Hip if you slept outside touching the earth do you think you'd have a reaction like that?
I had a bad reaction earthing to an underground stake overnight. The first night was fine, but same as you I crashed after that (swollen glands and feeling generally terrible in my case).
Thing is..I never got that same reaction spending a week camping last Summer with my feet (at least) on the bare ground, in a river, and even out the end of my tent on wet grass overnight!
It's all a bit of a mystery to me! I do use a grounding strap while I use my laptop but I'm a bit scared to try using it overnight again.
Very interesting Anne.
My very speculative hunch is that both the good and the bad symptoms precipitated by earthing may result from an increase in parasympathetic nervous system activation, along the following lines:
On the very first night you sleep with earthing, your parasympathetic is increased, and so your sleep becomes very relaxed and profound.
However, a day or two later, this increased parasympathetic activation has a knock-on effect on the immune system, and you may get a Th1 immune reactivation (the antiviral response), and so then you start to experience some bad symptoms, as your body ramps up its fight against viruses.
If you look at all the ME/CFS therapies that are designed to reactivate the Th1 mode (like oxymatrine, inosine, and interferon infusions), they all make you feel worse before you feel better.
So assuming earthing your body during sleep is indeed precipitating a Th1 immune response, you might expect to feel worse before you start feeling better.
I am going to use earthing a little more cautiously now: I might use earthing during sleep one night on, and the next night off, in order to limit the severity of the bad symptoms it produces. Then once I have got through the bad symptom period (assuming these bad symptom do disappear after a while), I may then use earthing every night.
Regarding the fact that you never had these bad reactions to earthing when you were camping, with your feet on bare ground and wet grass: it is possible that even standing on wet grass, you don't get the same quality of electrical contact with the earth as you do with an electrical earth rod that goes down 10 feet into the ground. And when you slept with your feet poking outside the tent on the wet grass, you may have only had a very small area of your heel or toes in contact with the grass, which may not have made a good earth connection.
I was glancing through this document:
A Practical Guide to Earth Resistance Testing, which details how engineers can test the quality of an earth connection. The electrical resistance of the soil plays a big factor in the quality of the earth connection: the lower the soil resistance, the better the earth connection. Factors such as dampness of the soil (not just at the surface, but all the way down) lower soil resistance, and so improve the earth connection of your earth rod. It is very hard to get a good earth in dry sand, for example.
I don't think you are going to get a better quality earth connection than the one you already have in your home's mains electricity system.
Another possibility is that the electrically conductive bedsheet itself does something in addition to earthing you. Such a bedsheet may have some degree of
Faraday cage effect, insulating you from electromagnetic radiation like mains hum and radio waves. Or the fact that this conductive bedsheet will electrically link your body from head to toe may have some effects also.
It is a bit of mystery.
