The Secret Behind How Floating Dissolves Your Stress and Reduces Anxiety
There’s an incredible amount of pressure put on us from the choices we make each and every day. Not to mention that we are also in the midst of a global health crisis. It’s clear that the stress we face daily can cause a lot of health problems. Many of us recognize the commonly associated physical problems like heart disease and high blood pressure, but stress can also weave its way into presenting as mental health issues like PTSD, depression, and eating disorders.
Most of us can feel the need to recharge and provide ourselves with some of the self-care these days as the world seems to spiral out of control. We want to turn to any solution that may help but there’s always a bit of skepticism when it comes to alternative wellness practices and whether they are as helpful as they claim to be.
Floating is no exception to this.
So let’s dive into some of the science on floating to see just how beneficial it can be for reducing stress.
Float Therapy and Stress Reduction
Dr. Justin Feinstein is one of the most well-known scientists studying the effects of float therapy in his custom lab setup at the Laureate Institute of Brain Research. In a recent Tedx Talk, Dr. Feinstein shared some of his study results about the effects of floating on stress.
The effects were incredible.
Every single person who participated in the study experienced some amount of stress relief. Furthermore, most of the participants saw a significant reduction in their stress levels that lasted for more than 24 hours after just a single float session.
If there was a pill you could take that would allow you to be stress-free for the whole day, who wouldn’t want that?
Floating to reduce stress may be more time-involved than just taking a pill but the benefits of it seem to be even more significant than most anti-anxiety treatments.
And just as importantly, there’s no concern about interactions with other medications or other negative contraindications. It’s one of the safest and lowest risk wellness practices there is.
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Dr. Feinstein isn’t just studying the effects of floating on people with normal, everyday stress though. He’s looking at stress-related illnesses like PTSD, depression, and anxiety, and finding that the individuals with the highest levels of stress before floating experience the greatest benefit from the treatment. Everyone who floats returns to a baseline level of relief, which means floating will bring you down to a similar level of relaxation as those people who always seems to be as cool as a cucumber.
What’s The Secret Behind Floating?
So the next big question is how does it work? Do we really just lay in the dark and let our minds clear out our thoughts for an hour or so?
This does seem to be the key to it all.
It’s difficult to find the effects of the solitude of floating, where we can’t be bothered by the outside world, anywhere else. Our minds and bodies slow down dramatically, our brains enter a state similar to dreaming, and this all gives us the ability to recharge more quickly.
Before float tanks took over as the most effective and relaxing way to experience this solitude, a psychologist named Dr. Peter Suedfeld did a lot of sensory deprivation research in the 60s and 70s by placing people in completely dark rooms in isolation for 24 hours. The term he used for this was REST (Restricted Environment Stimulation Therapy).
Dr. Suedfeld created a paradigm shift in the scientific community on sensory deprivation. Before this time it was only thought of as torture, as a result of incomplete research and questionable methods performed by researchers that would prime the subjects for a bad experience before the experiment even began.
By keeping the subjects at ease and making the process simple for anyone, Dr. Suedfeld found that participants actually enjoyed the sensory deprivation experience.
Over the years, Dr. Suedfeld found that the benefits of REST carried over to many areas including addiction treatment, helping with autism, enhancing creativity, and reducing stress.
This research was the foundation for the future of float tanks and helped scientists, as well as the wider community, stay open-minded to the benefits of floating and reducing stress.
Since these early days, we’ve come even further in seeing the light that shines in the darkness of sensory reduced environments. You don’t need to spend a full day in the darkness to experience the benefits, a single float session can provide similar benefits.
In his Tedx Talk, Dr. Feinstein comments on how we as humans aren’t designed to be constantly plugged into looking at screens, listening to the cacophonous noise of the city, or sitting under the glare of fluorescent lights all day. We also aren’t supposed to constantly let our minds go wild thinking about our to-do list and everything else that we cram into the 24 hours of our day.
Even if we enjoy having a full and vibrant schedule, these things can wear us out and add to the stress of our daily lives. Taking a break is our chance at hitting the reset button, and as we’ve seen, floating has been proven to be one of the most effective ways to do that.