspect is happening is the blood viscosity has been significantly lowered from grounding, i.e. the charge on my red blood cells has increased (zeta potential) and this causes nice smooth blood flow. Smooth blood flow means easy carry of oxygen to the parts of the body. When your body senses you have bountiful oxygen, it then turns down the heart rate so that you’re not over oxygenating. The doctor isn’t aware that this low heart rate signal is actually a sign of health and good oxygen delivery. When you stop to think of it, of course the doctor hasn’t seen this before and would not make the correlation with fantastic oxygen delivery but instead thinks the opposite that I might be getting dizzy with not enough oxygen because my heart slowed down.
This is why we need randomized controlled trials to be funded by our government on things like grounding … things that Big Pharma doesn’t stand to make money from. Only then will we know the real statistics on what the human body looks like as statistically “normal”.
I’ve been feeling better than I have in years and grounding has been the biggest recent contributor to an uptick in my health.
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11 Replies
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@jrgerber Walking around barefoot a lot has certainly made me feel “More real. More connected”. Your technical medical knowledge is way higher than mine, but to my understanding, my walking around barefoot is increasing my Zeta potential. So I can understand your excitement completely. And I certainly have been sleeping better. I’m biased, but I really do think there is more than just ‘something’ to this grounding.
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I get random high readings sometimes, so what is the average nightly HRV compared to without?
I do believe in EMF and have slept on a grounded mat for years, but honestly can’t tell a difference with or without it, nor does a difference get reflected in my HRV.
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One of the interesting published studies is this one where they measured HRV in babies before and after grounding: https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/electrical-grounding-technique-may-improve-health-outcomes-nicu-babies
“After measuring the environmental electromagnetic levels in and around the incubators, the researchers electrically grounded the babies by connecting an electrode wire from the infants’ incubators or open cribs to the ground. Twenty of the 26 infants were measured for both skin voltage — the voltage measured between the patient’s skin and electrical ground — and heart rate variability — to assess vagal tone — before, during and after grounding. Six of the infants were measured only for skin voltage.
“When we looked at the signal on the skin, it was an oscillating signal going out at 60 hertz, which is exactly the frequency of our electrical power. When we connected the baby to the ground, the skin voltage dropped by about 95 percent and vagal tone increased by 67 percent,” Palmer said. After grounding, vagal tone returned to the pre-grounding level.”
psu.edu
Electrical grounding technique may improve health outcomes of NICU babies | Penn State University
A technique called "electrical grounding" may limit preterm infants’ electromagnetic exposure in the neonatal intensive care unit and improve their health outcomes, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers.
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What product do you use for grounding? What brand? I bought a sheet & noticed nothing.
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I noticed in Amazon reviews of the silver lined bedsheets that many people were reporting that after a few washings the grounding stopped working (you can use a tester to easily determine this). So, I avoided those bedsheets. I recently ordered from Clint Ober’s site earthing.com for family Christmas presents and I received a copy of his book, Earthing, and another book from him. I was paging through them just last night and noticed someone in the other book stated they experienced the exact same thing… they first tried silver lined bedsheets and then those stopped working and then they tried what Clint sells, and the grounding and great sleep started happening again for them. I have some of the steel bedsheets from intuition-physician.com (Dr. Laura Koniver, MD) and I use the pure ground 3.0 cable with them. The reason I use that cable is my wife is sensitive to the 60Hz hum that is induced in the ground wire by the electrical wires in the wall. She can feel it but I can’t. Some people are more sensitive (https://youtu.be/CE7OA327Pro).
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I have a grounding mat but only for my feet. When I was doing the grounding experiment last year, I was for grounded I think for most part of my sleep but I wan’t monitoring HRV. I have the earthing book too, I experimented for general health but didn’t notice significant changes so stopped. I have benefited from other changes this year like cold therapy, sauna, HIIT, fasting etc. when I do a 3 day water fast, my heart rate too when sleeping drops to low 40’s and I don’t feel anything. So I don’t think that’s a concern.
Few questions as I ponder on this: 1) grounded sheet vs mat, would there be an emf interference with the sheet and apple watch? 2) I earth daily for almost an hour at the gym sauna, steam room and/or hot tub, how does that impact avg hrv? My hrv is coming in at low 30’s but I am not wearing the watch religiously at night these days. When I did the hrv in morning shows at 100. My HRR last week after running a mile was a solid 37-40. At 58 that is crazy good I think. My RHR is low 50’s. I take 2 gm fish oil daily. Do lots of cardio and strength training. My VO2Max is high. I am going to restart grounding with the mat and wear the watch. Will report my findings in a few days. Great discussion thread! Thanks
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That was one of my first thoughts was “could this be true, or is this an anomaly due to interference somehow?”
Here’s how the Apple watch (as well as other technologies like Oura Ring and WHOOP) works:
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- Optical Sensor Technology
- The Apple Watch uses photoplethysmography (PPG) — shining green LED light into your skin and measuring how much light is absorbed by blood flow.
- Each pulse of blood corresponds to a heartbeat, allowing the watch to detect the exact timing between beats.
The grounding works by giving your body electrons and those electrons then impart charge to your red blood cells. This thins the blood and makes it less viscous. So, there is conceivably the possibility that the fact they calibrated the PPG technology most likely on people whose blood is more clumped together (they are ungrounded) that the ability for it to sense the changes in how much light is absorbed could possibly be affected. It would be interesting to see if there are differences in measurement between that and an EKG. The EKG works by sensing electrical impulses of the heart.
One might think that an EKG being electrical might be more prone to interference by a grounding system, however, I believe the grounding would actually improve an EKG’s signal. I get this from an experiment I did about 10 years ago. I built a 3 lead EKG of my own design out of an instrumentation amplifier. When I hooked it up to myself, I was able to see my heartbeat on the oscilloscope, but, I noticed a lot of noise on the signal from my heart. I realized the interference was coming from the fluorescent light (EMF/RF) and when I turned the light off the noise went away. When EMF hits our bodies and we are not grounded, that energy has no way to leave our body. If I did that experiment again, it would have been a great thing to try grounding rather than turning off the light to see what happens. We know what happens to the 60Hz that the babies were subjected to from EMF in the NICU, it went away when they became grounded.
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WOW TOTALLY Awesome! Please tell us what brand of grounding sheets, any specifications? Do you have to plug in etc.? So many on the market and have wondered which ones are worth buying.
Thank you for sharing!
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The exact grounded bedsheets I use, and both my wife and I are quite happy with the results of, are found here: https://intuition-physician.myshopify.com/collections/grounding-sleep-systems
We’ve been using them for the past month and it’s been simply amazing how many times we wake up and say to each other “I didn’t get up to use the bathroom last night, did you?” and “I had the deepest sleep last night”.
My wife initially felt a prickly feeling, and we then ordered the “PureGround Cord” from the same site. That ground wire filters out the 60Hz that gets induced into the ground wire from the electrical wires in the wall. By induced I mean that when AC current runs through a wire, the pusling causes a magnetic field to build and collapse at 60Hz. That magnetic field will cause electricity to flow in a small amount in any wires near that wire… and the ground wire in the wall picks up this magnetic field and a tiny current starts to flow in the ground wire. You therefore are getting both the DC current from the earth that you want and that heals you, along with a 60Hz AC current that you don’t want. It is a tiny current and I can’t feel it, but my wife can. That’s why we then ordered the PureGround Cord. Dr. Koniver has a video about this exact topic titled “Electrosensitivity with a standard ground cord”.
The customer experience with Dr. Koniver’s site is nice, she puts a lot of care into what she sells, but it is slow. She does everything herself and so it takes about 3 weeks to receive the products from when you ordered them.
On the other hand we have Clint Ober’s site, earthing.com. I just received the Holiday Wellness Sleep Bundle: https://www.earthing.com/products/earthing-grounded-sleep-bundle-2 . I used the mat for the first time today for grounding. What I like about Clint’s products is he gives you all of this at a good price and he tosses in a couple of books you can read.
I trust both Clint and Dr. Koniver. They are both invested in wanting to help people with their health and as such I think their products are going to be reputable. They also both appeared in The Earthing Movie, which gives us an idea about them as individuals.
Other products I am very skeptical about, especially the sheets on Amazon that seem to almost all look the same from different vendors; and all have similar reviews saying they stopped working after a while – if you dig into the reviews a bit.
One more question that I don’t know the answer to is if Clint Ober’s products have a 60Hz filtering cord like Laura Koniver’s PureGround Cord. My wife tried the Earthing.com wrist strap today and she didn’t notice any prickly feeling with it.
intuition-physician.myshopify.com
Indoor Grounding Tools | Intuition Physician
Custom made, individually hand sewn, boutique quality grounding tools made locally right here in the USA using eco friendly, environmentally conscious materials like hemp and organic cotton, and superior quality conductive elements like stainless steel. These are the highest quality, medical grade healing … Continue reading
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I should add that things get a lot simpler for the purity of the grounding if you can actually run a wire out a window or something and attach it to a stake in the ground. Then the only thing you worry about is EMF/RF hitting the wire and inducing AC current. Using a stake outdoors is far less likely to have the level of AC current you get which is induced from a ground plugged into the wall.
I know I’m getting technical here, but I wanted to point out that even a ground wire running out a window and into the ground can get some unwanted AC occurring. The solution in that case is a shielded wire. What is a shielded wire? The cable industry uses a shielded wire called an RG6 coaxial cable. I’ve included a picture of it. That braided looking part of it, that’s the shielding. The whole purpose of that shielding is to keep EMF/RF from interfering with the cable signal. If you were to want to make your own grounding system, running a coaxial cable outside of your house and then taking that center piece of copper wire and attaching it to a stake in the ground would definitely give you a very nice clean and pure ground current travelling through that inner copper wire and that shielding would stop all interference. Then inside your house if you took that other end of that copper wire and attached it to your grounding sheets or a grounding mat, that would create the best possible ground, falling just short of the purity of actually standing or laying on the ground.
What’s fun about this piece of information is that Clint Ober, the owner of Earthing.com, used to work in the cable industry and he knew all about these concepts. This is how he discovered the effects of grounding in the first place – he applied what he knew from the cable industry and wondered if humans were just as susceptible to not being grounded and not being shielded from RF.
The bottom line here is:
1) get connected with the ground, this gives you the Earth’s DC charge that you and all life is meant to get by design to keep you healthy
2) minimize the AC current you receive. The AC current is coming from EMF. Shielding is one way to help this problem. Using a stake in the ground and attaching to that is preferable, but using a cord plugged into the outlet works also, so long as you have a cord that filters the AC out.
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Thank you so much for talking about this subject. I’ve seen comments about the subject, but haven’t had time to do much research yet. You’ve answered all of my questions in this thread! I’ve got to start getting grounded!!
Thank you all.
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