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Floating for Mental Health
May was Mental Health Awareness Month, dedicated to raising awareness and understanding of mental health issues while promoting healthy practices for maintaining mental well-being. It’s a time to reflect on the importance of our mental state, engage in open conversations about mental wellness, and explore various approaches to improving our mental health.
In recognition, we wanted to explore how floating’s widespread impact on our minds and bodies can help us build a strong foundation for our mental health. Through helping us by managing our stress, alleviating our anxiety, and even bettering our sleep – floating can be a powerful ally on our journey to enhance our overall mental and emotional wellbeing.
Reducing Stress Hormones
One of the most significant and well-studied ways that floatation therapy supports mental health is by reducing stress. When we’re under chronic stress, our bodies produce excess cortisol (a stress hormone) to help us cope with the perceived threat. However, in the modern world this “threat” is triggered by the fast paced and noise filled life we lead, meaning it’s essentially ever-present. This constant state of hyperarousal can lead to a range of negative effects on both physical and mental well-being.
Regular floating has been shown to regulate cortisol levels, leading to improved mood stability and reduced symptoms of anxiety. By reducing stress hormones, you’ll find it easier to manage daily stressors and maintain a sense of calmness in the face of everyday stressors.
Floating for a Healthy Heart
February is American Heart Month, where the spotlight turns to nurturing one of our body’s most vital organs. For those familiar with the tranquility of floatation therapy, it’s well-known as a sanctuary for the mind and body. However, its impact stretches beyond mere relaxation, touching the very core of our cardiovascular health. Let’s explore the ways in which regular floating sessions can be a powerful ally for your heart.
Easing the Heart’s Burden: Stress Reduction
In the fast-paced rhythm of modern life, chronic stress has become a public health enemy, contributing to a plethora of cardiovascular issues, including hypertension and heart attacks. The serene embrace of the float tank is a proven antidote to the stresses of daily life. For our hearts, this reduction in stress is not just a relief, but a necessity. Chronic stress taxes the heart, elevating the risk of these common heart issues. By stepping into the float tank, we allow our bodies to shift away from stress, thereby safeguarding our hearts against these risks. During this month of heart health awareness, it’s a poignant reminder of how essential stress management is for cardiovascular well-being.
Blood Pressure Regulation: Floating Toward Equilibrium
High blood pressure is a silent threat that significantly increases the risk of heart disease. The serene environment of a floatation tank can help the body shift from its sympathetic (stress-induced) state to a parasympathetic state, which is responsible for relaxation and healing. This gentle regulation is a testament to the body’s innate ability to heal and find balance, providing a non-pharmacological option to support heart health. Regular floatation therapy sessions could, therefore, play a role in maintaining optimal blood pressure levels, offering a serene route to heart health maintenance.
Improved Circulation: Nurturing Your Heart through Enhanced Flow
The benefits of floating extend to enhancing blood circulation, a key component of heart health. Good blood circulation is fundamental to cardiovascular health, ensuring that oxygen and nutrients are efficiently delivered throughout the body. The buoyancy and warmth of the saltwater in float tanks encourage the blood vessels to dilate, improving overall circulation. This enhanced blood flow can help in preventing the build-up of plaque in arteries, a major cause of heart disease.
The Heart’s Rhythm and Variability
Heart rate variability (HRV) is a measure of the variation in time between each heartbeat, considered an indicator of cardiovascular fitness and stress resilience. HRV is an important indicator of heart health, reflecting the heart’s ability to adapt to stress and changes in the environment. Emerging evidence suggests that floating may positively influence HRV, signifying a more resilient and flexible cardiovascular system. By incorporating floatation therapy into our wellness routines, we can potentially foster a heart that’s not only stronger but more adaptable to the challenges it faces.
Embracing Heart Health Through Floating
For those of us who have experienced the profound calmness of floating, it’s clear that its benefits ripple through every aspect of our well-being, including our heart health. As American Heart Month encourages us to focus on cardiovascular care, let’s recognize floatation therapy as more than just a mental escape – it’s a practice with the power to enhance heart health, offering a peaceful yet potent way to support our cardiovascular system. Whether you’re a regular floater or occasionally indulge, the heart health benefits of floating are compelling reasons to make it a staple in your self-care repertoire.
So this Heart Month we raise our glasses (and lower our blood pressure) to floating, where heart health meets profound relaxation.
Floating elicits the Relaxation Response
You’ve probably heard of our fight or flight response–when we’re presented with stressful or threatening situations (like being chased by a hippopotamus), our body’s autonomic nervous system responds by preparing for action. Our heart rate increases, our breathing picks up, and blood flows from our core out to our limbs (along with a lot of other changes, all focused on helping us get ready to defend ourselves or to get out of there as swiftly as possible). In addition to this well known reaction to stressors, we have another autonomic response you may not have heard of, which is pretty much the polar opposite of fight or flight: the relaxation response. This is also referred to as the “rest and digest” response, and it takes over when we feel safe and secure. Our breathing and heart rate slow down, our circulation evens out, our digestive system becomes more active, and we’re more likely to become sexually aroused. While our fight or flight serves us best in dangerous situations, our rest and digest response is useful for all those times when we’re NOT being threatened, and it makes more sense for our body to focus on taking care of itself. This allows us to store up energy, heal and recover, and even attempt to produce future generations. Both autonomic responses are incredibly useful to our survival, helping us to get through tough short-term situations and make sure that we have the resources and time to prepare for whatever maybe coming in the future.
Unfortunately for modern humans, we’re often under constant stress (even if it’s not as immediately threatening as being chased by a hippo). Things like being cut off in traffic, being chewed out by our boss, or being woken up by a loud car in the middle of the night can make our fight or flight response kick in. Even before the global pandemic, stress levels were especially high for people living in cities, where all of the motion, noise, and interaction creates a more threatening environment for our psyche. It’s safe to say that many of us were going through our days in a state of constant and chronic stress, and having to deal with the Covid and all of its impacts has certainly not helped.
This isn’t an all-or-none situation: there is a large gradient of stress that people experience in everyday life and a large diversity in the effects of that stress. Regardless of both the exact causes and levels of stress, finding ways to unwind, de-stress, and cue the relaxation response is increasingly important for all of us. In fact, when the term Relaxation Response was first coined by Herbert Benson, it was presented alongside a protocol for practicing and eliciting it in yourself. Reading through his suggested steps, it may sound very similar to engaging in a simple meditative practice. You wouldn’t be the first to make that comparison–in fact Dr. Benson is often credited with familiarizing a Western audience with meditation, essentially through rebranding it as the Relaxation Effect and conducting studies on its measurable impacts. With that in mind, it’s not surprising at all that numerous studies have found that floating in a float tank seems to bring on both the relaxation effect and its associated benefits. In fact, floating is often described outside the scientific community as “training wheels for meditation,”demonstrating that outside the lab, people have also been noticing the similarities between floating and the relaxation response for things like reducing stress, improving mood, and increasing focus.
Rapid Recovery – Floatation Therapy for Elite Athletes
As research on floating continues to mature and push into the mainstream, it has more and more evidence to back up its benefits. Many pro athletes are regularly jumping into tanks these days, and at the 2019 Float Conference, leading sports scientist Dr. Matt Driller presented emerging research on how float tanks can aid athletic recovery and performance. The results are quite exciting.
Dr. Driller hails from New Zealand and has studied elite athlete recovery for over a decade. His homeland prides itself on punching above its weight in sports, in spite of its tiny population. With limited top talent, New Zealand obsesses over getting every possible edge when it comes to preventing injuries from overtraining.
“Recovery fundamentals like sleep, nutrition and periodization come first,” Driller explains. “But at the highest levels, those extra ‘one percenters’ can mean the difference between gold and going home empty-handed.” This led Driller to begin scientifically investigating if float tanks could provide that marginal gain which could make or break a champion.
In 2016, Driller published his first study on how floating impacts athletes. He looked at 60 members of Australia’s Olympic team (who already floated regularly before the study began).
Measuring their mood, soreness and stress markers before and after one 60-minute float, the results were striking. Significant improvements appeared across 15 out of 16 mood factors. Athletes reported feeling less worn out, less tired, more relaxed, and less tense after getting their float on. Muscle soreness also decreased substantially.
Here’s where it gets really interesting – athletes who actually fell asleep during the float saw the biggest mood enhancements. This suggests that combining floating with napping may supercharge benefits.
Despite intriguing initial findings, Driller is the first to admit this study had limitations. The sample size was small and it examined only psychological effects, not physical performance metrics. Still, it remains heavily cited in the media on floating simply because so little other research exists.
To address these gaps, Driller’s team completed a more thorough trial on 20 elite team sport athletes.
Researchers brought athletes into the lab for an intense late-night workout mimicking the strain from competition. Afterwards, athletes either did a 60-minute float or relaxed in a recliner as a control recovery. Measures of soreness, sleep quality, strength, power and speed were tracked both immediately after and the next morning.
The findings demonstrate clear physical benefits from floating in the participants. Compared to just resting, float recovery resulted in:
- Higher quality sleep with less wakefulness.
- Up to 24 hours less muscle soreness.
- Increased pressure pain threshold the next day.
- Faster sprint times 12 hours later.
- More power output on vertical jumps the next morning.
As Driller summarizes, “Less pain means quicker readiness to train again. Better sleep equals better restoration. Maintaining speed and explosiveness is huge for back-to-back competitions.”
This compelling data reveals that floating may confer real performance advantages for elite athletes.
However, Driller emphasizes that research is still in its early stages. “We need more work to unpack why and how floating provides these benefits,” he says. Some questions he is exploring next include:
- What happens with regular floating twice weekly over many weeks? Do effects accumulate?
- How does floating right before and after competition impact performance and recovery?
- Can detailed sleep studies reveal changes to sleep stages and quality?
- How do effects compare to techniques like cold water immersion, compression, massage, and others?
Answers here will refine best practices on using float pods (alongside other modalities) for performance, especially in regards to recovery.
According to Driller, “It’s an exciting time to be a float researcher! Elite sports will continue pushing boundaries.” He looks forward to getting more controlled data to inform athletic and public use, rather than relying solely on studies with small sample sizes and anecdotal reports.
Curious to test out floating yourself?
“Give it a try – you might be surprised how profound silent floating can be, both mentally and physically,” Driller advises. Based on the results from these ongoing scientific explorations, float tanks may well provide that extra edge to elevate your own performance to the next level.
Understanding Float Tanks: Media vs. Reality
Float Tanks in the media are most commonly shown as psychedelic-inspired journeys – a sort of modern vision quest in which the character often confronts either internal (or sometimes literal) demons. This in turn leads to a breakthrough that allows the character to grow and progress on their journey.
Although the benefits from floating are in many cases deeply profound, they also tend to emerge in more subtle ways. Float tanks aren’t one-off epiphany machines, and although visuals while floating aren’t uncommon, they’re far from the surreal DMT trips shown in television shows and movies. Floating, as a practice, has a litany of benefits, including things like reduced stress and anxiety, decreased muscle and joint pain, an improved immune system, heightened creativity, and many other benefits that we’ve written about previously – but these are developed and maintained by floating regularly.
We’re going to spend a little time wading through the (often murky) waters of how float tanks are portrayed in the limelight of popular media. We’ll compare these dramatized renditions to the very real, albeit less flashy, benefits and experiences you may already know.
Float Tanks in Cobra Kai
Cobra Kai – the Netflix series continuing the story of the original Karate Kid movie from the 80s – features an episode where one of the main characters, Sam, joins her friends for a trip to try out float tanks.
Sam has a realistic hallucination in which she’s shown in a mind-scape with a black background, confronted by the demands of all the people in her life. This is followed by a literal fight with her aggressive, “shadow self.” A fight which, in this case, she loses.
Side Notes:
- Sam’s “hippy” friend also had a realistic vision as well, but in it she was a drop of dew… which is closer to the types of experiences people actually report from time in the tank.
- Her other friend couldn’t float, because the heaters in the tank were broken – classic.
Float Tanks and Stranger Things
Stranger Things has a way of making everything look ten times more mysterious, and the humble float tank is no exception. In the series, Eleven uses a makeshift float tank to heighten her psychic abilities, diving deep into an alternate realm in her quest to confront various threats.
In most of these clips she transports to a realistic mental realm, again presented on a totally black background, with characters (or entities) she is able to observe and interact with. In the more recent seasons, she used the float tank to work through very early trauma, which allows her to regain the use of her lost psychic abilities.
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Side Notes:
- Of all of these, Stranger Things gets a break since these scenes are about Eleven’s experience floating, rather than what floating is like for a normal human being.
- Their explanation of how to construct a DIY float tank is not too far off from a workable setup… although they ignore the fact that all of the heat is sucked out of the water when you add in salt – an extreme endothermic reaction that takes hours of commercial level heating to get up to temperature. Eleven would be floating in absolutely frigid water.
- The floatation experience is shown in a couple ways: being totally submerged in water with a breathing apparatus, or laying face up in a pool of saturated epsom salt. These actually mirror the progression of float tanks, from being fully submerged tanks of water in 1950’s labs, to lay-down commercial units in the 1970’s.
Float Tanks and Big Bang Theory
In The Big Bang Theory, Amy and Sheldon both hop into float tanks, but they’re shown as having wildly contrasting experiences.
Amy’s float is, based on our previous examples, what you’d expect: she is conjured into a head-space where realistic versions of people in her life are all criticizing her, telling her that she’s a failure. And of course they’re shown as disembodied heads on an all black background.
Sheldon’s float is also psychedelic, with him swimming around inside of visuals of infinitely repeating fractals from Mandelbrot Sets. Although also hyperbolic for a typical float experience, this is actually much closer to common visuals that people report from time in the tank.
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Side Notes:
- Float tanks are almost never in the same room together – each one would be a completely private setup.
- The description of the filtration process is shockingly accurate, other than clarifying that the water is circulated, disinfected, and filtered between every use, not dumped and fully replaced… which would be over $500 just in the cost of salt per float.
Float Tanks and Dave
Dave, the comedy series parodying the life of the real world rapper Lil’ Dicky as he was trying to make it big, also features a float tank scene at the end of the series.
Driven by almost sheer desperation, our aspiring rapper finds himself driven to a float tank to overcome writer’s block. In this episode, his psychedelic float hallucinations are heightened thanks to a little “help” from actual psychedelics, so we’ll also cut Dave a little slack on its representation of the pure float experience, but the pattern is familiar.
Dave finds himself engrossed in a realistic, but surreal vision (not set on a purely black background, for once). After exploring, he eventually discovers an alternate version of himself, shaved of all hair and mostly nude, who confronts him about art and creativity.
He has a traumatic end to the float, after which he has a complete creative breakthrough and literally runs to the studio, still soaking in salt-water, to start recording music.
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Side Notes:
- The float tank is located outside, where it doesn’t appear to be connected to a power source… obviously not the ideal situation for a good float.
- Floaters aren’t directly supervised during their floats, but customers are also not typically served psychedelic tea beforehand, so… yeah, the two dudes at the end were clearly being irresponsible.
Float Tanks in Reality
Television thrives on dramatization. It’s the nature of the medium to amplify emotional and sensory experiences, and (ironically) sensory deprivation offers a convenient platform for this. TV shows have a bad habit of depicting characters confronting literal versions of themselves in some sort of spiritual duel, while the reality is that most floaters find that their true ‘opponents’ are rooted in everyday stresses, anxieties, and physical pain. However, all of this emphasis on drama obscures the more understated and consistently beneficial aspects of floating.
The benefits – such as faster injury recovery, mental clarity, and even the silencing of those pesky inner critics – unfold over consistent float sessions. And while some people do report vivid mental imagery or “hallucination-like” states, they are generally more subdued than the common narratives suggest and do not require confronting a team of internal naysayers to achieve serenity. In fact, an overwhelming majority of people find the float tank to be a freeing space, a blank canvas where the mind can relax, rather than a chamber that amplifies neuroses.
The benefits of float tanks also aren’t momentary, as shown in short-form mass media, but extend far beyond the immediate experience. Even just looking at the basics of stress and anxiety reduction, some of the most studied benefits from floatation therapy, we can see that they have a compounding positive effect on other aspects of physical and mental well-being. The benefits in the real-world are enduring and often life-enhancing (albeit less flashy) than the ephemeral, dramatized portrayals in popular media.
So next time you see a float tank on the silver screen, take it with a grain of Epsom salt. Sure, it might not be the cathartic battle or trippy escapade that TV makes it out to be, but what it lacks in theatrics, it more than makes up for in genuine, lasting benefits. As can often be the case, the reality of floating is, in so many ways, better than fiction.
Rest yourself before you wreck yourself
If you’ve been feeling lately like there’s so much to do that you’ve actually become unproductive… you’re not alone.
The modern world has a way of brainwashing us into thinking that our productivity is the most important part of who we are. There’s a sense of ever present pressure to get things done, and we’re primed to think that we’re somehow failing, or wasting time, if we’re not working towards something with a tangible end result.
Over time, unchecked and overbearing responsibilities can lead to chronic stress and burnout. It’s an issue that has been explored in the scientific community for years (decades, even), but has only recently been getting the respect and attention it deserves.
With remote work turning into the norm for many people, some of us have seen our work lives get a little too comfortable in our personal spaces, and the lines between where our jobs end and our real lives begin may have started to blur. Couple this with the drastic decline in the non-work activities we’ve been able to enjoy as a support mechanism… and we’re experiencing a perfect storm of conditions that has caused burnout to surge.
So what can we do? Burnout is tied up with things that we have to do… and we can’t just not do them. It can be difficult to take time away without consequences. Most of us don’t have the luxury of taking a vacation for a reboot, and many of us have trouble even squeezing in a mental health day for a bit of respite.
But what we can do is take some conscious time to set aside our responsibilities, even for just a few moments. Taking some time to break free of the gravity of our responsibilities and enjoy the moments of weightlessness that come from taking the world off your shoulders. To daydream, and let our minds wander for no purpose other than to clear themselves.
If you can’t take a vacation to the tropics to escape your stress, come enjoy a stay-cation instead. Step away from your responsibilities and let yourself refresh your resolve to approach them.
