Can You Relate?

You’re out for dinner with a friend and you can’t focus on the conversation

You’ve been searching everywhere for your car keys and realize they are in your hand

You are racking your brain for a word. It’s a simple one and it’s on the tip of your tongue, but you just can’t find it.

You know you have a thousand things to do, and you can’t seem to remember what any of them are

Your head is fuzzy and you feel completely disconnected from the world around you

You can’t remember conversations you had yesterday

You feel like you’re absolutely buzzing with energy and it’s not helpful energy

Yup, me too. And it sucks.

The one thing I know for sure is that when any of these happen, I am ungrounded. Totally ungrounded.

Everything in the universe is made of atoms and atoms are held together by electricity; therefore, human beings contain electricity. Quite a bit of it. “Scientists agree that the human body at rest can produce 100 watts of power on average. This is enough electricity to power up a light bulb. Some humans have the ability to output over 2,000 watts of power, for instance if sprinting.” (How Stuff Works)

The thing is, we are rarely sprinting. Our world has evolved into a place where we spend a lot of time sitting - sitting and working, sitting and visiting, sitting and watching tv. Not so long ago, it was quite the opposite. We had to move to survive, and survival wasn’t a guarantee. Physical danger lurked everywhere, and we might have to run, fight, or hide at any moment.

One of the factors that allowed us to survive was the fight/flight response. This is a reflex response that is triggered electrically. Electrical impulses from the hypothalamus, a gland located in the brain, travel along nerves that directly connect to the adrenal glands (these sit on top of the kidneys) and stimulate the release of stress hormones adrenaline and noradrenaline. In the past, this energy would be discharged by either running or fighting.

The issue is this…

Our brains don’t know the difference between a real and a perceived threat, and it responds equally to an argument with a loved one and being attacked by a tiger. We have no way to release the energy circulating through our bodies, and that can cause brain fog and anxiety.

Our electrical appliances have a third prong on the plug designed to discharge electricity back to the earth if there is ever a surge. Historically, humans lived much closer to nature where negative ions are abundant and the discharge of superfluous energy happened naturally. Essentially, our extra, buzzy energy - the stuff that makes us feel so freaking ungrounded - was sent back to the Earth through our feet. Kind of a built-in, anatomical third prong, if you will.

This is simply not true for people living in an urban environment. We are surrounded by concrete and electronics and stress and none of it has a way to escape. Fortunately, there are many techniques that can be used to safely and efficiently ground ourselves (see our upcoming blog post on grounding methods). Our Reiki Level 1 class teaches you how to ground no matter where you are or what might be going on in your life.