Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing you think that you need, every little thing that's just feeding your greed, oh I bet that you'll be fine without it.
You're listening to The Minimalist podcast with Joshua Fields Millburn and T .K.
Coleman. Yes! Thank you, Malabama.
Hello everybody! Today we're answering your questions about minimizing chronic pain.
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Our first question today is from Taylor in Denver, Colorado.
Hi, my name is Taylor.
How do I let go of pain and anger I have towards doctors who chose not to believe me, resulting in a very long delay in a formal diagnosis and medical intervention.
This has resulted in permanent damage to my body and chronic debilitating pain.
I am so angry and grieving what could have been the quality of life I have lost as a result of their incompetence.
I appreciate any guidance or tips that you can provide.
Any thoughts on how I can let this resentment and anger go?
Thank you, Madam Melissa.
Oh, Taylor, my heart goes out to you and I certainly identify with this because I have felt that same sort of anger with respect to my own chronic illness and chronic pain.
Now TK, throughout this episode, I wanna talk to you about the three things that really helped me minimize my own chronic pain and disease, but first, I think we should answer Taylor's question head on.
She's asking, how do I let go of the anger that I feel toward my doctors for not helping me with my own chronic pain?
I'm thinking about this quote from the Buddha when he said, holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
And isn't that what we do?
I'm so mad at you, I'm so frustrated with you.
I'm so upset by you.
I'm so offended. You make me so angry, TK.
I'm holding on to that poison.
I'm drinking the poison and I'm expecting it to affect you in a way.
And so I think maybe that's the first thing to think about.
There's another quote that I wrote down here from Mark Twain.
He said, anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel and which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured." Wow.
Those are really powerful and powerful arguments in the form of these pithy Proverbs for why it can be deadly, why it can be self -destructive to hang on to anger, even when we feel very self -righteously justified about it.
I do think it's important to emphasize the fact, however, that letting go of anger doesn't have to be like a game of hot potato where you drop it as fast as possible.
And the goal of the game is to get rid of it in as short of a time as is conceivable.
Letting go can also take the form of doing something constructive with that.
Sending it out into the world, radiating it, projecting it outwardly in a way that is healthy or in a way that's creative.
So there's passive letting go where maybe you have something in your hand and you just release it and it's done.
but then there's proactive letting go where you take whatever it is you have and you use it creatively in a way that can benefit from someone else so that you're not merely holding onto it and just letting it sit there, letting it rot away in your soul but you are turning it into a gift. And I think anger is an indicator of what we're willing to fight for.
And sometimes instead of just like, letting that anger go away, I think it's worth sitting with it for a minute and not just thinking about it in terms of, hey, what is this teaching me in terms of my values, because it seems like you really have that, but what am I fighting for in my life?
Let's not move past this anger too quickly, because if that happened to you, how many more people is that happening too on a daily or weekly basis?
How many of those people do you ever interact with?
Or are you going to come across in your life?
What does that anger tell you?
How does that anger fire you up?
When you think about the other people who didn't know or don't know what you now know and they're being misled and sent down the wrong path, if you look at a lot of the people in life that are really passionate, that have a strong sense of mission or vocation, a lot of the times it boils down to them having a defining moment where they really got angry.
And instead of just dropping it like hot potato, they decided to channel that anger along constructive lines and they became a fighter for something good that really helped a lot of people.
I think what we meet in the middle here is it's generally not constructive to cling to the anger because anything you cling to, you will eventually get dragged around by it.
And I think that's where Taylor is right now.
Maybe she had some anger that was useful that showed her like, oh no, these doctors did not have my best interest in mind.
And so maybe that anger is going to trigger my ability to think differently about future interactions with doctors or with the healthcare system or with what I'm putting in my body or with prescriptions or anything else, right?
Last week we talked with Sally Kay Norton and during the first question on that episode, I said, you might be wondering, what does any of this have to do with minimalism?
Well minimalism involves getting rid of the clutter that gets in the way of our wellbeing.
Of course that has to do with our physical clutter with which often obstructs our wellbeing, makes us miserable, puts us into debt, punishes our future self, but what it also does to us is we realize that that's not the only type of clutter we have. Our material clutter is a physical manifestation of what's going on inside us.
We have this lifestyle inflammation because there's a whole lot of spiritual or emotional inflammation that's going on inside us as well.
And today we're actually gonna be talking about physical inflammation in our bodies.
But I'd like to leave Taylor with some insights about the emotional clutter that she's experiencing.
If you were talking to her as one of your clutter counseling clients, and she came to you with some emotional clutter, what would you say to her?
I would create the space where we could visit with that anger.
Because one thing that I don't like to do with emotions like that is, even though we speak about them in very general terms, anger manifest itself in the body and in the psyche in a way that is unique, in a way that is irreducibly particular for each individual.
Your anger isn't like my anger because anger embodies itself in time and space.
And I would love to just open up the conversational space where we could talk for a little bit about what that anger feels like for her, where it resides for her?
What exactly is it about that situation that makes her so angry?
Yes, I can make educated guesses, but I want to hear it in your tone, in your voice, as it pertains to your story.
And then we take a look at that and we see, okay, what can we learn from this for ourselves, but also what can we learn for others?
And how can we carry this forward in a way that is productive and creative?
You talked about that, not clinging to it.
You know, I think about it in terms of, if you had a book in your heart or a song in your heart or a poem in your heart or a business idea in your heart, I don't want you to hold onto that, but I also don't want you to let it go.
I want you to let it flow.
I want you to take it and do something with it.
I want to transform the energy around it.
And so I would love to have a conversation about that.
Doing something useful with it too, right?
Yeah. Because it might may be that Taylor is doing something with that anger, but she's beating herself up or she's using it to blame other people as opposed to doing something that is constructive that a year from now, she'll be grateful she did something with that emotional clutter.
Speaking of emotional clutter, Taylor, I would encourage you to download TK's free ebook.
It's called Emotional Clutter.
You can find it over on the resources page at theminimalist .com, just click resources there at the top.
We have a bunch of free resources over there but my favorite one is Emotional Clutter.
It's an ebook. You can download it.
You can read it in one sitting, and I think you'll walk away with some helpful tactics that will allow you to let go of the unnecessary suffering that is caused by this emotional clutter, but then also acknowledge your emotions for what they are.
And for me, I found when I read that it was really freeing.
Our next question is from Andrea.
What kinds of over -the -counter, or natural, or home remedies, or even diet changes do you recommend for people dealing with chronic inflammation?
Especially in the joints.
I've had joint pain for years and the doctors still can't figure out why.
And it's getting worse as time goes on.
I think this happens quite frequently.
We say, oh, this is what it must mean to get older, to age.
Pain must just be part of the aging process.
I'm getting old man.
All my back, my shoulder, whatever it might be, right.
And I totally identify with that.
And then we just give up.
I'm reminded of this Confucius quote.
It's one of my favorite quotes about health.
He said, a healthy person wants 10 ,000 things.
a sick person only wants one." And it shows you the folly of all the things that we pursue.
About six years ago, I had developed these three autoimmune conditions, which we're going to talk about here in a second.
And all I wanted was to be healthy again.
I didn't want the fame or the success or the money, those things.
It's not that I didn't want them, they didn't even matter anymore.
All the things that felt like were so important, they mattered to me.
A luxury car, a really nice suit, how does my shirt fit?
Do I have the trendy pants, right?
What about that expensive belt or my wallet?
Those all went out the window.
I ceased caring about them 100%.
I didn't want those 10 ,000 things anymore.
I just wanted the one thing back.
I wanted my health, which I took for granted for a really long time.
Now, of course, I'm not a doctor, And I'm not making any medical advice during this episode but I do want to share my own experience of healing with these three auto immune conditions.
So I found for me that healing has been much more about subtraction than it is about addition or intervention.
What do you mean? Well, I don't think there's anything wrong with interventions and sometimes we need that but healing the body, as we talked about last week is different from repairing your car.
If there's something wrong with your radiator You might need to replace your radiator in your car.
That same sort of wisdom does not work with the body which is a self -healing mechanism.
It has its own self -healing mechanisms. And so I found that for me all of the healing interventions, the three biggest ones are either free or there are low cost alternatives.
I subtracted my way to healing.
The first one which I wanna talk to you about in a moment is earthing grounding you might call it.
I wrote a whole essay about it and I'm gonna read some of that to you today.
It's called I shouldn't have to deal with this.
The second thing is I restricted my diet which was a standard American diet or standard Western diet.
I tried different things till I figured out what worked well for me.
If you haven't already, go back and listen after this episode.
Listen to last week's episode with Sally Kay Norton.
Savvy D was telling me that it's his favorite episode one of the minimalist podcasts because we had a nuanced discussion around toxic super foods.
Now these are the foods that we think are making us better and healthy, but they may be harming us or making us sick in some way.
And it was a enlightening and surprising conversation for me.
The third thing that really helped me out is I've been doing ice baths daily.
And all three of these are types of subtraction, not interventions or additions.
With the ice bath, it's literally subtracting the inflammation in my body.
In fact, on page three today, we're going to talk about cold thermogenesis and some of the insights around that.
And then the same with the restrictive diet.
It was much more about the things I removed from my diet than the things I needed to add back in.
Yes, I wanted some nutrient dense foods in my diet, but the things that are making me sick, those are the things I needed to subtract as though I was eating some sort of poison.
So also on page three, I'm going to talk about, there are these seven interventions that I have done to help with my symptoms. They're both conventional and unconventional, and they've really helped along the way as I have healed from these autoimmune disease.
First, I want to read from this essay.
We'll put a link to this in the show notes.
You can find it at theminimalists .com.
It's called, I shouldn't have to deal with this.
My story of minimizing chronic disease, pain, and inflammation with earthing.
Now, I have never shared the full details on this.
Early on, when I became sick, I brought some doctors onto the podcast many hundreds of episodes ago.
And we talked about some of the things that may be cluttering my health, but I didn't have a full picture until now.
And I hesitated writing this until...
Well, I didn't wanna publish it until I felt confident to say that my life is so considerably better than where I was five or six years ago.
I waited a while, but now I wanted to share it with you.
An introduction to pain, millions of people suffer from chronic pain.
I never thought I'd be one of them.
At age 37, after numerous doctors visits, I was diagnosed with three autoimmune conditions, rheumatoid arthritis or RA, which explained the severe pain in my ankles, wrists and other joints.
Irritable bowel syndrome or IBS, hence my roller coaster of indigestion, constipation, and diarrhea, and, inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD, which accounted for the dozens of excruciating ulcers that doctors found in my intestinal tract.
I began experiencing poor sleep and various skin conditions, acne, rashes, cysts, dandruff, flaky skin around the same time.
Doctors told me that my body's immune system was attacking its own tissue, but they didn't know why.
Maybe it was a shift in my microbiome, they said, or maybe it was stress or overuse of antibiotics.
Regardless of the origin, my first thought was, I shouldn't have to deal with this.
It felt like my life was over.
Although I was relatively young, I woke every morning with pain so extreme that I didn't want to live.
Motivated to find a cure, I tried supplements and medications and yoga and stretching and acupuncture and trigger point release and saunas and ice baths and restrictive diets.
Some of these treatments help manage my symptoms, especially the last two, both of which reduced my inflammation.
Yet the pain and dysfunction continued daily.
Over the next two years, as I scoured online forums and health podcasts and YouTube videos, I discovered legions of people suffering from similar autoimmune -related ailments.
Some recommended new drugs, others touted cures involving dubious, homeopathic remedies.
I saw unfathomable hardships, but no long -term healing.
Eventually, I stumbled upon the Earthing movie, where I learned about something called Earthing or grounding, as it is often called, which had reportedly helped thousands of people afflicted with chronic disorders, including, and I have a whole list of here of many of these disorders.
And I found testimonials from people.
So here are what many of the people we're suffering with who experienced some sort of benefits.
Allergies, Alzheimer's, ALS, anemia, arthritis, asthma, autism, cancer, cardiovascular disease, colitis, Crohn's, diabetes, diverticulitis, which is inflammatory disease in the gut, eczema, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, kidney failure, lupus, Lyme disease, multiple sclerosis, pancreatitis and psoriasis.
Many of these sufferers proclaim significant improvements after earthing.
Their testimonials were brimming with hope.
I have a little link here to just hundreds of testimonials here, but I chose three that really stood out to me.
Terry Flint said, I had so much trouble with IBS before grounding but my bathroom habits are regular now.
Which by the way for those of us suffering with IBD or IBS or both like I did, the only thing that you really want in life is to go back to being regular.
It's like the thing you're hoping for that you took for granted for decades.
Denise Madrid said, my arthritis has become non -existant.
I am free of pain and inflammation.
Dr. Wendy Minagots said, I tell my female patients to be grounded because it helps their cysts, periods, cramps, bloating, hot flashes, fibromyalgia, back pain and other pain.
When patients are grounded, conditions often heal that typically never get better.
While these anecdotes sounded promising, particularly for those of us with chronic diseases, I still had no clue what earthing actually was.
So I dove deeper into the research. What is earthing?
According to Healthline, earthing is a therapeutic technique that involves doing activities that ground or electrically reconnect you to the Earth.
This practice relies on earthing science and grounding physics to explain how electrical charges from the Earth can have positive effects on your body.
At first, this so -called therapy sounded too woo woo for my analytical brain.
Erthing. Give me a break.
The name alone tripped my skeptic alarm.
If healing was this simple, why didn't my doctors tell me about it?
But my skepticism soon faded when I came across a mountain of evidence suggesting that a number of disorders are ameliorated by grounding the body.
I found dozens of scientific studies that demonstrated the benefits of earthing, including elimination of chronic pain, reduced inflammation, increased energy, deeper sleep, lowered stress, headache relief, improved circulation and decreased hormonal symptoms. I put a link here to the scientific studies that I read as well.
I read a bunch of scientific studies because I was so skeptical before I even started.
As I read through the research, which I realized that modern medicine is great at treating acute injuries like cuts and broken bones, yet its focus on pharmaceutical drugs to treat chronic disease is, at times, tantamount to nursing and axe wound with numbing cream.
Sure, the pain is reduced, but the condition still persists.
In the same way, modern doctors want to help the chronically ill, people like me, so they prescribe medications to temporarily mitigate their symptoms while the underlying cause chronic inflammation continues to run rampant.
That's where earthing enters the picture.
How does earthing work?
Stated plainly, earthing is nature's original anti -inflammatory.
It reduces inflammation which is the common cause of disease by limiting an electron deficiency in the body, which safely shifts the nervous system from a stress -dominant mode to one of calmness and healing.
Whenever you are grounded, your body cannot be inflamed, says Clint Ober, founder of EarthFX, who clarifies that reconnecting to the Earth doesn't cure you of any disease or condition.
It restores your natural, internal, electrical stability and rhythms, which in turn promote normal functioning of the cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, and immune systems. terms. In layman's terms, earthing sucks pain out of the body, says Ober, who was widely praised as a pioneer in the study of grounding science.
His seminal book, Earthing boldly declares that its namesake is the quote, most important health discovery ever.
Now, such acclaim sounded hyperbolic to me until I tried it myself.
On a random Wednesday, I quietly removed my shoes at a nearby park and stood on the grass.
In less than an hour, I noticed a 10 % reduction in pain.
Of course, I still had my reservations.
Was it just the placebo effect or was a remedy hiding under my feet?
So, I started earthing every day, simply connecting my feet to the ground outside.
The more I did it, the better I felt.
Less pain, less inflammation.
Then everything changed when I purchased a grounded mattress cover, which plugged directly into the ground port of an electrical outlet near my bed operating like an extension cord to the earth that allowed me to stay grounded at night.
Not only did my sleep improve, my pain was radically reduced.
Within six weeks, 70 percent of my joint pain was gone.
My skin was noticeably better.
My gut pain had decreased and an endoscopy revealed that 100 % of my gastrointestinal ulcers had disappeared.
I'll just pause on that for a moment.
I know in the essay I said I had dozens of ulcers, my doctor actually stopped counting at a hundred.
I woke up every morning, it felt like I swallowed glass.
In fact, when it first happened, I really thought that I had swallowed. Like what happened?
I'm in such pain. I woke up one day and I had pain the days before, but then there was one day where it just reached this critical mass.
And now, I was suffering so bad that I didn't want to wake up in the morning.
Were you like screaming in pain?
No, I'm not really a screamer, but I was like on the bathroom floor in pain.
I was going to hospitals in pain.
I was going to doctors in pain.
It was panic level pain for sure.
And that's scary, because you don't know what's going on.
Yeah, I had no idea what was going on.
And eventually, we found these ulcers in my duodenum.
That's the part of the small intestine.
We had to use an endoscopy pill.
It takes 50 ,000 photos of your insides.
You basically swallow this camera and it takes all these photos over the course of like four or five hours and then you eliminate the pill.
And it's all Bluetooth so it just zaps those photos to a little bag you wear that whole time.
And that's how we found out.
I had all of these ulcers in my digestive tract.
And it's no wonder, any time I ate anything, it felt like I was on fire.
We're turning the text here.
100 % of my gastrointestinal ulcers had disappeared.
I was astonished. Earthling was a fire extinguisher for my inflammation, dousing the firestorm that was raging inside my body.
What's more, my wife, the healthiest person, and the fittest person, I know, experienced benefits too.
Better sleep, less muscle soreness after workouts, quicker recovery time, faster wound healing, a drop in anxiety.
With those improvements, we bought a grounded mattress cover for our young daughter who immediately began sleeping through the night, often 11 to 12 hours straight without waking.
She would often wake up throughout the middle of the night and she certainly wasn't sleeping 11 or 12 hours but now, pretty regularly, Ella, my daughter, sleeps every night through the night.
She'll often sleep from 8 p .m. until 8 a .m., uninterrupted.
She doesn't even get up to use the bathroom and that was not the case before.
That was actually my biggest regret from all this like, why didn't I start grounding her earlier?
Now she was already grounding regularly, she walks out barefoot outside, but at night, it was disconnecting her from the earth.
And we'll talk about disconnection here in a moment.
These improvements made me wonder, when do we become so disconnected from the earth?
And what damage has been caused by that disconnection?
When did we disconnect?
Since the dawn of humanity, human beings have maintained a connection to the Earth by walking barefoot or with leather footwear.
Leather footwear is conductive if you have a leather sole.
We also slept on the ground or on animal hides.
Ergo, the Earth's free electrons were able to enter our bodies throughout the day and night, which meant every part of our bodies were able to equilibrate with the electrical potential of the Earth.
thereby stabilizing the electrical environment of all organs, tissues, cells and molecules.
This function is crucial for the operation of the immune system.
However, when rubber sold shoes became popular around 1960, we accidentally separated ourselves from the ground itself.
This disconnection was further exacerbated by our built environments.
Insulating materials such as carpet, fabricated wood and other synthetics are great for our homes, but terrible for our connection to the earth.
Because of these barriers, the average modern human is now ungrounded throughout the day.
Without grounding, the whole body gradually becomes electron depleted, says Dr. Gattan Cavalier, an engineering physicist and research scientist. This electron deficiency, according to Dr. Cavalier and other researchers, has led to a significant increase in health problems related to chronic inflammation.
Well, thanks to my ungrounded shoes, car, office, and home, I had unwittingly disconnected myself from the Earth for 99 % of my life.
Which meant I'd gradually become electron deficient during my first four decades on this planet.
To reconnect, I merely needed to remove the barriers that block the Earth's electrons from entering my body.
I'll pause here real quick and say.
This is where minimalism comes in.
This isn't about doing something.
And as I quoted Clint Ober earlier, everything doesn't heal any chronic disease.
What it does is it removes that disconnection from the earth so we can take in those free electrons that we need to have that homeostasis in our body and we are disconnected for so long, we become electron depleted and that is a problem.
return to text. Why does earthing promote healing?
If our disconnection from the Earth was the inciting incident that has led to our collective health crisis, then it's conceivable that reconnecting is a path to healing.
Dr. James Osman, president of Nature's Own Research Association explains why so many people have improved their health with earthing.
Quote, a grounded person is conductively coupled with the surface of the Earth and its abundant supply of electrons, which stabilizes the body's internal electrical environment.
When you are grounded, you absorb the Earth's electrons like a sponge.
They then move throughout your body, impacting it from top to bottom." Health writer Martin Zucker further clarifies that these electrons reduce electrical imbalances and the oxidative free radicals involved in chronic inflammation and multiple diseases.
To corroborate this claim, multiple medical thermal imaging studies have demonstrated a significant reduction of inflammation in grounded individuals.
I think this is the thing for me, I'm a rather visual person as most of us are.
You can tell me some words and you can say electrons and negatively charged ions.
Okay, cool, that sounds scientific.
Grounding physics. But when I saw the actual thermal imaging studies, and I have a link to several of the the studies here in the essay, and I have a picture of what I thought was the most profound and convincing study.
Basically, if you look at the image in the essay, there are arrows in the left image that show a bunch of pain and inflammation for this person that is imaged.
And according to the researchers here, that is the source of pain in the body, that amount of inflammation that is in this person on the left. You could see the arrows are pointing to where all of this inflammation is, but then you see the image on the right.
And it was a 50 % reduction after two nights, just two nights of sleeping grounded, half of their inflammation, and thus half of their pain is gone after sleeping grounded for just two nights and dozens of similar case studies have yielded comparable results.
I put a link to a bunch of those case studies in this essay, if you want to check those out.
According to Dr. Steven Sinatra, a board -certified cardiologist, all you have to do is reconnect to the Earth's natural energy which balances your body at the deepest levels, draining it of inflammation, pain, stress, and fatigue.
And it's free. No pills, no prescriptions.
Let me pause on that for a moment.
There was a time where I was taking Crohn's medication for my ulcers that I may have seen a 5 to 10 percent improvement from.
And I was spending upwards of $3 ,000 a month on that one prescription.
Because it was not covered.
At one point, I had to borrow money from Nicodemus cause I just didn't have enough money to pay for my own medical bills and medical prescriptions.
And it was, I mean, it was daunting.
I was like paying rent and then some, but it was just for a bottle of pills that wasn't really helping me.
Now it's not to say that I'm against prescriptions, I think, especially in cases this is where they'll bring us back toward homeostasis if we have some sort of deadly infection.
My friend, Tommy Wood, he's a medical doctor and he was down in Costa Rica and he got bit by a pit viper in Costa Rica.
Wow. He had to have a lot of antibiotics otherwise he would have been dead.
And so he needed that prescription.
In fact, it was intravenous antibiotics, right?
And so I'm not against prescriptions.
I do think, as I talked about in the last episode with Sally K.
Norton, they're often overprescribed.
And I don't think it's necessarily the doctor's fault.
I think we as consumers of these things, we go in with the expectation.
I want you to fix me.
I want you to fix me now and quickly.
And so give me a pill that's covered at least partially by my insurance, because I don't wanna make any other changes.
I don't wanna take responsibility for this.
Give me the thing that cures this immediately.
And by the way, how long would that have gone on of you just coming up with that money, coming up with that money, probably not coming up with it.
But had you simply resigned to this is my life and this is the best that I'm gonna be able to do.
I think acceptance is a really powerful thing, but also refusing to accept some things is equally powerful.
I do wanna talk to you more about that in a moment.
Return to text, this explains why I felt so much better after a few weeks consistent grounding and counteracted by inflammation and thus my inflammation related disorders through the transfer of negatively charged electrons from the earth's surface into my body.
The final section here is called where to reconnect to the earth.
Once I personally felt the benefits of reconnecting to the earth, I formed an elementary hypothesis, more connection equals more healing.
While walking barefoot in the yard and sleeping grounded each night, were great for my recovery.
But as I improved, I looked for ways to stay grounded all day.
So I acquired a universal earthing mat.
It's actually the one you're standing on right now.
That's the very first one that I bought.
Oh, is that right? That's right.
And so TK stands out every time we're in the studio here and then I got some chair mats for the studio as well.
Also at home, when I'm just lounging around with my family or on the couch, I have chair mats on my counter here in the studio as well.
Even we're on the third floor here.
Actually, I guess technically we're on the fourth floor here.
I am staying grounded because of this extension cord to the earth.
I also got a earthing pillow cover.
I was talking to AB about this because she was an aesthetician and they often deal with people who have different skin rashes or disorders, they wanna look better, right?
But it's all these inflammatory things on their skin.
And a lot of people started buying these earthing pillow covers and calling them beauty pillows just because they found that like a lot of acne and inflammation on the face was going away when they were sleeping grounded on a pillow.
That's not why I did it.
I did it because when I travel, I still want to sleep grounded.
Over the last four years, there has not been a single night that I have not slept grounded.
Even if I'm traveling for filming or out on tour, I bring something with me so I'm grounded.
There was literally one night where I couldn't and I woke up the next morning feeling quite a bit of inflammation.
I didn't know why, it turned out someone had accidentally unplugged my cord from the electrical grounded outlet, it's not the electrical outlet, it's the grounded port on the electrical outlet, there's no electricity involved in any of this, it's just an extension cord into the ground.
Anyway, I'm getting too far into the details here, I also have a pair of flip flops there right over there if I want to walk grounded in the city, we're going to talk about shoes that I was able to use here in a little bit.
But I found that if I was grounded the vast majority of the day, my symptoms continued to abate.
And even now, there are times where I'm not grounded.
Driving down here this morning, it's a two hour drive from Ohio and you hit traffic.
I was not grounded that whole time and that's okay, right?
It's not about having 100 % grounding all the time but my hypothesis, at least for me, ended up being true.
The more I was connected, the more I set my body up to heal itself, The grounding didn't heal me.
It just allowed my body to have the environment in which it could heal.
What to expect when you start grounding.
This is what I've noticed from a lot of different people.
So I put it here at the end of the essay.
Most people experience less inflammation, less pain, and better sleep.
Benefits usually arrive quickly through, although these improvements can be gradual for some people.
Certain people may not feel any benefits until they increase their grounding time.
A few people feel a slight tingling, which is a sign of improved circulation, which subsides as the nervous system relaxes.
Athletes often experienced less muscle soreness and faster recovery after workouts.
I know my wife definitely has.
And she was as skeptical as I was about all of this and maybe even more so.
She also started tracking her sleep and with an aura ring and her sleep improved pretty dramatically, specifically her deep sleep.
In rare cases, some sick people experience temporary flu -like symptoms, which are likely related to the body detoxifying.
I think they call this a Herxheimer's Reaction, whereas our healing crisis, you may have heard referred to before, but it could be that your body is just overwhelmed with detoxifying and so that has happened.
I've seen just a few rare cases where people are like, oh yeah, for a day I felt like I had a little bit of a cold or a flu or something like that as I started grounding more frequently.
A person with radiant health and great sleep may not feel a big difference.
So Savvy D over there, we just got him an earthing mat for his bed.
And I think the thing to know here is like, you know what?
He may not notice much of anything at all, but grounding still serves as a natural form of prevention for these people.
Now, I think people like Savvy D, unless they're really interested in it, don't even try to talk to them about earthing.
Earthing is for people who are experiencing significant chronic pain, inflammation in their life.
And it is one of several tools that I've used to simplify my life and simplify my health and eventually heal my body.
In conclusion, with the help of studies, researchers, testimonials, and my own experience, I've done my best to succinctly present the merits of Earthing in this essay.
But if you walk away from this exploration with only one take away, let it be these words of wisdom from Olivia Ramirez Smith, author of The Mother Earth Effect.
Quote, one of the best things a person can do to lessen the likelihood of developing a chronic disease is spend at least part of their day connected to the earth.
It really is that simple.
And the essay have some links to some additional resources in there as well.
If you want to check out the Earthing book.
Also we did a podcast with Clint Ober years ago, I know for a while before we had any sort of affiliation with Earthing, full disclosure here.
We have a grant from the Earthing folks.
That's not why I wrote this essay.
In fact, it was the other way around.
I've been waiting for a long time because what I do is I hand out this earthing book by the case.
I mean, I don't give one person a case, but what I realized is I was asking people, here, dedicate nine hours of your life to reading this scientifically complex book about Earthing.
And most people just checked out right away.
I said, what if I wrote a blog post that was six or seven pages that fully encompass my story, the who, what, when, why, where and how are all in here.
But it also describes the science because I was hyper, hyper skeptical.
Why didn't my doctor tell me about this?
And I came across that Earthing movie, which I have a link to in the essay as well and some Earthing products, if you're interested.
But it really starts with you don't need a product to go earthing.
You can go walk barefoot in your yard right now and you are connected to the earth.
You're getting the earths abundant free electrons that your body needs in order to maintain that level of homeostasis.
I also have a link in here to a bunch of the frequently asked questions from the Earthing Institute.
TK, do you have any questions for me?
Just a quick thought here.
There's a theme that you see in a lot of science fiction movies that explore the notion of like a simulation or a matrix -like reality.
And one of those themes is the longer amount of time you spend in a synthetic simulated reality, the more the real world when you're finally exposed to it feels like woo -woo.
And when I think about everything that you said here and I appreciate the sensitivity you have to making sure you differentiate this from woo -woo, but isn't it interesting that for the overwhelming majority of human history, people grounded as such a common practice that they didn't call it anything.
In the same way that we don't talk about breathing so much, or a heart beating, but we've gotten so far away from our natural connection with the earth, with the clothing that we wear, with the kind of buildings that we build, with the way we live our lives, we can actually go a whole day without ever touching the ground.
And even when you look at a lot of your ancient spiritualities the notion of taking off your shoes as a symbol of reverence, as a symbol of connection, is as old as humanity.
And so I really liked that part of it, and that's something that interests me.
I think that's spot on.
Anyone who wants to read that essay, check it out, theminimalists .com slash earthing.
Before we get back to our callers, mala bama, what time is it?
You know what time it is.
It's time for the lightning round, where we answer the Patreon on community chats, question of the week.
Yes indeed, now during the lightning round, we each have 60 seconds to answer your question with a short, shareable minimal maxim.
You can find this episode's maxim in the show notes at theminimalists .com slash podcast and every minimal maxim ever at minimalmaxims .com.
We'll also deliver our weekly show notes directly to your inbox including seven new maxims every Monday for free.
If you sign up for our email newsletter at theminimalists .email.
we'll never send you spam or junk or advertisements.
We'll start your week off with a dose of simplicity.
What is the question of the week this week?
How do you cope with pain?
Ooh, how do you cope with pain?
How do you bear the unbearable is maybe another way to phrase that, right?
We often are forced, we're given this pain.
This is usually not something that we ask for, right?
Now, before we get to our Pithy answers TK, let's hear how some of our listeners answered this question.
Trisha said this. I deal with chronic hives and haven't been able to find a good solution though I've had some success minimizing the occurrences with environmental changes medicine and changing thought patterns Eventually you either press on to find a better solution or let go and accept your body's response Even if you're not fully healed I think there's this thing with acceptance that I wanted to address with you TK because it is true that there are some Circumstances that we cannot change and thus it makes sense to accept it Otherwise, we're just gonna batter ourselves with something that is unchangeable.
There is, however, the set of circumstances that we can change.
They might be difficult to change, they might be unknown, they might be complicated or complex but they also might be changeable.
And I noticed for me, the thing that I refuse to do was accept the things that I could change.
I refuse to make that sort of acceptance because I knew that there were things that I wanted to do to heal.
I didn't know what they were But I've seen plenty of people heal and I knew that I would be able to as well.
It may not happen on the timeline that I want.
Oh, can I heal by next Monday?
You know what? Probably not.
But it doesn't mean that I have to accept that this is how it's always going to be.
This reminds me of a question that we got when we did our book tour.
And I believe it was in San Francisco and there was a question that came up about contentment.
And you know, like, isn't that a dangerous thing Our species has evolved and accomplished so much by being discontent.
And one of the things that we talked about there is there are two kinds of contentment.
There's contentment as settling for that which is unhealthy or unworthy of me.
But then there is contentment as gratitude and appreciation for what I have, even if I am in the process of pursuing more.
And I think there's something similar that goes on with this idea of acceptance.
There's acceptance as a certain sense of, hey, look, this is the reality that I'm dealing with.
Maybe I can change it, maybe I can't, but I'm going to honestly acknowledge what my situation is.
I'm not gonna live in denial.
But then there's the kind of acceptance as resignation where you say, hmm, it looks like changing my reality or positively influencing it is gonna require a lot of discomfort and I don't even wanna think about that.
So I'm just gonna give up.
And that's the kind of acceptance you refused to have and I really liked that idea.
I liked that distinction.
I refuse to give up.
I won't accept this because I'm not ready to give up yet.
And I really wasn't a point.
In 2019, worst year of my life by far, I woke up every morning and wish I hadn't.
And it's not because I was suicidal in the sense that I no longer wanted to live, I no longer wanted to live with that excruciating level of 10 out of 10 pain.
I was in a lot of pain.
and I'm not anymore.
I can get on this microphone and say confidently that I have improved more than 90 % and there are still some days where it's like, oh yeah, my ankle feels a little inflamed or oh yeah, I got a little pain in my shoulder right now.
We're gonna talk about that coming up as well on page two.
And there are a few other things that are like, oh yeah, but my life is 90 % better.
I'm functional and those are things that I'm accepting in the sense that I'm not gonna let it get in the way but I'm also not even given up on those.
I know that my body can continue to heal and those symptoms will continue to abate.
Sometimes it's helpful for me personally to remind myself that I'm not smart enough to give up.
There are some situations where I know I've worked my butt off, I've carefully considered the costs, I honestly acknowledge the trade offs and I say, Nope, I'm abandoning ship here, I don't wanna go any further.
But there are a lot of things where I feel that temptation to give up, like no, there's just no answer for me And I have to remind myself, dude, when was the last time you learned a new trick in this area of life?
When was the last time you asked some questions?
When was the last time you lifted your finger to read about it?
When was the last time you really tried something new?
You're just running up against the wall of your own ignorance.
The wall of your own need to evolve.
Who you have been and what you have done, no matter how much it has worked for you, can't take you any further.
And you've just got to roll up your sleeves and do some hard stuff.
you're not smart enough to give up on this quite yet.
Wow, that's so good.
Let's do one more question here.
This is a question from Marty.
What are the top three insights you would give to anyone suffering from a chronic illness to consider?
Well, I've got three for you.
No one cares about your health as much as you do, even if they know more than you.
Maybe they do care about you, but no one is going to care about your well being as much as you do.
Second insight is is perfect health is uncovered through subtraction, not addition.
We often try different interventions and interventions can be great.
I'm gonna talk about some interventions, seven of them that I've tried and that have helped me.
There are dozens, probably hundreds of interventions I've tried that have had either neutral effects or negative effects.
They made me feel worse or they drained my bank account or maybe they had terrible side effects with certain medications.
But the truth is that perfect health is our birthright.
And what happened is we have put ourselves in an environment that has gotten in the way of our health, of our thriving.
And finally, it took years for you to become unhealthy.
Healing will not happen overnight.
Alright, you all, you can read dozens of listener responses over in the Patreon community chat.
How about you listeners?
How do you cope with pain?
Let us know in the comments.
Now, give me something pithy, TK, how do you cope with pain?
Pain shapes the story, but it doesn't write the ending.
When you are living with pain, it really can begin to feel like this pain is who I am, especially if it's chronic pain and you have a reason to believe that it's going to be with you for a long time or until the day you die.
But your humanity and the preservation thereof requires you to recognize that who you are transcends pain, and even if your life will always be correlated with that, that you still can make a contribution to humanity, you still can represent something.
And one of the deepest human needs we have, is to live with that sense of significance and meaning that comes from knowing all our life makes a difference.
And even if you aren't as free and mobile as you once were, the simple recognition that there are other people that suffer pain and who will suffer pain, though today they may be well, that you can be an example for them of someone who can exercise the power to laugh, exercise the power to love, exercise the power to encourage.
In spite of that pain, you do something for humanity that is so much greater than many of the things that we praise.
I know in the Catholic tradition, we consider suffering to have great meritorial value that our prayers matter the most when we pray through the suffering, because it's a way of offering up that right that we have to be better about it, that right that we have to be resentful and say, I'm going to sacrifice this for the good of other people by living in a way that bears my cross with nobility.
In that vein, I have an insight that I wish I didn't have, but I'm glad I do have it now.
And that pithy insight is pain is the best gift that nobody asks for.
Pain has been an incredible gift I've never asked for it.
I want some more pain, I want some more inflammation.
I want it to feel like I've swallowed glass.
I want to end up in the hospital, I want to interact with all these doctors.
I want to spend all of my money, all of my emergency fund, all of my savings trying to figure this out.
When we had Kelly Starrett on the show, he said, pain is a request for change.
And he was talking about that with respect to say you have a shoulder injury or you roll your ankle, and now all of a sudden you have an ankle injury.
Your body is asking for change.
And so my body was asking me, you've got to change something.
You've got to change everything about your life.
And are you willing to make those sacrifices or do you want to keep living with all of this pain?
All right, that's the end of page one, but we are just getting started.
We have a slew of listener questions to answer on page two and page three, but first real quick for right here, right now, here's one thing that's going on in the life of the minimalist T .K.
Coleman has been on fire and no, it's not inflammation, but he has been on fire with his new clutter counseling sessions.
Counselor, what are you enjoying most about these sessions?
It's just a lot of fun.
And something that you don't get to do as much on the show is be able to delve deeply into what's behind the question.
You know, questions have a way of being framed in a way that is pretty general.
What do I do about my fear?
What do I do about my pain?
What do I do about my loneliness?
But behind all of those abstract general questions that we all ask, there is a particular story and that's where the power to really unpack things are.
So every one of these sessions has been a lot of joy for me to be able to help people clear away the clutter that they might've come into the session and feeling overwhelmed by and helping them move on with their lives to do what really matters to them.
I really love working with people in that regard. You know what I've been most shocked by throughout the whole process is seeing the unique problems that come in.
That's right. I thought it was all gonna be just physical clutter, and that's almost always some sort of component behind it.
We have someone coming to you for emotional clutter and someone else, I've just got a new job.
I have career clutter, right?
Or I have identity clutter or spiritual clutter or calendar clutter.
Digital clutter. There's a lot of clutter in our lives, and I really admire your ability to unpack that with someone through many of the stories that they are telling themselves.
Now since it is October, you decided, I know money's tight right now, to do some holiday pricing around clutter counseling.
So if you tried to sign up before and it was a little bit too costly for you for the next three months at the end of the year, Q4, you can do holiday pricing for the rest of the year.
It's perfect if you couldn't afford it before.
Also, TK is offering one clutter counseling scholarship per month until the end of the year.
So if you can't afford a session and you would like to get a scholarship, we're going to offer one of those per month.
Just send a less than two minute video to clutteratthemineralists .com.
Now, please note, appointments are available online via Zoom or in -person at the Minimalist offices here in Los Angeles, but spots are limited.
So please, please, please be patient.
If you're unable to schedule an immediate appointment, book for next week.
If this week is full, Malabem what else you got for us?
Here's a minimalist insight from one of our listeners.
Hello, this is Katar from Germany.
I'm a Patreon subscriber and I got a listener tip.
Currently I play a different 30 -day challenge.
I read one of the Minimalists essays a day by tipping on random essay on the website theminimalists .com archives and that feels really good and I review my Minimalist approach and the thoughts on Minimalism and it helps me to get on living a value -driven life.
Thank you. Bye bye.
Kata, I'm so glad that you're enjoying those essays over at theminimalists .com.
Also over there you can check out the essay that I read today and a bunch of free resources for you to download.
If you'd like for anyone else has a list or tip or insight about this episode, leave a comment on Patreon or YouTube or better yet you can send a voice memo.
We need more of these.
We want your insightful insights.
We want your listener responses.
Just send and your voice memo to podcast at theminimalists .com.
We would love to feature your voice on the show.
Even if it's just a simple minimalist tip that you have. All right, that's the first 34 % of episode 463.
You don't want to miss this one.
We'll see you on Patreon for the full Maximal Edition, which includes answers to a bunch more questions.
Questions like, how can I heal the chronic shoulder pain that is ruining my life?
What can I do to best support someone who is in pain?
pain, which functional medical doctors does JFM trust?
How do you deal with the guilt of not being able to give 100 % of yourself to loved ones while you're struggling with chronic pain?
What's the best way to talk to my friends and family about my illness?
How much of my illness is in my head?
And what are the best options for treating Lyme disease, Epstein -Barr virus, CMV and other viruses?
plus a million more questions and simple living segments over on The Minimalists Private Podcast. We also have an outstanding home tour from one of our listeners this week.
Just visit patreon .com slash The Minimalists or go down and click that link in the description to subscribe and get your personal link so that our weekly Maxwell episodes play in your favorite podcast app.
You'll also gain access to all of our podcast archives all the way back to episode 001.
By the way, Patreon is now offering free trial.
So if you'd like to test drive our private podcast You can join for seven days for free.
And that is our minimal episode for today.
Big thanks to Earthing Studios for the recording space.
On behalf of Ryan Nickademus, TK Coleman, Malabama, Post -Production Peter, Spire Jeff, and Spire Dave, A, B, Savvy D, and the rest of our team.
I'm Joshua Fields Milburn.
If you leave here with just one message, let it be this.
Love people and use things, because the opposite never works.
Thanks for listening, y 'all.
We'll see you next time.
Every little thing you think that you need.
Every little thing you think that you need.
Every little thing that's just feeding your greed, oh, I bet that you'll be fine without it.
