Grounding for Anti-Aging: The Ultimate Anti-Inflammatory Hack

Introduction to Grounding and the Guest 0:00

Now with medical technology, we can ground people and have people sham grounded so they don't know if they're grounded or not, nor do the people reading the MRIs, and hook people up to monitor the electrical output of the Earth, the Schumann frequency, and watch people on functional MRI and see if there's any synchronicity between our brain output and the Earth's output. And of course there is, because our brain when it's in a healing state, when we're in deep sleep, when we do prolonged meditation, or when we're grounded, which is the easiest one for me because insomnia is terrible for me.

And meditation, I don't got the bandwidth for that. So the easiest thing is to get grounded and put your body and your brain in the same healing state as if I'm in deep restorative sleep or if I've meditated for like two straight hours. This is Dr. Talks. Welcome to Vitality Made Simple. This is the podcast that equips you to feel better, look better, and to enjoy better relationships. You know, life is all about relationships, but we want to do things to enhance those relationships. And I'm your host, Dr.

Debbie Osment, and I have a special guest for you today, someone who's going to make you feel better, look better, enjoy better relationships. Welcome, Dr. Laura Conover. Yay, I'm excited to be here. It's thrilling to have you here. And if you all are watching this on video, you'll see that what we're going to talk about really is a natural anti-aging strategy because Laura looks a good 20 years younger than she is. I thought she wasn't. and I found out that she's been out of school for 25 years.

Oh my goodness. So we're going to talk about grounding or earthing. I found Laura via her awesome book, The Earth Prescription. I was doing some research on earthing and came upon her. She has a robust website. So we're going to talk about a lot of fun things. So Laura, tell us, you know, as an MD, you worked hard in medical school, but obviously you sort of put aside the pharmaceutical model and said, okay, what can anybody do? Tell us about that. Yeah, you're so right. And it was a leap of faith because my body told me.

So I You know, went through the conventional, you know, medical school residency, that kind of thing. And I working in an office and then I became a mom and I took a leave of absence for a little while. And then when the kids were slightly older, I went back to working in the same clinical setting where it's, you know, 15 minutes and insurance bills and, you know, and I specifically remember having a young female, I mean, you know, young twenties or whatever. come in and she was looking for a refill in her birth control and just an annual exam.

So I did that. And the whole time now that I was a mom, I just thought, this is like a precious baby angel, you know, like my little daughter at home. And I think it's kind of weird that I like examined her body and gave her a prescription for, you know, birth control pills, which I am happy to do, but like I didn't even, I just had this feeling like I don't even know if she's safe. I don't know. You know what I'm saying? Like I don't know anything about her struggles right now. I don't know. It just, it was so offensive to me because I started thinking of patients as my kids, cause I had a daughter and a son and that I actually went in the bathroom and threw up.

And I thought, I can't live like this, because I'm a mom right now, and I got to go home energized. And I can't just make myself sick every day. So I left conventional medicine. And we can talk about if you want to next time. Actually, Clara, my daughter, is the one who helped me discover grounding for health. And so when I was then ready to re-enter in my power of holistic medicine and enhancing health as opposed to fire hosing illness, I had to do it with grounding involved, so there's just no way around it.

There's too much medical evidence that grounding is absolutely required if you want to live a long, healthy life. It's not negotiable, I don't feel. So that became my new practice, basically.

Why Dr. Conover Left Conventional Medicine 4:00

So how did your daughter's health figure into that? Okay, so I like crash and burn in the conventional world. So I went home and I snuggled with my babies and Clara had terrible, terrible colic, like just cried all the time, GI pain all the time, could not sleep. I mean, it was quite miserable. And the only time she could relax was when I was outside. I lived in Arizona at the time, so I was always barefoot, it was always pretty mild. And that's the only time. And so at first, of course, I thought like anyone would that she just likes fresh air or it's hearing the birds or, but if she was in the car seat with the windows down in fresh air, we were driving, no go, crying the whole time.

If she was in a stroller, same thing, crying the whole time. I really realized that I had to be holding her in my hands, skin to skin. And that's when it happened. And I knew it wasn't placebo effect. I knew it wasn't just that I was holding her because even if she was in a dead sleep, if I took both feet off the earth, So I became ungrounded and she became then ungrounded. She woke back up even in the middle of the sleep because the pain would return. The GI reflux and all of the symptoms that was making her cry in the first place would come back.

And it was just night and day. And it was just something that over time I just noticed month after month after. So eventually I looked it up in the medical literature. And even back then, Claire is 24 years old now. But even back then, there was a significant amount of medical literature on grounding. And I realized it's a real healing modality. And then retrospectively, I started realizing how that makes sense with what I learned in medical school. They just didn't call it that. So actually, every physician on earth knows that our body is electrical, but just none of them will talk about grounding.

So it's weird. Yeah, well, you know, you can't charge for grounding. And that's what I love about it, because everybody can do it. So for our listeners who may not really understand grounding or earthing, as it's sometimes called, and the whole electrical capacity of our bodies, please explain it. Okay, so I went through medical school and it was very clear that our whole body only functions well if it's electrically and conductively healthy. So everybody knows when they're looking to roll out a heart attack, they'll hook you up to an EKG and you'll watch that classic heartbeat.

You know, it's in every soap opera, right? That's looking at the body, the heart, it's natural conductivity. That's looking at the natural electrical output of the heart. It's a DC energy that they're measuring. If you had a stroke and actually at one point we had to rule out a seizure with my daughter and you get those electrodes or you're at a sleep lab, you can look at the same thing with a brain. I'm sure a lot of viewers are familiar with the brain wave patterns, right? So we know our brain operates electrically and we can monitor that, but we're always looking to rule out illness.

So we're looking for that stroke. We're ruling out that seizure. We're ruling out that heart attack. Same with muscular. issues we can measure the DC output of contracting a muscle and see if there's muscular issues. So we know and every healthcare provider on earth knows we monitor this body from head to toe electrically to make sure it's healthy. The flip is also true. So if it's not electrically healthy, you do not live in this earth suit. You know, the paddles for shocking the heart back. So everybody knows it.

It's not a big like woo woo thing. It's just factual base. We are electrical. What then people don't take a step further is we're not just going to try and wait until you have a problem with your electrical appliances, which is your heart and your brain and your muscles and actually every part of you. Uh, it's actually a boost to health, just like you would never buy a cell phone, run the battery down once and then toss it out, right? You just know you're going to plug it in to reboot it because all electrical appliances need, need to be rebooted with an electrical source.

So we have a lot of manmade versions that y'all, again, all your listeners will understand. I plug in my fridge or it won't work. I plug in my washer and dryer. It won't work. And our bodies, although they're totally natural, so they run off natural DC electricity. So it's nothing to do with the artificial appliances, but everyone understands. So again, making that leap between this is an enclosed electrical unit and it needs to be recalibrated time to time. So to my electrical appliances, they need to plug into man-made electrical output.

So that makes sense. So if you can cross the bridge between the two, grounding the human body is not something you want to do with man-made electrical appliances or circuits. You want to plug into the natural electrical output of the earth. So the earth has a DC energy. It's like a battery. It's a voltage that can be measured. It's always there. Even if you're not grounded, you're in it. It's great. It's wonderful. When we started sending human beings up in spaceships, they realized very quickly that you cannot sleep and you cannot think straight.

If you aren't in that, bathed in that earth's electrical soothing, that's like our womb environment, right? It's like hearing your mom's heartbeat when you're in utero. It's very comforting. And when we're taken out of that, our body doesn't really work very well. So they had to start putting on space shuttles, Schumann frequency generators that mimic the earth, just so they could sleep, just so they don't get depressed, just so they don't get anxious, just so their inflammation stays down.

Discovering Grounding Through Her Daughter 9:00

So that's all the time, even if you're not grounded, but you take it one step further by actually doing the plug-in. It's like plugging in your cell phone or your computer to recharge it. It requires touch. So there has to be direct touch between what some part of your body, cause it's all conducted, every inch of skin, everything. I could touch something with one fingertip. It's like I'm plugged in to the earth's natural DC energy. And then there is a host of reactions. Every single organ system in my entire body starts to go into a healing state.

Ask me about any organ system and we can go there because there's medical studies on every single one of them. And the great thing about it now we know is that these are not just, I went outside and I felt better because that's so multifactorial. That's the sun, that's the plant pheromones, that's the ions, that's so many other things. But there are double-blinded medical studies showing this healing response of the human body. double-blinded meaning some people are using a grounded mat that's actually grounded and grounds the human body so it has a cord with a ground state going to the earth and then some people are on a grounded mat they think it's grounded but it's not it's a sham cord and they're in the same lab or hospital they're in the same conditions for the same length of time doing the same health challenge whether it's like running on a treadmill or doing yoga or lifting weights or sleeping in a sleep study.

And the patient doesn't know if they're grounded or not. The scientist taking the cortisol levels or examining the brainwaves, they don't know if they're grounded or not. And then the person analyzing the data doesn't know if it's grounded or not. So it's blinded in multiple levels so that we know the results are specifically and only because of grounding, because that's the only difference is if they're grounded or not. Otherwise, all parameters are the same. And so that's how hugely impactful it is for our electrical earth suit to be grounded because, again, we can go in and measure so many different systems of the body and we know with just that one variable being changed, whether the cord is grounded or sham grounded, all of these health results start to multiply.

So I hope that they'll change the medical education to be not just, let's look at an EKG to rule out a heart attack, but let's look at an EKG grounded to show repair. or to show stability, to show the boost in heart rate variability, et cetera. And we can do that with every organ system. So I do think it warrants its own field of medicine, which I have coined conductive medicine. And I hope in my lifetime there is conductive medicine being taught, but I don't know if that is going to be the case.

Because like you said, there's no profit in it. Yes, but people are getting sicker and sicker and sicker. So I think, I mean, even like you being willing to come on Vitality Made Simple, people are going to find out and they can help themselves. So you mentioned inflammation with the astronauts and I'm sure there's plenty of studies. Tell us about what you've seen in terms of chronic inflammation improvement. Mm-hmm. So if you're trying this on your own as an experiment and you don't necessarily have labs, there's a couple of parameters you can test on your own if you decide.

And I have an e-book that you can, but you don't even need to read that, but it's free. It's about, give me 10 days, 10 minutes a day for 10 days at sea. So you do a baseline, you go out just 10 minutes a day. We can talk about all these different kinds of grounding techniques. You can do it in the middle of the winter, you can do it in the city. You got this for sure. And then in 10 days sea and things you would, Just roughly go by to see if maybe inflammation was paying a key. Is there any pain decreasing?

Is frequency of headache decreasing? Is depression lifting? All of these things are inflammatory related. So that's one way just as your listeners could track that. But in the lab, yeah, there's lots of concrete evidence that taking blood samples before and after grounding, that whole body inflammation goes down. And that just has amazing ramifications like long-term if we're doing this for a lifetime, if we're teaching our kids now and moving forward with this for a lifetime. So there's something called C-reactive protein that drops by about 30%. That is a marker of your entire body's inflammation from head to toe.

30% is more than any medication we have to lower inflammation. That's more than any anti-inflammatory you could take as a medication. That's because it's direct. One of the cool things about grounding is if I take, say, Advil, To decrease inflammation, I have to let it absorb. I have to let it be digested in my digestive tract. I have to absorb it through my digestive tract. So if I have irritable bowel, an inflammatory bowel, or any kind of autoimmune conditions, or my bowel is celiac, whatever, then already It's not probably good to take that because you're hurting your gut lining.

Then it depends on my circulatory system to take that medication and distribute it all throughout my body, hoping some of it goes to where I actually need it. And then I have to wait to see if there's an effect. And so now I'm taking a medication and depending on my whole body systems to deliver that medication and get the result I want. But grounding is electrical, so it doesn't depend on any of it. One cell being grounded grounds my entire body from head to toe. Skip the digestive tract, skip the circulatory system, my entire body, even areas of inflammation or areas of infection, they're all still conductive.

So the second, like flipping a light switch on, that's how quick it is because it's like electricity, I get grounded. I'm not waiting a half hour or an hour for Extendron to work on my headache. I'm immediately, instantaneously grounded from head to toe and there's no barrier. It doesn't matter if I have an artificial hip. It doesn't matter if I have an abscess that's walled off by connective tissue or scar tissue. It doesn't matter because that scar tissue will get grounded. My whole body will get grounded.

My cerebrospinal fluid will get grounded. Like everything will get grounded. So it's very quick to work. So going back to the markers, the C-reactive protein shows that this works head to toe by about 30% to decrease independent of taking anything, doing anything else. If you look at inflammatory markers of muscles and muscle contractions, there's something called creatinine kinase. It's an enzyme. If you have like a lot of exertion, you'll notice those markers rise as your muscles are inflammatory and they have wear and tear and then they have to rebuild.

How Grounding Works in the Body 15:00

But those markers go down. And the last one is, that's the most important, is everyone's heard about inflammatory cytokines, right? Especially during COVID, that's all our cytokines storm. Well, inflammatory cytokines are one of the main drivers of aging. They age, it ages all of your organ systems. It's related to dementia over time, cancers over time, infection and... Over time, the body's response, it crosses your blood-brain barrier. It gives rise to depression. There's just a lot of things that inflammatory cytokines do that harm our body.

And grounding has been shown to decrease inflammatory cytokines. So it makes you better at responding to infection. It decreases your dementia risk. It decreases. It helps you sleep better because you have less inflammation, boosts mood. There's just so many different ways that inflammatory cytokines, you want to keep them low because that's a driver of aging. Inflammatory cytokines are so bad, it actually reduces your stem cells. So it reduces your body's ability to renew itself. So we can keep those low and we can keep those low for decades.

My body is retaining the ability to renew itself decades longer. So I've increased my health span, not just maybe my lifespan, but my wellness span within my lifespan. And that's, I think, the key to healthy aging, like you had mentioned earlier. It's so exciting, Laura, because when you think about decreasing cytokines, that's going to improve blood sugar, that's going to improve natural killer cells. They're part of cancer resistance. So how do you recommend that people get started? I think your 10 minutes for 10 days is fantastic.

So maybe make a list of every potential complaint and what methods do you recommend? So you could write down your starting weight because grounding naturally boosts your metabolism. So most people get about a pound a week weight loss if they need to lose weight. And if you're underweight, you generally will gain some weight because it normalizes your metabolism to a healthy set point. Write down your average sleep pattern, how much sleep you get. Write down any pain you might have. And if you have lab values, you know your blood pressure or whatever because it does help with lowering blood pressure if you have high blood pressure.

There's a lot of different things that you could just write, like you said, a complaint list and just one to 10 on each of them, your mood, your libido, all these kinds of things. And then 10 minutes a day, maybe longer if you can, but I'm saying at least 10 minutes a day, grounding your body from head to toe. Ideally going out in the morning, if that's possible. But if it's not, it doesn't matter. You can do it at night right before bed. I have like a couple different routines I do every day so that I know I'm getting that five minutes here, five minutes there, five minutes there, five minutes there.

So I know each day I'm doing about 20 minutes of grounding. And then just give it 10 days. I mean, give it two weeks if you can. And then go back to your baseline because it is subtle. It's natural. So the Earth's energy field is magnitudes more gentle than a man-made electrical field. So a man-made electrical field is 10 to 100,000 times stronger than the earth. So when we're having this artificial lifestyle and it's stressing our bodies out, it just is going to take a while and it is going to be subtle.

I mean, some people find pain relief. Like if I'm getting a tension headache because my muscles are tight, I'll feel the relief. So it can have immediate results. But if we're looking for long-term wellness, it tends to be subtle and cumulative. So that's why doing a baseline is really necessary because you might not know in 10 days, oh, I slept 30 minutes more, but if I wrote it down, I probably will. Or, oh, I lost a pound last week and I didn't change anything else, you know, that kind of thing.

Or, wow, I was, my wrist, I have carpal tunnel and I just noticed I never even took Advil for it last week. You have to write it down or you might not put two and two together, but that's what I would recommend. Oh, that's terrific. Okay, so then what do you do when you go out to side to do grounding? Are you barefooted? Are you laying in the grass? You know, we want to know everything. Okay. So unfortunately I don't have a backyard. I have a teeny tiny front yard and my dog has pooped in it way too much so I'm not laying in that.

And also I'm a wuss with the cold and I hate it. So typically not even barefoot unless I happen to have the luxury of being by the lake or by a beach. But typically no. I'm not walking around my neighborhood sidewalks with bare feet because I will get a glass shard or fire ants or spit. I don't need to step in it. So I typically ground through hands, which is great as the winter is coming up, because your hand is just as conductive. One fingertip is just as conductive as your whole foot. Or even the side of your cheek, even if you're totally bundled up, just leaning your cheek on anything.

In an urban setting, pretty much everything is grounded. All sidewalk is grounded. all metal poles, signposts, even like the crosswalk little button that you push. I've tested it with my ground test meter. If I'm just waiting across the street and I just rest my hand on that pole, I'm grounded. You know, just take three deep breaths. Any tree or bush growing out of the earth is grounded. All plumbing is grounded. So when I go in my office, I'm going to wash my hands because I probably touch things along the way in the parking lot, right?

And so I got some grounding outside, then I go inside and every water stream coming out of every faucet, including your bathtub, including your sink. Have you ever noticed you feel a little bit better? You were grumbling and fighting with your partner maybe, but then you did the dishes and you feel a little bit less irritated because you were grounded while you were doing those dishes. When you take a bath at night, a lot of people love baths and some of it's because it's warm or you put some Epsom salts in it, but a lot of it people don't realize is because that's a 10 minute or 15 minute grounding session.

So it's great to do before bed. So my routines. I like, you can also ground with indoor grounding tools, which we can talk about next if you like, but I use those typically when I want longer periods of grounding. So if I have the flu, I don't feel good, cramps, whatever, headache, I have a migraine, I'll use indoor grounding tools. Like I have a little grounding blanket, a grounding hot water bottle, a grounding bed pad that I sleep on if I want to. But mostly I just want to go outside. It's just, I want to go outside.

So I have like cement and sidewalks are all grounded, I have in my garage, it's a cement slab. And a lot of people have basements that are like this too. In the winter, I'm gonna give you tips for like, if you're wuss about the cold, cause I hate the cold. So in the winter, I have my garage set up with a cement slab is exposed. So I don't have a rug on top of it, but I have a chair and I have a space heater and I bring a book out or my laptop and my feet are on the cement slab. That's the only time I really ground through my feet is honestly there because it's temperature controlled, cause I have the garage shut.

And I'm grounded while I read, while I do some yoga stretches, while I catch up on my computer. I don't love mixing, you know, manmade and grounding at the same time. It's not great, but it's better than not doing it at all. So that is my go-to usually in the morning or I'll have a cup of coffee in my garage. Sometimes on my little front stoop if it's really warm, but I'm talking about winter. And then when I drive to the office, I will, I have just a metal pole so I can have my shoes on. I can be in my work attire and I'm just gonna, I think it's like a handicap sign and I park right next to it and then I just hold onto that.

And I take three deep breaths while I look up at the sky. You wanna get a little bit of sunlight on your face. And then I go in and I wash my hands. That's more grounding. And then I try, this is ideal and I don't always do it, but I try to take one meal outside to eat grounded because grounding instantly boosts your metabolism and it takes inflammation away from your whole digestive tract. So I typically get nauseous really easily and I find eating grounded, I'm not nauseous. And I also am more in touch with what I'm eating, so I'm satiated more.

So if it's breakfast, if it's my lunch, on lunch break I'll go out, there's a little brick patio and brick, you could be grounded right through brick. Or if it's my dinner, I don't necessarily have the time to cook outside, but I might just take it from my kitchen and just sit on my front doorstep and eat with my feet on the sidewalk or holding onto a, I have a couple little trees in my front yard, I'll hold onto a leaf. And then lastly, if I went through the whole day and I didn't do any of that, it was just hectic crazy.

I will go outside right before I go up to bed, I'll have slippers on, it's not gonna be through my feet, I have a robe on, sometimes I'll even microwave a little heating pad and put it around my neck, you know, those little rice packs. So I'm warm, I'm toasty, I got hot chocolate or my hot tea, but I will go outside and hold, whether it's an evergreen tree in the winter, a little pine needle or a leaf, if it's... right now in the fall or a bush or even a metal signpost you know the little stop sign at the end of my street if I just and I look up at the moon and

Inflammation, Pain, and Health Benefits 23:00

I'm like okay take me away from this like little give me this bird's eye view of like I'm okay I'm in a wondrous on a wondrous planet spinning through space and I'm just going to take a couple deep breaths so I look up at the moon or I look up at the stars And instantly, your muscle tension decreases, your brainwave pattern shifted to a relaxed brainwave state, the digestion starts flowing, your cortisol decreases, and now I'm ready for bed. So if I go through the whole day and I haven't done snippets, but I mean, I wash my hands all day long, so I get a lot of grating just through washing my hands.

And another thing would be a bath. Don't want to go outside, thunder and lightning or whatever, while I don't take a bath during lightning. If it's snow, I don't get much snow in the Carolinas, but if it's just miserable outside, a bath is my go-to grounding right before bed. But I'm going to ground 10 minutes before bed no matter what. Wow, Laura. Okay, so I want to clarify a few things. Do you wear special shoes? I mean, I've always thought grounding had to be barefooted. No, not at all. Any part of your body is, like I said, hands are so easy because you can put like little microwave heating pads in your pockets and you can switch your hands.

So much easier than slipping shoes off and on, getting your feet dirty, washing your feet, putting socks off and on. No, I typically never ever again, unless I'm like on vacation or I'm at a park and it's just so pretty and there's no dog poop and I don't think they sprayed any chemical like typically I'm not thinking about my feet I'm typically using my hands or even resting against a tree or just a sign post like I said any part of your body besides your hair is conductive so if my tip of my nose touched a leaf if I mean that's unrealistic but it could you know if I was doing yoga outside and I was in child's pose and my forehead laid on the ground I'm grounded and you know it only takes like one cell in your body to ground your entire body from head to toe.

So you don't have to be like laying on the beach in a bathing suit. If you're bundled up in winter gear or on a picnic blanket that's plastic and you're taking a nap, if you just put one fingertip over the edge, your whole body is just as grounded as if you were buried in the earth. It's very easy because like I said, our entire body only functions off of conductivity. It doesn't work if we're not being electroconductive. So it's very easy to get grounded. It's any fluid in your body, any cell in your body, any organ system in your body.

So what's accessible to us on the outside is skin, but on the inside, everything instantly becomes grounded. Your bloodstream, your plasma in your bloodstream, your cerebrospinal fluid, your brain, your heart, your liver, your kidneys, your bladder. you know, all the muscles in your body, even your skeleton. And even on a microscopic level, the plasma inside each cell and the membrane, the cell membrane, that's all electrical. So it instantly becomes grounded. There's even something called a cytoskeleton that gives your cell shape so it doesn't go flat.

So it's just microtubules that are like collagen-based basically that make you be 3D. And that's just like a, it's like a fibroactive system. So you touch anything to anything grounded, the earth's crust, anything living, out like a tree that's rooted in the earth, anything conductive like a metal stake, which gives us rise to indoor grounding tools because you can put a ground stake and run a cord into your door. But anything like that, like rocks will ground you, pavers, brick, you can get grounded through almost every surface outside, even in an urban setting, and you can get grounded in your home through pretty much any plumbing.

So one of the big tips I give people is if they travel, every hotel that you ever stay at that has like a hot tub or swimming pool even if it's on the 20th floor and it's like in a you know very urban setting so there's like no nature at all. If you have jet lag and you can't go outside and just touch a tree or sit on the sidewalk and put your hand on it for a minute, then just go check into your hotel and if you could take a quick swim or at least a bath, you will instantly reset your body to that time zone.

I mean, there's so many things we could talk about because the Earth's energy informs our brain of what time it is, what season we're in, and it also is cohesive with our brain in the part of our brain that provides meaning. And so we can talk about that next if you want to, but it's a reset. So if you travel, make sure you get grounded in some way, even if it's, again, just going to your hotel room and taking a bath before bed. You will get reoriented to that new time zone. Jet lag, treating jet lag was one of the original things that people discovered grounding for because it really, really works.

And you have simplified it so much, Dr. Laura. Thank you. So tell us about how the brain reacts. So this is amazing. So again, there's no shortage of medical studies now. We've known since the 1920s, so well before any of us were alive, that there's something called the Carnegie curve, an electrical output, and it's called the Carnegie curve because it was a ship called the Carnegie and it went all around the earth, measuring the electrical output of the earth, the DC, natural electrical output of the earth.

And they notice it's a 24-hour pattern. No matter what time zone you're in, it's oriented to that time zone, 24-hour pattern. It's also seasonal. It's an elliptical shape. So it orients yourself to what season it is. And it's a lot of the guidance system that animals use, obviously, to know when they're on the earth, what time zone, and what season they're in. So it's orienting. But now, obviously, fast forward over 100 years, And then you have, now with medical technology, we can ground people and have people sham grounded so they don't know if they're grounded or not, nor do the people reading the MRIs, and hook people up to monitor the electrical output of the earth, the Schumann frequency, and watch people on functional MRI and see if there's any synchronicity between our brain output and the earth's output.

And of course there is, because our brain when it's in a healing state, when we're in deep sleep, when we do prolonged meditation, or when we're grounded, which is the easiest one for me because insomnia is terrible for me. And meditation, I don't got the bandwidth for that. So the easiest thing is to get grounded. It puts your body and your brain in the same healing state as if I'm in deep restorative sleep or if I've meditated for like two straight hours. So you get grounded and your brain goes into that healing state and that is the same wave pattern as what's coming out of the earth, that DC energy.

It's a match. So now they're looking at the brain, where is it the highest match? And so now what we know is it's the highest match in something called the parahippocampal gyrus in your cerebral cortex. That part of the brain is an early indicator for Alzheimer's because that part of the brain, so it shrinks before you get symptoms in Alzheimer's. So that part of the brain is the part that provides meaning. So when I could be looking at a bunch of women. and understand, oh, this is a bunch of females, but I wouldn't know which one was my daughter if I had had a stroke there or if that was advanced Alzheimer's.

Or I could be standing in a parking lot and I could see all the cars and I know they're cars. I mean, I could put a label on it probably because it's not that I can't identify things, but the meaning, the contextual meaning in my life, which one is my car? How am I gonna drive home? You know, where do I go to get into my car? What does my key match to? It's the part that provides meaning. It's a very orienting, not only to time and space, obviously on our planet, and resets our earth suit, but also to meaning in my life.

How to Start Grounding Daily 30:00

So I always tell my kids, don't ever make a big life decision indoors. Don't ever make a big life decision indoors. Every surface is artificial, unless you happen to be in a bath, I guess. The temperature's artificial. The electrical output we're surrounded with is artificial. You're really not in your real body. You're not really assessing what's meaningful to you. what feels right for you, what is synchronistic for you, unless you are outside. So you go outside, you get grounded, and then that part of your brain pings, and the earth pings information there, and they show.

It's in the same magnitude that it doesn't interrupt cognitive thoughts. So it's not like if you're outside, you can't think straight because you're getting all these pings. It's small so that it doesn't interrupt cognition, but it's at the frequency where it's just always a reminder. It pings and decays, pings and decays, and it's just enough for subconscious thought. So if you've ever felt like you went out on a hike or you laid down on the grass and took a nap or you went in the bathtub and all of a sudden you started having solutions, you know, you're mulling over something, writing to-do lists, inside frustrated, don't know what to do, but then you have this clarity.

You're not even thinking about it. You go on a walk and you're like, you know what? I'm going to do this or that. Because you have unlocked now this part of your brain that realigned you with what's important to you. And it provides so many more solutions than you can give yourself muscling through it inside. So it's just amazing. And hopefully there's going to be tons more research on it. But that's what we know so far about the electrical output of the earth and how that recalibrates what's meaningful to us.

Well, and that's enough research, Laura. You know what I'm saying? I mean, that's enough. People can try it for themselves. They can know. And it makes so much sense to me, according to our design, you know, how our bodies are designed. Life was in a garden, started in a garden. So it really is congruent with everything. So yesterday, this is so interesting. I went for a walk and I'm working on this book and I'm like, I gotta get outside. I walked two miles on asphalt and my shoes, I don't, I mean, I guess I thought they had to be leather.

I'm not touching trees. I'm not touching anything, but they might be leather cells. I don't know, but you can tell us about that. Anyway, after that two miles, I came home and I was just like downloading all these ideas and clarity. And you know, it's like you said, the sunshine and movement, but Clarify, I guess I've been wanting a pair of leather moccasins because I thought, okay, if I wear leather moccasins for my walks, then I'm really connecting. What do you think? So, but I don't want to bust your bubble because I 100% what you're saying about getting out there you're in the earth's electrical predominantly in the earth's natural human frequency, even when you're not grounded.

That is affecting your brain and recalibrating you in a way that it cannot reach you inside because when you're inside that lamp my computer this that this my coffee maker my fridge mini fridge. It's, again, it's 10 to 100,000 times stronger than that earth's energy. So there's no way that that's reaching me when I'm inside. So just going outside, even not grounding, is a million percent a great idea. But I don't know, it's tough because there's, so the one earth surface outside that, if it's worn, you probably can get grounded through it.

But if they just laid it, you're not going to, is asphalt because that black is like plastic. So it's tar. So you do want to stick to sidewalks if possible. And then with shoes, it's just tough because there's been so, if there's enough moisture, you can ground right through leather, like you said. So if people have leather moccasins, leather slippers, that's a great idea. However, it has to have a lot of moisture and you also have to make sure that it doesn't have a layer of plastic because unfortunately how shoes are made these days is glue.

So they just stick a layer of glue and then put an insole and another layer of glue. So if it's truly leather, and just made with just that one layer, then yeah, people can get grounded through it. A lot of people do Tai Chi in their special socks and through the thin fabric socks. You're usually in the park grounded. They're usually grounded when they're doing Tai Chi. If you're on like a cotton picnic blanket, you're probably grounded right through the blanket. So I'm not saying you were or were grounded possibly, but it's not a sure thing.

So I don't necessarily like people taking guesses with their foot. But there's a couple of ways around it. So one, one of my favorite products that I do have custom made. So everything that I offer, I didn't use to offer any grounding tools at all because I'm like, you got to get outside. I mean, you just have to get away from the artificial at some point. But it's not really fair because there's a lot of people with mobility issues or the people who are recovering from something and you can't just go outside and walk barefoot.

No, they can't even don't have the mobility to go barefoot, can't bend down, you know, that kind of thing. So sometimes that's limiting to people who need it the most. So I have a limited selection of eco-friendly, ethically made grounding tools for people who are in a healing state and need to be in a healing state longer than just a couple of minutes here and there. So my favorite thing is my grounded hiking stick. It's solid wood and it has recycled copper going all the way up into the handle.

So you can grab through your hands without worrying about your feet if you use a little walking stick that's grounding you. And then the other thing, there are a lot of companies that do create grounding shoes. Off the top of my head, there's Raum, which is R-A-U-M. There's Harmony 7-8-3, I think. There's grounds with a Z. On my website, if you go to my blog and you type in grounding shoes, I do a review of a bunch of them. They're very hit or miss depending on what socks you're using. So if you are using grounding shoes, I would say don't even wear socks.

Just have skin touching whatever rivet or whatever conductive element they have inside it. If you want to wear socks, I'd probably just, again, focus on hands. And then again, there has to be moisture involved. So a lot of times if you test it, like I've tested all these with my ground test meter, I might not be grounded right away putting them on, but after I've walked a mile, there's sweat. It's the natural design of our human body, right? We have the most dense glands on our feet, in our hands, in our armpits, but that's third.

And that's to make a little bit of moisture makes you highly conductive. And then also on your feet, your body weight, the pressure ensures contact. So that's why feet are easy because your body weight and then the gentle moisture that it always, even if you feel like your feet are dry, they're not, they're always producing a little bit of micro amount of sweat. And that makes you so conductive. And again, I think that's part of God's design is not a coincidence that all the surfaces used to touch and connect with the earth naturally are the ones that are most highly conductive.

So anyway, Sometimes when you test things, if you have a ground test meter, you might not instantly be tested through grounding shoes, but if you're given enough pressure and enough walking for a few minutes, you typically will. And just to be a little bit more eco-friendly, instead of buying a new pair of shoes, or if you have an orthotic insert, or you play sports like you want to be grounded while you're playing soccer or while you're playing rugby or whatever it is, running, jogging, there are shoe stickers and I have those on my website where it's just a long conductive strip.

You just peel the sticker off, put it on the bottom of your shoe, wrap it around to the inside. You don't have to buy a new shoe. It's just a sticker and it's so much cheaper and it's so much more eco-friendly than like consuming, you know, more pairs of shoes. So if that way, you know, some people will be like, I want to ground my slippers because I always go out and have my coffee outside. Awesome. I want to ground the shoes that I walk my dog. Why if I'm walking my dog on the sidewalk, would I not want to be grounded all the time?

Awesome. Just get these little stickers. And they come in a two pack. So honestly, you can use that on two sets of shoes because you're so conductive, especially if you're ever standing, you don't really need both feet grounded. You just one will grind your whole body, right? So if you're running, you might want to do both shoes just so that every time your foot hits, you're grounded. But if you walk slowly or if you stand a lot while your dog's doing their business or whatever, you can use one set of shoe stickers on two shoes.

So I think that's probably the easiest way to experiment with grounding for your feet. And that is a fantastic stocking stuffer. I did. I mean, that is wonderful. So for our listeners, I know you have a lot of great information on your website, including all this research, but I noticed that you're going to have

Grounding Methods, Shoes, and Indoor Tools 38:00

a retreat. Tell us about your retreats. Yes, so this is my newest thing because it's one thing to do consultations or to put out... I put out so much free information in my newsletter, on my blog each week, that kind of stuff. And I try to do a lot of outreach because your physician is probably not going to be educating you about this. They know it, but they haven't thought it through and they're focused very narrowly on what they're focused on, which is fine, but they just haven't taken that minute.

So you're not likely to hear it. So I do try and put out so much free content. Um, so that, which is great, but if you want to take it up a notch, it was just not enough for people who really need in-person help. And so I just started doing retreats. So now I do them about once a season and I do have a fall retreat coming up in November. It's November 9th through the 11th. And I just ran out the entire little cabin, little, um, campsite in North Carolina and you get your own little cabin, your own bathroom, your own bedroom, your own little fire pit.

And then we just meet a couple times a day and we do grounding sessions together, lots of live Q&A. I'm right there for you 24-7 to really help you take that. And I like doing it, I do every season, so I have a winter one, I have a summer one, but my favorites are the spring and fall because that is when it's natural for your body to do that reset. Your body's going through that transition. Now we're switching from, you know, we're past the fall equinox, so it's getting darker. It's the perfect time to release.

the perfect time to start going inward, the perfect time to get rid of inflammation, the perfect time to surrender and start nurturing. And again, in the spring, it's the perfect time to start wakening up. It's the perfect time to start optimizing. So I just love fall and spring. So if you have anyone have any room in their schedule and want to just have a full reset, I'd love to see you on retreat. That'd be amazing. Oh, that sounds glorious. Tell us Dr. Laura about some of your big success stories or some things that really shocked you.

I mean, so many over the years, but I think the thing I hear the most that people are shocked by are that it does optimize how your body runs. So people who do everything under the sun to try and change their metabolism, lose a little weight, start sleeping better, that kind of thing, they just get a reset when they start doing grounding because everything else you do is it's still a missing piece. So I can eat organic pressed juice all day long and that optimizes my nutrition. I can breathe filtered, wonderful, clean air all day long, drink great hydration.

But if I am not nurturing and resetting my electrical earth suit, there is just no substitute. There's no substitute. There's no other thing that will electrically recalibrate your heart and your brain and your blood pressure and your metabolism and your cortisol and your sleep. Nothing. So the biggest thing I think is when I get, cause I do get a lot of patients who are incredibly healthy because they're open to holistic healing modalities. So they do the meditation and they do all this organic food and they're empathic and they take on other people's energy and they just really struggle and they're like, what else could I possibly do?

I take so many great supplements. I'm up on my health. My physician says, I'm 20 years younger and like all my labs are good and everything. I feel crappy. I can't sleep. I just feel crap. And so that is a major reset because if you have done 90% of your pie and everything's optimized, but you still just something's missing and you don't even feel like you're oriented on this planet, you know, like your brain fog is coming and everything's slowing down and pain is accruing. That is because you're missing that electrical component.

So I have had people just have tremendous success with their cortisol and with insomnia releasing. And mostly people are so thrilled when they've done it for a month or two and they're like, I just lost five pounds and I didn't change anything else. I just started grouting and not that, you know, weight is this. But I mean, it is like real proof that my whole body is running better. So that, and then on a more specific basis, like I definitely had patients who struggle with pain, like migraines that have gone down in half that no medication was able to touch.

I've had patients who had pain, like I had mentioned carpal tunnel before. I hear that a lot there. They had said a surgery scheduled and they start grounding and a couple of weeks later they cancel their surgery. It just does not, it's not as tight. It's not as inflamed and the pain just isn't there. So yeah. And like with my daughter, it was very dramatic. The minute we were grounded, she could sleep. And she was out of pain. And the minute we weren't, man, she was, she was miserable. So was I.

So there's just a lot of dramatic stories like that. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I've noticed that Laura with my granddaughter, just going out, they have a gorgeous garden and just letting her, I mean, holding her face myself, letting her touch things. And she just, whew, just relax. It's just, you know, you can see it. You can just see it on her body and feel it holding her. You mentioned cortisol. You mentioned a drop in cortisol. And I think we live in this cortisol nation where people are just running too high all the time.

I had a patient who is like a person you described who is doing everything right. She's very proactive, but she comes in and she's like, Dr. Debbie, I just don't feel good. And so my recommendation, really just thinking from a relaxation standpoint, I told her to get a lawn chair and go sit by the lake, take her shoes off, put her feet on the ground and count her blessings. You know, look at the sky and realize the value of the world. And that really helped her. So that was sort of a multimodality, but the grounding was certainly a big part of it.

How does this all become enhanced with the ocean, with saltwater? So, grounding is grounding. So, if you're not lucky enough to live near the ocean, don't think like it's less grounding if I'm holding a leaf or less grounding if I'm standing outside. I mean, your whole body does, because you can be in a lab with just a cord touching the earth and then your body, and your body goes into the healing state that Over 50 years now if these double-blind medical studies have been showing so I don't want to discourage anyone from not grinding But yes, just like sweat.

I mean we're producing sweat so that we're more conductive When we're touching the earth's surfaces and so the ocean is the most highly conductive saltwater is it's like an electrolytic solution It's like your cerebral spinal fluid and I think it's any coincidence that your brain is sitting in a bath of basically ocean water, right and to be that quickly grounded to change and to give you sleep, to give you relief, to shift your mind, to shift your brain wave patterns that quickly. I mean, that's the ocean is like basically waiting there as an electrolytic grounded solution.

I mean, if you can go in that, you know you feel like a new human being, you know you do. Yeah, well, I was trying to find a good excuse to go to the ocean. Yeah, that's a good one. And you know, it really is. If you, I tell people, if you're going to take a vacation anyway, why would you not make it around grounding? I mean, that's really legitimate. So that is an excuse to go to a place that's a beach related, lake related, river related, or forest, mountains, that kind of thing. And you know, we've known this like intuitively people feel better.

That's why those are destination spots. I mean, pretty much any destination site you can think of is a spot where people more easily get grounded than when they're You know, so it's intuitive as well as now medically validated.

Brain Effects, Meaning, and Decision-Making 45:00

That reminded me of, say, camping. So we have been big boy scouters. And you know, you hike for 10 days or whatever, carry a pack. You've got shoes, hiking boots on. You're in nature, but you're not really touching anything in that, you know, maybe you are sitting around the campfire. But then at night, sleeping in a tent that is a plastic tent, Basically, it's not grounding, correct? Correct, yeah. Unfortunately. So a lot, if you can make use of being warmer around a campfire and touch, sit on a rock or sit, you know, maybe you're on a camp chair, but you slip your foot off, that would be great.

You can get outdoors. So I carry a lot of different ways when you're traveling to get grounded. So you can get an easy fix, very inexpensive, is to get a little ground stake and push it into the earth right outside your tent and just bring the cord in. And you could just hold the end of the cord that has a little alligator clip. You could clip it to like your bra strap and then you're grounded all night. Or you can get, I mean, sleeping bags and bed rolls and mats and such so that you can be grounded in a tent or grounded in your home.

So I mean, but yeah, you're right. Like that's the thing is that people, you are still outside in that healing energy, but if you're not grounded, there's not an electrical point of contact. So you're not getting the electrons in that make the difference. medically to your health. But again, there's still a lot of benefits for being outside. So I would never discourage anyone from being outside. But you do have to question, is any part of my body ever actually touching any part of the earth? Because you can be an avid hiker or a bicyclist or something and never, never touch the earth.

That's why Tour de France athletes, lots of them stop when they do stop. they will touch the earth. They will sit on the ground. They'll sit on a rock or they'll rehydrate and they'll take that minute because again, it's a reboot and they can get back on and keep going. There's a lot of athletes. I know Aaron Rodgers is pretty infamous for grounding. Tom Brady said he used grounding for recovery. So there's a lot of athletes, a lot of long distance runners who will incorporate grounding, but you have to be intentional because you're not just by default grounded anymore in the way we live.

We're very insulated even when we're outside, we're insulated. So yes, being intentional about any part of your body touching any part of the earth. You can't just assume that you're grounded, unfortunately, these days. Yeah, it's something intentional, but it's something free. It's something accessible. It's something that's immediately beneficial, as well as long-term beneficial. I mean, gee, why not? Yeah. Now, you have on your website also a masterclass. Tell us about that. Yeah, so the Shift Network had asked me to put on a comprehensive class for people who more than just experiment, you know, kind of vaguely heard of it, but they really want to know more or they're a practitioner and they want to be able to talk about it and reference medical studies and that kind of thing.

Because again, Decades now of double-blinded medical studies showing system by system. So I did that. It's a seven week long course. Every single week, it's an hour and a half class. We go through like one organ system. We'll just tackle sleep or we'll just tackle metabolism or we'll just tackle digestive health or we'll just tackle hormones. That kind of thing. And so we just go system by system. I tell you all about the medical literature and then I give you tons of fun free printables that you can use if you're a practitioner like tracking guides.

You know, we're talking about the musculoskeletal health. I'll do a live exercise where we're exercising so you can feel the difference when you're exercising grounded, first ungrounded, that kind of thing. Eating, we do a mindful eating practice. So you can really feel the difference when you're grounded in your digestive tract right then and there. And we just go through all the different organ systems in just under two months. And then you really feel like you are very well-rounded to practice it, but also share it with others.

That just sounds fantastic. I mean, that could be for any just proactive group. You don't have to be a physician. No. Oh, no, no, not at all. Just, you know, say a friend group that wants to say, okay, let's get healthier together. Let's go through these classes. Yeah, like a book club kind of thing. And then we just, you know, talk each week about the different modalities and how that has impacted you. Or maybe it hasn't and you're frustrated when you want to troubleshoot and there's a lot of troubleshooting in that class.

That's good. It's certainly anti-aging, because folks, when you see Laura, I'm astounded that you've been at middle school for 25 days. I mean, I feel like, I might do whole body grounding. Absolutely. So I want everyone to look at Laura's book, The Earth Prescription. She also is an artist. She has some very relaxing art on her website, and she's written a children's book that I've got ordered for my granddaughter, who's only six months old, but you know, gotta be ready. And so so check that all out Dr.

Laura Conover is someone you want to get to know you want to learn from her her heart is so pure she's you as I researched you as I told her off-camera

Retreats, Success Stories, and Resources 50:00

and I would love to be her neighbor because she just wants to live life to the fullest and and harness The natural things that God's given us to help us feel good and look good and have better relationships Absolutely. Thank you so, so much for taking the time to invite me on your show and for me to share this somewhat woo woo topic. But as I hope your listeners have found out now that it's just, it's not at all. It's just literally factual, fact-based. So I just love that you were open to that and you're sharing that and really thank you.

I appreciate it. You're welcome. It's absolutely factual. Years ago, I read Dr. Sinatra's book called Earthing and it just makes sense. I mean, I hear an outdoor person and it makes sense. So Laura, in closing, tell our listeners about your website. You are the intuition physician. So tell them how to find you. So my website is intuition-physician.com because when I went back from being with Clara and figuring out grounding and I'm like, I'm not doing conventional medicine. I wanted it to be very clear.

And like you said, I pay, I do some intuitive work. So I do have like a very, like a wide, holistic, wide lens. So I thought that was kind of catchy. So intuitionphysician.com. And now I'm more specifically focused on grounding, but still from a holistic point of view. So you can find information on the retreats, on my book, on those eco-ethical grounding tools if that interests you, but also just free videos. I mean, thousands of blog posts over the past 15 years I've written. You could type any topic into the search bar and it's going to come up with some kind of blog post.

you know, online dispensary of supplements, just all that stuff. And if you want to contact me, there's a contact me page. So I'd love for people to meet me on my website, maybe sign up for the newsletter and just get my weekly uplifting blog post. That would be great. Yes, that would be great. That's how I found you. So thank you and thank you listeners. We're now in, I don't know, 150 countries and 1000 cities. And that's because you're sharing. Please join me on Instagram. We're having lots of fun there.

And look at all Laura's sites. Share this with everybody. This can help everybody. And, you know, I go to her website. I think there's some good stocking stuff or ideas, just gifts for people that she loved that want to feel better without spending a lot of money and just having fun being outside. So thank you again, Laura, and thank you listeners. Blessings until next time. Thank you for tuning into Dr. Talks. We hope today's episode has enlightened and inspired you on your path to optimal health.

Each day is a new opportunity to make choices that empower your well-being. For more insights and strategies, subscribe to our podcast and visit our website, www.doctortalks.com. Stay connected, stay healthy, and join us next time on Doctor Talks, Real Talks from Real Doctors, on the issues that matter to you most.