3 Strategies To Use To Float When You Can’t Get Your Mind To Turn Off

“There’s no way I could do that because I can’t get my brain to turn off.”

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard someone use this excuse for why they couldn’t float…

I’d have a lot of nickels.

You might be nodding your head in understanding, or you’re the complete opposite because you know how great it feels to float and let go of everything in your mind and body.

Even I experience this hesitation about settling in for a float on occasion so I wanted to share some thoughts and practices on the best ways to overcome this hesitation and dive into what is bound to be one of the most relaxing hours of your life.

Trust in your float facilitator and surrender to the feeling.

The value of having someone guide your float should not be underappreciated. Going into a float centre is trusting in experts to create the ideal float experience for you so that you have the best chances of escaping from the throws of time for a while.

Because I usually facilitate my own floats and get out on my own accord, I don’t experience this often enough. But I was just in for a float during regular hours for the first time in a long time and I was able to ask Josie to play the music when the time was up.

I knew I had more work to get done that day and a mid-day break like this was unusual, so trying to get my brain to turn off was hard at first.

There was a point I hit when I didn’t think I could wait any longer. I thought that maybe she got busy at the front desk and forgot about me. These are the normal feelings that lots of us go through when we’re detached from our anchor to time and constant connection to the world around us through our devices.

The funny thing is that just as I hit this breaking point, the music gradually started to come back on followed by the lights and the feeling of relief that washed over me as I was gently brought back into the world around me this way instead of just giving up and getting out was amazing.

It’s really hard to describe without experiencing the difference between a float where you set an alarm and get yourself out versus trusting in the facilitator to get you up when the experience is over.

I think the best way to sum it up is to surrender into the float.

Once you’re in the float sometimes the anxiety creeps in because you feel your mind racing. Here are some of the other strategies I use and recommend if you’re thinking of getting out.

The 10 Breaths

It’s incredibly hard to get through doing 10 deep breaths without losing track of the count with thoughts interrupting.

Anytime you feel the urge to get out of your float early or you find that there are too many thoughts jumbling your head, start doing 10 deep breaths while counting. The goal is to try to remain completely focused on your breath and the count alone without any other thoughts coming into your mind. When you lose track of what number you’re on or a different thought comes into your head, you start back over at 1.

It’s a great practice in focus.

And a hard one.

I think it can easily take ten or more minutes to achieve this and by the time you do, you’ll completely lose track of time again and have a much calmer mind to settle back into your float.

Don’t try to force the thoughts away.

Let them happen and they will start to settle down.

Thoughts don’t always have to be tamed.

One of my more frequently used analogies for floating is that it’s like a mental filing cabinet.

Driven, Type A people falsely assume that they “can’t” float because they can’t get their minds to turn off. That there are just too many thoughts always in their head.

We all have adapted the ability to focus and clear our minds of relentless thoughts because this is the gateway to the flow state and it’s evolutionarily adaptive for high-performance situations.

You are going to have a lot of thoughts in your head when you settle into your float.

We all do, all the time.

But as you start to let your body relax and loosen, your mind gets more space to relax as well. The thoughts in our head start to make more sense. They settle like falling leaves on a pond and soon the ripples stop reverberating.

The peace and tranquillity of this state is blissful. Especially when your brain typically goes a mile a minute.

This is the value not only in floating but in taking similar time each day to find a few minutes to become more aware of your thoughts and how your body is feeling. You can do this by leaving your phone behind as you go for a walk or by sitting still in a quiet place.

Training your mind to find more focus and to let go of intrusive thoughts helps in every aspect of our lives. Learning how to do this can be hard in our always plugged-in and distracted society but it’s well worth taking the time to work on.

The skills that we build in the float tank are highly transferable to everyday life and the more busy and crazy the world seems to get, the more important it is to practice these skills, even if you can’t get your mind to turn off.