Float Your Way To Peace | Studying Serenity and Float Therapy

Finding serenity sounds nice right about now, doesn’t it?

As we’ve struggled through 2020, it can seem like a faraway dream to find serenity now.

With so much uncertainty, it’s difficult to tune out and relax to focus on the present, even though it’s one of the most important things we can do for ourselves right now.

We have to remember to focus on what’s in our own control and what we can have an impact on when the world feels so chaotic. And one of the things we can make a positive impact on is taking better care of ourselves. Finding our own sense of serenity and taking care of our mental health through positive routines is something we can and should control, especially at this time.

Because we so often talk about mental health from the perspective of negative symptoms, it can be hard to remember that mental health isn’t an on/off switch. We don’t often talk about mental health from the positive perspective without comparing it to the negative but the reality is that it exists on a spectrum and even when we’re not suffering, we still have room to make things better for ourselves.

And this is one of the things that floating does best for you. It improves your serenity by helping with mental and physical wellness while setting you at ease.

We often think of serenity as something that comes from meditation or the peace of relaxation but it’s also a specific term used by scientists. Serenity is a marker of mental wellness that gauges how well we stay present, our readiness to practice forgiveness, and how content we feel with our lives despite the negativity.

Serenity was also one of the many mental health factors studied in recent float therapy research.

In 2018, Dr. Justin Feinstein’s team at the LIBR were able to demonstrate the effect of a single 60-minute float on serenity, and the results are part of what makes floating such a promising wellness practice:

In anxious participants, serenity soared post-float, above the baseline for non-anxious participants in the study.

And in the non-anxious group, serenity increased a significant amount as well, demonstrating this mental health gradient.

Even more impressively, when looking at the data from all 50 participants in the study, every single one saw an increase in serenity post-float. And a quarter of them maxed out the serenity scale post-float.

Looking at the graph for all the participants’ data shows the significant results of this study. The red bar is how serene they felt before floating, and the blue bar shows the post-float improvement.

There’s a presentation on the full results of the study here, and the research article is available here. In addition to the study looking at serenity, the researchers also saw decreases in anxiety and muscle tension as well as increases in relaxation and energy levels.

This chart shows the different mental health traits impacted by a single float:

Regardless of what this year has been like to you, we are all able to cut through the chaos and choose to take control of what we can, including our self-care. And this can look like many different things that you find restorative, from meditation to yoga, to sitting by a fire listening to holiday music or even getting away to the complete stillness of a float tank to silence the holiday hubbub for a bit.

Serenity can be found closer to home than you think and isn’t just in some far-off oasis. But it does require you to take the time for yourself to rest and recharge.