Should You Use Grounding Mats, Straps, Or Pillows in a Sauna? (Full Explanation)

Why I Don’t Use Grounding Straps in Saunas or While Sleeping (Here’s the Real Reason)

In this video, I’m breaking down why I don’t use grounding straps, grounding sheets, or grounding pillows—whether it’s in the sauna or during sleep. A lot of people assume that plugging a grounding device into a wall outlet automatically connects them to a safe, clean ground… but that’s not always true.

If you live in an apartment, condo, townhouse, or any building with shared circuits, you may have hidden wiring issues that make grounding potentially more dangerous than beneficial.

Here’s the problem:

If your electrical panel has a swapped neutral and ground bus bar—or worse, if there’s commingling of circuits—you can end up with transient voltage feeding back through your grounding strap directly to your skin. That’s not something you want connected to your body for eight hours a night or during a sauna session when you’re more electrically conductive.

The only real way to verify a clean, safe ground is to test it with an oscilloscope or install a dedicated outdoor grounding rod. And let’s be honest, most people aren’t doing that.

I’ll be diving deeper into this in a Part 2 and Part 3—because while the concept of grounding is simple, the implementation is where things get risky and complicated.

Read the transcript >

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Transcript

Why wouldn’t I use a grounding strap? Okay, so I don’t know why over here I have YouTube pulled up, but I’ll put it here for you in the Facebook group too. I don’t know why YouTube still hasn’t enabled the ability to either do voice recording or embed images or videos in comments.

So I’ll throw this in the Facebook for you. Hopefully you’ll see it. I’ll try to put a link in there, but if you’re not already a member, you know, obviously you have to connect the two in order to see the, um, or play the audio. So why don’t I use grounding straps or why am I against grounding mats?

This is such a difficult question to answer. It’s actually really, really, really simple, but contextually there are a lot of situational differences between people’s homes and houses and offices and the spots where they’re using them. That’s the main issue. So the main, the main problem is that grounding by itself is great.

You should do it. You should use everything to get you in contact with the earth. The trouble is when you’re using an outlet, kind of like one that you could see behind that plant behind the red light therapy panel over there, you don’t really know what that’s hooked up to, right?

You think you do, but unless you’ve checked, like unless you’re a hundred percent sure you understand exactly what that is, you could be hooked up to anything. So when you have commingled bus bars in a panel where the neutral ground swap or, or even at an outlet on a circuit, right, or the junction box or something, right?

There’s all types of wiring errors that can be present. So the reason that I’m not a fan of just blindly telling people to go get a grounding sheet and sleep on it all night is because especially if you live in a condo, an apartment, a townhouse, anything where there’s shared circuits, even a regular house too though, if you have any bus bar swaps in your panel, you’re going to have transient voltage on the line.

And now you’re bringing that.

directly to you all night long, right? I don’t think it’s that much of an issue to have a terrible ground for a little while, like an hour or two, but it’s not something that I would do eight hours a day for the next 30 years, right? Yeah, you can make this work and you can run a line through the window and put a grounding rod outside.

You also have to make sure there’s not underground power in your area. If you live in a close neighborhood like I do, where you can almost reach out the window and touch, you know, the person next door. You know, that’s an issue because you can have all types of wiring that also pick up transient voltage on that ground rod.

You know, these are things that you would want to be careful of. So how do I differentiate that? You know, it’s hard because you come across these clips and it’s me saying, hey, don’t use the ground. Do not use a grounding wrist strap in a sauna, right?

Why? I feel like I’ve covered this before. I feel like I’ve had multiple, multiple videos that teach people why this is the case. Everyone thinks it’s a great idea that you can drop your body voltage to zero running a grounding strap in a sauna, even if it’s a high EMF, high electrical field, you know, sauna, right?

Like it’s not a super low one. Yeah, you can do that as far as changing your meter measurements, but you also have to think a little bit too. Not everything is about a meter measurement that you see on a screen, right? Once you have enough experience, well, if you’ve ever hired a building biologist before to do home assessments and things like that, it really makes it very clear that when you make your body the conduit for discharge on anything, it’s fine, but not for a super long time.

Like just because I can garner a reduction, just because I can have a meter read lower on the screen by hooking myself up to something doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s a good thing, right? Because you haven’t actually changed the equipment that’s creating the emission, which are the wiring in the walls, the heaters, whatever you’re gonna be next to.

It doesn’t have to be related to sauna either. It could be anything else, right? It could be anything else that has some type of EMF emission that you’re next to. So that’s emitting a field that’s coming into contact with your body and you’re able to measure that in terms of body voltage.

You’re able to get an increase, right? When that’s on or off or enabled or disabled, right? So you know that’s the cause or the point of concern that’s creating that environment, right? So when you hook yourself up to a grounding wrist strap and now all of a sudden you see the meter drop to zero, you inherently think that you’ve solved the issue.

But this is exactly like using a sticker on an EMF, I’m sorry, on a RF radiation device. You know those little cell phone stickers that they sell that they put all over phones and stuff? I’ve got a few of those things around here. They don’t work.

They don’t do anything, right? When I take my meters and I put them between, right? Just put them right between some type of an RF emitting device like a wifi router and turn it on and I have some type of receiver, right? It changes nothing, whether you have these stickers present or not.

You could cover the damn signal with the sticker and it still is not gonna do anything. It will wrap around just like wifi is going to fill the room, right? So why am I telling you that part? I’m telling you that part to try and create other visual examples to stimulate you to think a little bit instead of just take these people at face value.

I’m not saying they’re ill-intentioned, what they’re proposing to you is kind of a fallacy in the way that you’re going to be able to use it in your own home, right? For most people. Most people are not in a situation to have a clean ground, right? Yeah, you could go through the steps.

Yes, there’s outliers. Yes, there’s some people’s homes that have no issues, but some of the people that you could be watching online that said, hey, they love this stuff. They could be some of the people that have no issues in their environment. And then somebody else buys the.

thing and expects the same result and they’re not going to get it. It’s not because the thing doesn’t work. It’s not because the paradigm is flawed. It’s not because grounding is bad, right?

It’s not because grounding products or sheets or whatever pillowcases are bad. It’s situationally that in implementation, in reality, like in the real world usage of it every single day, when you lay your head on your pillow and you sleep at night, isn’t the same from that first person to that second person.

So you parting with your money just to buy this thing, have a disconnect and you’re unable to put two and two together to recognize for a second, Hey, my situation doesn’t mirror there’s exactly. So it’s actually not the product that I’m buying that is necessarily creating the positive result.

I’ll, you know, sometimes it is if all the ducks, you know, line up, if everything lines up there for it to be effective. Sure. But in relation to sauna, like, let’s take two steps back for a second in relation to sauna, if you want to wear a grounding strap, fine, the exposure limit is really low that you’re going to like, you know, be doing something like that in comparison to sleeping.

It’s not something that I would do. It just doesn’t make sense, right? Understand that if you have an emission present in an environment and you’re able to take a skin measurement and measure that on body voltage, right? Or have a body voltage measurement of you in that environment, out of the environment with the equipment turned on, with the equipment turned off, right?

You’ve you’ve, you know, for certain that this is where that emission is coming from, you selecting to use a grounding strap and being the point of discharge for that field, that’s not really a mitigation technique. Somebody might be telling you that it is, but nothing has changed at the source.

Just like the stickers that go on your cell phone. Now, why don’t I make videos that harp on people for the stickers?

because I know that placebo is powerful. I saw it time and time again in leukemia treatment in the hospital five days a week for a year, right? And so, somebody spends $30 or something on some sticker and it makes them feel better, hey, fine. If somebody comes to me and says, hey Matt, do you think I should buy these or would you recommend them or do you buy them or would you sell them to me?

I would say absolutely not. They don’t work, right? But it’s not worth, you have to have situational awareness toward, you know, like, do you really need to be upsetting to people if it’s not really causing them any harm? No, but at the same time, not gonna lie to you if you say, hey, does this work?

Absolutely not, it doesn’t do a damn thing. Kind of like the grounding mat in a sauna, right? You think that it’s doing this thing but you’re just having your body be the conduit for discharge for the equipment that’s generating the field because if you sat there with the grounding strap on and removed all the other equipment that was creating the field, there would be no reason to have conduit of discharge through you because the EMF wouldn’t exist, right?

So we’re getting a little off tangent with that. That’s gonna start getting a little bit more complicated because then from there, you would wanna say, well, what are the conditionals that are creating this within the environment? Why is this equipment, you know, doing this versus other set equipment that’s doing X, right?

So now you have like comparative stuff and it’s gonna get complicated really quickly. The, it’s, I shouldn’t say complicated. It’s actually really simple. Situationally, it’s complicated because you create a visual in your mind that this stuff does one thing but as soon as you leave this room that I’m in right now or as soon as you leave your room that you’re in right now and you go to another person’s house or office or something with a different set of conditionals, everything that you think is a static or a constant goes out the flipping window.

I mean, just erase it off.

whiteboard. It doesn’t exist. There isn’t any carryover. There are no two places that are exactly the same.

I’ve been through this over and over and over. Every single time I move an office actually, you know, we have issues when we first set up, right? Everyone complains about, you know, even if you shut off the Wi-Fi, you have power line adapters and everything else, you know.

At the same time, the last thing that you would want to do is to ground yourself because you have found a body voltage spike and then not understand situationally what’s creating it or how that differs from environment to environment when you move around. You know what I mean?

So I’m going to stop this one here. I think we need a part two and a part three to this because I think a lot of people, like I slept in a Faraday cage for a year that was hooked up to a traditional ground. Yeah, you can do the little tester and you can do this and you can do that and make sure that it’s an actual ground and it’s not a faulty circuit and everything else.

I don’t think it’s a good idea and I’ve done it and I paid the money and I really don’t think it’s a great idea because for one thing, if you were going to do that, you would want to have a non-grounded tent. Don’t have a metallic tent that hooks up to a ground because if there’s any transient voltage on those circuits or anywhere else, the metallic tent, when it’s grounded, when it’s plugged in, is an attractor and you’re bringing that transient voltage directly to your body because usually they’re not super oversized to where there’s like two feet between all sides of the mattress and the actual tent itself.

And so when you lay in there and you’re wearing a body voltage meter, when you get close to the damn thing, you can tell that it’s interacting with your body. You really can. I can see it right on the readings. I’m not a fan of that.

I don’t do it for myself anymore. If I were going to do that again, I would use a non-grounded tent. If you’re on a second floor, you have to have a grounding mat or at least some type of RF blocking sheet.

underneath it. Otherwise, you’re gonna have transmitters that are shooting things up through the floor and then they get trapped and bounce around in the tent. You’d be better off without it, right? That makes sense.

So a lot of this stuff goes way over people’s heads because you’re dealing with things that are so-called invisible. You can’t see them, can’t measure them. Even if you had the tools to do so, you wouldn’t have the wherewithal or the knowledge or the wisdom to quantify it effectively.

But when you have enough field experience with a lot of these things, or you help enough people, or you see this from structure to structure or environment to environment, there’s patterns that begin to take place and you can kind of create visuals in your mind and know what to expect before you even measure stuff.

Now, obviously you have to do an assessment in order to have real-world values, but this is what’s lacking with the grounding products. They just ship them out and you have no idea, no wherewithal that you could actually be doing yourself more harm than good, right? Now, this is relative.

I don’t see people dying from using a grounding product or something, right? So if it’s something that you really wanna do, do what you, you don’t have to take it from some guy on the internet. I’m just telling you what I’ve found from looking at these things and what I do for myself and what I won’t do for myself any longer.

And so I don’t sleep in Faraday cages anymore. I would, again, just non-grounded or I have to create the ground if I’m ever gonna do something like that. And I don’t wear wrist straps or any grounding things in a sauna because I don’t wanna be the conduit for discharge.

So let me know what your questions are. Hopefully this shed a little bit of light on this. I know it can get a little bit fuzzy over time, but we’ll do a part two and a part three and see how we can better help you guys. We’ll see you in the next one.