The Power of Success
“Did you know that Tony Robbins burns 11,000 calories a day when on stage?”
It’s hard to imagine, so I knew I had to see this kind of performance for myself.
Bob told me that if I ever get the chance to see Tony Robbins live, it’s well worth the cost of admission.
Last week I had the chance to make this long-term goal a reality as Tony Robbins was the keynote speaker at the Power of Success seminar in Toronto. If you’re at all familiar with Tony, his stage presence is exactly what you have seen, whether from a seminar clip online or the Netflix documentary I Am Not Your Guru.
I had a great experience and felt energized for the entirety of the 14-hour day and some of the most valuable lessons that I learned from Tony are the topic of this week’s FlowCast.
Give it a listen, there are many great lessons to learn from it around the topic of success and peak performance.
The Human Will Is Incredible
Sometimes social media gets us stuck in a loop of feeling that our lives are not as exciting or interesting as the lives of the people we are connected to but if you look closer, you will find inspiration in those posts, tweets, and TikToks.
I saw an example of a friend who had made an incredible change from a bleak situation into a hopeful future recently and it got me thinking…
There's a lot of darkness in the world today and if you wanted to it wouldn't be very hard to dwell in a cloud of misery.
What we sometimes forget though is that the human will is incredible and has endured the most horrific events throughout history. Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl is the classic example of how even when there's nothing else left, the human spirit and will never be stolen away from you.
Positivity and optimism lie at the root of all the historical examples of incredible human will. Limiting beliefs are bound to cast you downwards in a spiral of despair.
If you're going through a hard time or stuck in some way, draw inspiration from the world around you and keep moving forward. Making the shift with limiting beliefs is not easy but just like putting in the reps in the gym to build bigger biceps, putting in the repetitions with positive messages will build that new belief system in your brain.
Don’t compare yourself to others and see it as a reason for feeling down on yourself, get inspired and build on the positivity around you to live even brighter.
Creating Balance With Your Weekends
You’ve Got To Make Time To Recharge
The concept of burning the candle from both ends embodies the trendy term called work-life balance, or lack thereof as seems to be more and more the case. If you are in a hard and stressful job but also spending your weekends staying up late and partying or neglecting sleep for Netflix binges, the wick that is your lifeforce is getting burnt out from both ends.
Thanksgiving long weekend just passed us and usually, long weekends give us respite from the ‘always on’ mentality that we live with today, as businesses also closed for a day of rest and give us all the chance to pause. However, long weekends are also filled with family gatherings and times of celebration which can mean late nights, good food, and plenty of drinking. All of this is great when it means reconnecting with friends and family spread near and far to create lasting memories but recognizing its impact on your nervous system and stress levels is valuable for avoiding a state of full-on burnout and keeping your training or business progressing if you are involved in any sports or entrepreneurial endeavours.
My Thanksgiving weekend this year was the aforementioned kind as I was attending my best friend John’s wedding in Toronto and I knew that I would have to find balance in other parts of my life and throughout the weekend in order to not crash after the wedding.
This is what a few busy days and late nights can do to your recovery. The following data from my Oura ring display from Saturday morning and Sunday morning on Thanksgiving weekend tells you all you need to know.
Knowing how various factors impact my sleep quality helps me to make choices to regain balance or simply know that I may wake up feeling less than optimal after a busy weekend like this and that I should go light with training to avoid pushing myself into a deeper hole or risking injury.
The value in knowing that a few nights short of optimal sleep combined with busy and active days crushes your recovery and readiness for training extends to general exercise as well as sport-specific training. If you like to work out just to stay healthy, following a busy weekend like the one I had, you may want to consider doing light weight training only or avoiding it altogether and just doing some low-intensity cardio, yoga, and stretching until your body is more fully recovered.
In addition to considerations with how your workouts are designed to create balance, do what you can to mitigate stress at work, and find other parasympathetic activities to include while you are returning to normal. For me this included getting some extra rest with an hour-long float session once I returned home, getting outside for a quiet walk, and getting extra sleep for the following few nights.
Most often the choices that help us regain balance aren’t the most fun or easiest options (but they will make you feel better) which is why you need to make the conscious choice to improve your recovery and reduce chronic stress levels.
Tips For Regaining Balance
Adjust Your Workout Plan Until You Are Better Recovered - don’t tax the nervous system with high-intensity weights or cardio.
Eat healthy foods - this is completely subjective to you and your goals but you probably know when you’re making the right choices. Use a food tracker like MyFitnessPal for a bit if it helps you get back on track.
Forest bathing - getting deep into nature has restorative effects on your mind, body, and soul.
Get extra sleep - turn off your devices and go to bed early to catch up on some Zzz’s.
Go for a float - find a float centre near you and get into a state of deep parasympathetic rejuvenation.
Reduce caffeine - when your body is reaching its limits you may be reaching for that extra cup of coffee to keep going. Avoiding doing that will limit further contribution to adrenal fatigue and stress.
Plan in advance - if you know you’re coming into crunch time at work or in training, prepare ahead of time with all of the above tips so that your competition or all-nighter at work doesn’t grind you into the dirt.
There are many ways to return to optimal functioning but it all starts with awareness which we intuitively know when we’re approaching burnout and overtaxing ourselves. We don’t always have the luxury of stepping on the brakes and settling down - there are seasons in our lives when we have to go full-tilt forward. But when you can it’s best to slow down and keep balance in place.
If you’re unsure of what this feels like in yourself or if you want even more details, a device like the Oura ring, Whoop, or other HRV tracking tools can help you to quantitatively measure your recovery to keep track of trends. Intelligent use of your own recovery trends will allow you to push yourself harder for longer without getting sick, injured, or burnt out and is a critical factor in the success of many world-class performers across all fields of business and sports.
When you’re stressed and overworked, proper recovery isn’t just going to come to you; you’ve got to create time to regain balance.
Make Time To Recharge Today
The Powerful Benefits of Infrared Sauna Use
It feels really good to sit in a sauna. Working up a sweat and the nice enveloping heat is comforting, like having a nap on the beach on a warm summer day. But here’s the real science behind why sauna feels so good and what working up a sweat can do for your health, recovery, and sports performance. Let’s break it down into the different categories of benefits so that you can pick and choose only what is most interesting to you.
Infrared saunas versus traditional saunas
At Flow Spa, we have a 2-person far infrared sauna with ceramic heaters primarily due to the smaller footprint able to be offered by an infrared Sauna compared to a traditional sauna.
There are a lot of infrared saunas on the market today that fall under two categories: near-infrared and far-infrared. Many biohackers and lifestyle gurus are claiming near-infrared saunas are superior for a wide range of reasons from detoxifying effects to stimulating the metabolism through activating the mitochondria in a way that normal saunas cannot. All of the claims towards near-infrared saunas, which use red light bulbs and do not heat up much, are unfounded.
Compared to traditional saunas, which use wood stoves or heaters to warm the air to very high temperatures (above 185 F), infrared saunas sometimes more specifically referred to as far-infrared saunas, aka FIRS use light and ceramic heaters to warm sauna users directly, providing a deeply penetrating heat at a lower, more comfortable temperature (closer to 140 degrees F).
Far-infrared saunas stimulate blood circulation in your skin, which may help to boost your skin's ability to produce collagen for greater skin health and elasticity.
The great thing about far-infrared saunas, like the one at Flow Spa is that the benefits are supported by the research into saunas on health because all of those findings are attributable to hyperthermia, or the effect of heat on the body.
Can Using A Sauna Help You To Lose Weight?
Detoxification
I’m not a fan of the word “detoxification” because it has become jumbled with all kinds of unvalidated concoctions and fad diets. We do know that sweating, whether induced by the heat of sauna or from hard exercise, is partially caused by fat cells burning up fuel for energy and resultantly anything stored in the fat cells will be carried through the circulatory system or exuded with sweat. Naturopathic doctors often include sauna as part of the treatment protocol for anyone dealing with an excess of heavy metals in their body or a buildup of toxins like pesticides from conventionally grown produce. Because a lot of this bad stuff is released with sweating it’s always important to shower off after sauna use.
Regular sauna sweating can help detoxify the body as it releases heavy metals (lead, mercury, nickel, and cadmium) as well as alcohol, nicotine, sulfuric acid, and other organic and inorganic compounds. The more regular that you can use the sauna during your detox protocol, the better the results you’ll see.
This is one of the most evidence-based methods to detoxify the body of heavy metals and other fat-soluble toxins including persistent organic pollutants.
Sports Performance
There are many incredible benefits to sauna use as it relates to sports performance that almost sound too good to be true. The mechanisms of sauna on enhancing performance are similar to that of exercise itself in that sauna use and heat acclimation increases blood flow to the skin and skeletal muscles. This increase in blood flow to the muscles allows for greater transport of glucose and fatty acids to the muscles to be used for energy, thus reducing the need to rely on glycogen stores for energy. By increasing blood flow to the skin and consequently activating the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), heat acclimation allows sweating to occur sooner and therefore lowering core body temperature. Furthermore, this increase in blood flow also leads to an increase in plasma volume and red blood cell count.
Altogether these effects have been shown to increase run to exhaustion time by 32% when a 30-minute sauna session was done 2 times per week after workouts.
Muscle Hypertrophy
Another sports performance benefit of sauna use is that it can lead to an increase in muscle hypertrophy (muscle growth). Exposure to heat has been shown to mitigate oxidative stress, which will lead to less breakdown of muscle tissue through several actions:
The Signalling of Heat Shock Proteins
Boost Growth Hormone Levels
Improve Insulin Sensitivity
Heat shock proteins repair damaged proteins in the body (i.e. everything we're made of, but especially our muscles) and scavenge free radicals which cause oxidative damage. Part of the mechanism of action is the activation of powerful endogenous antioxidants like glutathione. Adaptation to heat increases the robustness of the heat shock protein release.
Several heat-shock proteins can even help with increasing muscle mass, even without weight training.
Heat shock proteins repair damaged proteins in the body (i.e. everything we’re made of, but especially our muscles) and scavenge free radicals which cause oxidative damage. Part of the mechanism of action is the activation of powerful endogenous antioxidants like glutathione. Adaptation to heat increases the robustness of the heat shock protein release.
Boosting growth hormone levels further allows muscles to repair and grow. Growth hormone is the proverbial fountain of youth when it comes to hormones that our bodies release. When exposed to hot saunas (80ºC) two times per day, there was a 2-fold increase in growth hormone release in research subjects. Any sauna exposure after training has also been shown to further increase the growth hormone release over exercise alone.
Improved insulin sensitivity is a result of the reduction of insulin resistance that comes from sauna use. Part of this may be due to the metabolic similarities between exercise and saunas. Insulin sensitivity means that your cells are better able to use glucose for energy, instead of storing it as fat, and is an important marker for increasing longevity.
Lifespan and Sauna and Cardiovascular Health
Heat stress was shown to produce a 15% increase in lifespan in fruit flies. This increased lifespan is a part of the hormetic induction also seen in humans. Hormesis is the concept that a little bit of stress makes you resistant and more tolerant of greater stressors - like how a vaccine builds immunity. All of the factors in this article are components of the hormetic response to heat stress in the body.
As blood is drawn closer to the skin's surface, your blood vessels expand to accommodate increased blood flow.
This can help to improve endothelial function and blood flow, lower blood pressure, lower oxidative stress (which can lead to heart issues like atherosclerosis), and reduce cardiac events.
Another important factor that can lead to increased longevity is an improvement in cardiovascular health with sauna use. Blood flow to the heart lowers heart rate and cardiovascular strain.
Sauna use has been a part of the Scandinavian culture for a very long time and research has started to link the previous correlation in lower heart disease rates with sauna use.
Individuals using sauna three times per week have lower rates of cardiovascular disease and a reduction in the incidence of heart attacks. Important factors to consider when seeking to improve lifespan.
Infrared sauna treatments cause reactions in the body, including increased sweating, increased heart rate, and the same type of clarity-of-mind feelings as moderate exercise relaxation responses triggered by the body's parasympathetic nervous system.
Immune System
Because while you're in an infrared sauna it raises your core body temperature, the use of sauna may kill off potential pathogens. Through the penetrating infrared wavelengths from infrared saunas, the subsequent rise in core body temperature can induce an artificial fever giving your immune system a boost.
Brain Health, Mood, and Mental Health
It’s not just everything below the teetering tower of intelligence that is our brain that can benefit from sauna use though. Sauna use increases neurogenesis, learning and memory, and improves focus, while also improving mood. How do you like them apples?
Here’s what happens when you heat things up:
Norepinephrine and prolactin release.
Increases in BDNF.
Dynorphin release.
Norepinephrine is a potent neurotransmitter involved in focus and attention. It gets released in large amounts during fight or flight situations but also provides further benefits for focus and attention when not in life-threatening situations.
Prolactin is involved in myelin growth - the protective sheath around nerve cells. Prolactin helps with nerve cell damage repair and maintaining electrical activity in the brain, which is necessary for robust learning and memory.
BDNF is an incredible compound in the body. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is like miracle grow for brain cells. It increases the growth of new brain cells and preserves existing neurons. It further increases neuroplasticity allowing for enhancements in learning and memory. BDNF has also been shown to decrease symptoms of depression and anxiety. Another bonus of BDNF is that as it circulates through the body it also repairs muscles.
Finally, modulating core temperature may lead to the same feeling as runner’s high. Beta-endorphin - the feel-good hormone released with long-distance running and other exercise is increased due to heat stress. The pathway that leads to this effect is convoluted as it first causes feelings of discomfort.
Hyperthermia increases something called dynorphin - it’s involved in that dysphoric feeling of discomfort that you get from being hot and sweaty in the sauna as well as during exercise. Dynorphin counters endorphin and helps to cool the body from the heat stress. Subsequently, this leads to an increase in endorphins more than exercise alone so even though you feel a little squirmy from the discomfort of the heat at first, you leave it feeling amazing as the endorphin release counteracts that dynorphin.
So not only does sauna increase blood flow, sweating, and cardiovascular fitness, but it also leads to the same feeling of a post-exercise euphoria where you feel relaxed, happy, and experience less pain.
Sleep
A drop in body temperature at night is one of the circadian cues that the body uses to signal that it is time to sleep. In Why We Sleep, Dr. Matthew Walker suggests taking a warm bath in the evening as a way to help with insomnia or to induce a deeper sleep. Infrared sauna use can also be used to trigger a similar drop in body temperature after coming out of the sauna. If you’re having trouble sleeping or looking for ways to improve your sleep quality, try this method of warming up your core temperature first.
Bask In The Heat
Whatever results you’re looking for it’s undeniable that there are many great benefits to sauna use. Now that the weather is getting cooler our sauna at Flow Spa is becoming more popular as a regular service to make use of and treat yourself. For anyone who can tolerate the heat or has been cleared by their physician, it’s a relaxing and enjoyable experience that works great when you don’t have as much time available to get in for a longer float session or for any of the other benefits listed above that are unique to sauna use.
Cryotherapy For Recovery and Pain Relief
I first drafted this blog post as I entered the final week of preparation for the Canadian Strongman national championships a few weeks ago. The context as I had written it was perfect so I didn’t want to change anything up in that regard even though the competition has been over for about a week and a half.
There are countless factors in the world today that contribute to what amounts to a chronic state of inflammation for most of the population. Giving your body the chance to literally chill out is paramount to wellness and keeping inflammation under control.
While I don’t often galavant around with my training for strongman, I’ve come to realize that it’s of interest to our Flow Spa audience, a group that includes many athletes both past and present who are seeking to recover and remain pain-free.
Research has supported a lot of benefits to cold exposure - often known now as cryotherapy - and at its core, it comes down to three main benefits:
Eliminating inflammation.
Reducing pain and boosting feel-good hormones norepinephrine and dopamine.
Increasing blood flow and circulation.
I recently talked about a couple of the keys ways that I use floating for recovery from heavy training, as it positively impacts the physical beat down of heavy weightlifting along with the nervous system overload.
Something that is not just present and pervasive in heavy training athletes but most of our society is a problem with inflammation. Our gruelling exercise regimes contribute to this issue but so does our less than ideal diet, sleep patterns, long work hours, and constant exposure to the blue light of buzzing devices.
My absolute favourite method of immediate sports recovery is contrast therapy which utilizes hot and cold tubs or sauna combined with cold exposure to induce a powerful anti-inflammatory effect.
This method of recovery does take more gumption than going in for a relaxing float and so it’s not suited for everyone but the research on the anti-inflammatory effects of cold exposure certainly makes this therapy compelling. Runners who immersed their legs in cold water immediately after hypertrophy-stimulating workouts inhibited that muscle growth compared to runners who did not use cryotherapy. This research has led experts to agree that the best time to include contrast therapy or cryotherapy is not immediately post-training like the football teams of old.
Instead, it’s best to do it on days off or as far away from training as possible.
So if you were to train in the morning, it would be best to do your contrast therapy recovery at night. This consideration is most important when you are trying to stimulate muscle growth or strength gains with your training. If you are just working out for health, it won’t be as big of a deal for you. Another caveat is that I consider it a positive to include contrast therapy to reduce the turnaround time between events placed closely together, like when an athlete has a weekend full of tournament games to play and needs to be fresh for the finals.
When it comes to general pain and inflammation these powerful effects still apply, acting like a natural dose of ibuprofen to kick out inflammation and reduce pain. The circulation effects are also very beneficial for those who gradually increase their tolerance and exposure to contrast therapy so as to not shock the system too severely. While soaking in the warm water of the hot tub, blood vessels dilate and then when moving to the cold tub the autonomic response of the nervous system is to constrict the blood vessels to keep the core temperature up.
Moving back and forth from hot to cold therefore acts like and additional pumping mechanism to move the blood through the circulatory system. Increased circulation through any mechanism has been associated with reductions in cardiovascular disease and the incidence of a heart attack.
The other benefit of cold exposure in keeping the body and core temperature warm is that it activates a special type of fat in our body called brown adipose tissue (BAT) which is metabolically active, unlike typical fat stores, and increases in BAT activation is associated with weight loss. Another cool effect (pun intended) of cold exposure is that has been confirmed in the last couple of decades is that we can overtime increase our stores of BAT which was previously thought to be impossible and this can lead to consistent increases in our metabolism over time.
Finally, both the shock of heat and cold lead to euphoric sensations and increase our mood. You may have heard the old story of how Van Gogh was subjected to daily ice baths as a way to control his mercurial mood. Our bodies are incredibly adept at staying in a happy norm but when we push ourselves out of our comfort zone, there are interesting reward mechanisms in place in our bodies. Both heat exposure and cold exposure that leads to an initially uncomfortable feeling in our body lead to the release of a hormone called dynorphin. It’s a kind of protective mechanism in our body that tells us we’re in a situation that we need to be vigilant of and get away from. But when we maintain conscious control to keep ourselves in an uncomfortable situation and literally push past that metaphorical comfort zone, there’s a subsequent rise in endorphins to balance out that dynorphin release, along with a boost in dopamine and norepinephrine which lead to euphoria and a clear focus.
If you ever do take the plunge and try an ice bath, getting out of it you feel incredibly refreshed and focused. I liken it to a cup of coffee without any hint of anxiety or jitters to go along with it.
Any hot or cold exposure can also help us sleep better as one of the primary sleep-inducing signals to the body is a drop in body temperature which can come from either getting really warm and letting your body cool back off before bed or literally plunging yourself down in temperature with cold exposure prior to sleeping. Either way leads to deeper and more restorative sleep.
Reach Out If You Want To Learn More About How Contrast Can Help You
Finding Your Path
Students face extreme pressures from every direction. Their peers, parents, teachers, and the standardization of tests themselves all combine to make a mental soup of confusion for adolescents who are seeking some understanding of the internal and external worlds around them.
Several of our guests, as well as our co-host Telsi, have talked about how they veered from the path they were ‘supposed to take’ into their true calling
Below are some of the best clips that we’ve had recently in terms of advice that we’d like to share with our young audience looking to find their purpose or some direction on their journey.
We’ve already had a lot of great discussions on the FlowCast and one question that is central to our mission of helping to find your flow is how to navigate the challenges of being a student and finding your purpose. Students face extreme pressures from every direction. Their peers, parents, teachers, and the standardization of tests themselves all combine to make a mental soup of confusion for adolescents who are seeking some understanding of the internal and external worlds around them.
Several of our guests, as well as our co-host Telsi, have talked about how they veered from the path they were ‘supposed to take’ into their true calling
Below are some of the best clips that we’ve had recently in terms of advice that we’d like to share with our young audience looking to find their purpose or some direction on their journey.
Trust Your Gut
Laura was on what seems to be a very common path for students with picking the toughest university in Canada and one of the most competitive environments for students in life sciences. I went through the same route myself and can attest to the pressure and difficulty of undergrad life sciences at UofT.
Laura found the right opportunity at the right time though as she discovered a jobs fair booth for the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine and that was the moment everything changed for her.
Nothing Is Permanent
Telsi followed a very similar route through university as Laura and realized that her course selection wasn’t true to herself and her calling. She discovered the Canadian College of Homeopathic Medicine and shifted gears from more traditional life sciences into homeopathic medicine. Recognizing that psychology and mental health played an important role in the lives of the clients that she regularly met with, Telsi did eventually return to university to round out her skill set as a personal trainer with a psychology degree.
Fight for What You’re Passionate About
Many of the most successful athletes and business people go all-in on their passion. While they may still acknowledge the risk involved, these people put everything on the line to achieve a level of mastery that we all can glean inspiration from.
Mike Doherty felt so passionate about Muay Thai that he left his job so that he could focus all-in on the training he needed to do to become even better. He opened a gym and started coaching other athletes to become champions themselves and furthered his skill.
Water Finds its Way
If you’re feeling lost or without a purpose, know that it takes more time and more experiences. You don’t know what you truly love to do until you have lived and experienced many different things. Slow down and have patience. You’ll find your way.
How Teachers Can Benefit From Float Therapy
Back to school time in the fall is a challenging transition for students and teachers alike. Momentum shifts and that sense of the grind through to Christmas as the weather gets colder imposes upon our psyche.
The stress of the new school year is also compounded by the new germs being passed around which often leads to an uptick in colds shortly after the summer break.
Having a strategy to incorporate mental and physical wellness into your weekly and monthly routine is essential for maintaining good health year-round but becomes critical at these transitional times.
Back to school time in the fall is a challenging transition for students and teachers alike. Momentum shifts and that sense of the grind through to Christmas as the weather gets colder imposes upon our psyche. The stress of the new school year is also compounded by the new germs being passed around which often leads to an uptick in colds shortly after the summer break. Having a strategy to incorporate mental and physical wellness into your weekly and monthly routine is essential for maintaining good health year-round but becomes critical at these transitional times.
Teachers can benefit from floating through:
Powerful stress reduction.
A chance to get away to a quiet oasis without having to travel.
Joint and muscle pain relief.
Float therapy is a wonderful way to reduce pain and stress naturally. Being supported in Epsom salt water that is denser than the Dead Sea allows your body to completely relax to relieve tension. The unique stimuli-reduced environment of a float pod or float cabin also allows your mind to let go of stress and anxiety.
Stress Reduction
Teaching is a challenging and demanding job with all of the different factors that go into commanding the attention of a classroom full of students, all with their unique personalities. Combined with the tight timelines of grading work, and countless other factors, teaching can be very stressful. Float tanks may be the best technology we have to combat stress. Research has shown a significant reduction in cortisol levels come about from just one hour of floating. Anxiety is also significantly reduced and the “post-float glow” feeling of complete relaxation you get while not having a care in the world is extremely helpful when needing to unwind after a long day or a long week.
A Quiet Oasis
The float therapy experience is incomparable. Customers leave saying that they’ve never experienced anything quite like it because we are never in an environment with no external stimuli. While some new floaters opt to leave the lights on or music playing, the benefits of the experience are compounded when you immerse yourself in the stimulus reduction through turning off the lights and letting the music fade out. This gives your brain the chance to bask in complete silence and darkness which extraordinarily refreshing in the overstimulated world that we live in.
Pain Relief
Repeated strain from grading papers and desk work can lead to a lot of tight muscles and pain in the body.
There’s over 1,000 lb. of Epsom salt in each float tank, making it denser than the human body and allowing you to float completely without effort. Research shows this decompression is beneficial for back and neck pain, and ongoing studies are working towards validating the benefits that we’ve seen at Flow Spa with clients suffering from chronic conditions like arthritis and fibromyalgia.
Needless to say, teachers who came into Flow Spa during the final grading and exams before school was out for the summer found their float experience to be exactly what they needed in terms of a reset between grading tests and papers.
Developing different strategies to incorporate a reset into your routine will help to ensure that you are prepared through it all. At Flow Spa, we help in providing guidance with meditation and some of the various techniques you can use to consistently reduce stress and anxiety. Restorative exercise is also essential to maintaining balance and overall well-being. And when you need that time to get away from everything and decompress, float tanks offer an unrivalled experience.
Use This Gratitude Practice To Make Your Outlook Immediately Brighter
As we are approaching the first six months of doors-open business for this burgeoning start-up that is Flow Spa, like any business, getting the momentum rolling forward hasn’t been without its hitches.
Throughout it all, I have had an unwavering sense of gratitude for the business and the support in my life that has allowed me to push forward with this vision.
We often forget the little things that have a profound impact on our sense of well-being. Without a habit being ingrained in your routine, it will fall by the wayside when life gets in the way or you feel you are too busy to take less than five minutes out of your day.
Gratitude is one of those things.
It often sounds so simple and doesn’t take much time to incorporate into your daily routine but seems to be a lost art to many people. That is gratitude journaling or just showing gratitude daily.
Starting your day off with a dose of gratitude makes a world of difference in your outlook and how you feel about the day.
While some people like to kick off the day with their gratitude practice, others prefer to wait until before bed to reflect on the day while looking forward to the next one or the bigger things at hand that you are grateful for.
I suggest trying both methods and finding what works better for you.
People often approach the idea of taking those precious moments to be grateful or to write it down as a waste of time because they are naturally pessimistic or feel like they don’t have a lot to be grateful for in their current situation. A lot of people get confused about practicing gratitude and think that it has to be things that are immediately present and make your world seem like it’s all sunshine and rainbows.
It can be beneficial when working towards a goal to have gratitude for that bigger goal at hand. Recognize that you are working towards something that will better you and you can be grateful for how far you’ve come already or if you’re just getting started, be grateful for the path ahead of you because having a goal and a mission to accomplish brings us a deeper meaning.
To balance this goal-oriented gratitude I have found that the way Tony Robbins practices gratitude has a lot of power to it.
Balanced Gratitude Practise for Optimism
The gratitude practise takes all of three minutes a day and consists of:
Something relatively goal-oriented, the type of gratitude that we typically see as we look forward to some expected outcome.
Something immediate and relatively mundane. Look around you on a macro setting- it could be the feeling and warmth of the rising (or setting) sun on your skin, it could be the sounds of the birds around you, the smell of summer, the colours of the vibrant flowers in your field of vision. Get specific and take a moment to deeply embrace that feeling.
The final type of daily gratitude is to reflect on a past relationship or experience with another person (or place) and relive the lessons that you have learned that you are grateful for because of that person or place.
By breaking up your gratitude practice into three distinct pieces, you won’t always write down or contemplate the same things. This is why writing down your daily gratitude list can help you to catch yourself from running on autopilot and make the practice more potent if you tend to always think of the same answers. Writing it down also forces both hemispheres of your brain to work in concert to actualize the gratitude more deeply. Priming the nervous system in this way is powerful so I do recommend writing your gratitude lists down in a journal, on a notepad, or even in a note on your phone or computer.
Try it out for yourself.
Start with one week and do the practice every day at the same time. Prime your day in the morning or set your mind at ease before bed with a nighttime practice. Get it done and see how you feel after one week. I’m certain that it will help to bring more optimism into your life and you’ll realize that this is a valuable practice to incorporate for life.
This Fighter Used His Emotional Mastery To Beat An Opponent At His Own Game
I recently sat down to talk to my friend Mike Doherty on the FlowCast about his recent wins in muay thai, including an IKF World’s title.
This is a powerful and inspiring interview and I hope you give it a listen and enjoy!
Unlocking Creativity and Flow Through Breathing
Can we unlock deeper states of creativity and flow states through breathing?
We often hear the question arise about what do you do in the float tank?
Other than the pithy answer of “well, you just float,” it often helps to provide some open-ended guidance to those new floaters who maybe don’t have a lot of practice with single-point meditation or focused yoga.
Breathing is often the first place I turn to when recommending something to focus on when floating. Your breath and your heartbeat are the only things you can hear if you’ve turned off the music and so you can either embrace it or it may become a foe like the telltale heart of Edgar Allen Poe.
It still sounds a little hokey, but learning to attend to your breath and breathe more consciously is doing miraculous things for people’s health. You can do anything from reducing stress to performing and recover better in sports all just by shifting the way you breathe.
Most of us breathe an average of 12 times per minute and this isn’t far away from what researchers suggest is a sign of a stressed body at 15 breaths per minute. Shifting your body into a relaxed state takes a little conscious awareness and practice to reduce your breathing rate to less than 8 per minute.
I believe that getting into this relaxed state alone is enough to induce deep states of flow in the tank and enhance creativity by allowing your brain to function more optimally.
However, to take it a step further, there are techniques more deliberately designed to tap into the creative centres of your body, as you practice and develop more conscious awareness of oxygenating your body through deep breathing.
This is an example of a Wim Hof Method (WHM) technique used to specifically induce creativity through thyroid activation. This is a more advanced technique with the Wim Hof Method and while you may try and practice it, I will be releasing more information in the coming months about how you can join me in learning more of the fundamental techniques to help you get more out of the practice.
WHM Technique for Creativity:
* Never push anything past your comfort zone. This isn’t about doing anything to extremes. It’s about developing more control and capacity in your body over time.
* Get into a comfortable position, either seated in a chair or preferably lying flat on the floor.
* Begin WHM breathing - fully breathing into your belly, chest, head in a wavelike motion. On the exhale, only let your chest and belly fall without effort to retain most air and oxygen.
* Repeat this wave-like breathing for about 30 breaths until you are fully oxygenated. The signs of an effective round are that you will begin to feel lightheaded, tingling in the fingers and toes, and loose in the body.
* On your final breath, fully inhale, fully exhale, fully inhale again and hold at the top of the breath with your lungs full of air.
* Squeeze your chest and neck and push that oxygenated blood into your upper chest where the thyroid is located. Only partially squeeze the neck to avoid the sensation from going to your head, which is another technique for different intended purposes. It helps to visualize the blood going to your chest and thyroid as well.
* Hold for about 30 seconds before exhaling fully.
* Repeat two more full rounds before ending or doing some regular WHM breathing for relaxation.
This practice will take between 15-20 minutes depending on your pace of breathing.
After completed it helps the first few times to sit for a moment and take inventory of how you feel. If you are doing the practice for the intended tapping into your creativity, you would then ideally sit down to do the creative work you’re wanting to do.
This might not make complete sense at first, but we talk about it in this podcast episode here as well and watching the video version may help to better see how it works. Read or listen through a couple of times while trying it out for yourself.
P.S. I will be running some seminars inspired by the Wim Hof Method and other meditations that I’ve learned from in the coming months and so follow us on social media or subscribe to the email list to get advanced notice on the limited space that will be available in each of those groups.
Top Eleven Health Benefits of Float Therapy
Floating will make your life better. This incredibly therapeutic saltwater float experience has clinical evidence to back up a whole host of benefits. Here are 11 of the most common benefits supported by research and our own customer experiences when you come in for a Flow Spa float.
11 Ways Floating Makes Your Life Better
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Floating will make your life better. This incredibly therapeutic saltwater Flow Spa float experience has clinical evidence to back up a whole host of benefits.
Floating, float therapy, or REST (Restricted Environmental Stimulus Therapy), used to be called sensory deprivation tanks but the name has become a misnomer as improvements to the technology allows these spacious pods and cabins to be as comfortable as you want it to be. Customizations include leaving music, guided meditations, and relaxing lights on to help you get the most out your experience. Inside each of our pods and cabins are over 1,000 pounds of Epsom Salt dissolved into a solution at a depth of 11 inches. This makes the water denser than the Dead Sea allowing you to float effortlessly on the surface of the water.
Each person has their own unique experience with floating because it’s such a gentle therapy, the healing potential will benefit whatever is in most dire need of attention.
Here are 11 of the most common benefits supported by research and our own customer experiences when you come in for a Flow Spa float.
1. Pain Relief
Research supports the pain-relieving benefits of float therapy for chronic pains like neck and back pain. Because your entire body is gently supported in the Epsom salt solution, floating promotes better spine health by allowing the spine to decompress and all the tense muscles that don’t normally get a chance to relax - including during sleep - can reduce tension completely over time.
Other chronic conditions like fibromyalgia, ankylosing spondylitis, and arthritis have shown great promise in the customers we’ve had come in and long-term studies that are underway to gather further support for this beneficial effect of floating.
2. Complete Relaxation
Describing floating is challenging - it’s something you’ve got to see and experience to fully understand because it’s a completely new experience and sensation. One term that does get through most often in describing floating is that it is a complete and unrivalled relaxation experience. This type of stimulus reduction and peace sets the entire body and mind at ease in a way that’s hard to compare to anything else. The temperature of the water is the same as your body and most people liken it to feeling more like floating on a cloud rather than being in water
3. Deeper Sleep
Many people report having the best sleep of their life after floating. This is why it’s popular to float in the evening while winding down after work to allow the body to gently ease into sleep with a reduction in racing thoughts and to-do lists shuffling through your mind.
4. Anxiety Reduction
We live in a busy and distracted world and a byproduct of this is that many of us are facing greater levels of anxiety daily. Because floating is so relaxing and allows our overactive nervous systems to completely tone down for an hour, clinical evidence supports a dramatic reduction in symptoms of anxiety from float therapy. Many customers relish the feeling of leaving the spa without a care in the world about the things that usually bother them. More often than not customers will take some extra time to relax in our lounge and enjoy some tea or water after their float.
5. Stress Relief
In addition to reducing anxiety, floating busts through similar symptoms of stress. Researchers have shown a significant drop in the stress hormone cortisol after just one hour of float therapy. Having less cortisol present in your system allows you to have a clear and focused mind and to be more productive or to fully embrace the bliss of treating yourself to some well-deserved R&R.
This reduction in stress levels also contributes to a significant reduction in hypertension that comes with floating. High blood pressure is temporarily improved even after just one float session.
6. Theta State - REM Sleep
The theta brainwave state sounds like something very mystical, and sure, it can be but in essence, it is the slow and calm state our brains get into during REM sleep when we are dreaming. It is a sign that our brains are deeply relaxed and can be reached by experienced meditators as well. The cool thing is that research shows the deep state of relaxation that comes from floating induces a theta brainwave state without the need for years of practice in meditation or going completely to sleep. There are unique benefits to this including enhancing creativity, consolidating memory, and feeling refreshed without needing to completely fall asleep. While it’s not a perfect analogy, some people liken this theta brainwave activity that comes from floating as the equivalent of 4-6 hours of REM sleep. For people who sleep poorly, this can be extremely powerful when it comes to memory consolidation and recovery that sleep typically provides.
7. Skin Health
The float tank solution is nearly 30% Epsom salt which makes it supersaturated in magnesium. Magnesium is important for skin health and many customers dealing with dry skin or conditions like psoriasis and eczema report improvements in symptoms when adding floating into their routine.
8. Magnesium Deficiency
Testimonials from customers reporting that floating helps with restless leg syndrome or sleep quality (as magnesium is an important mineral for promoting deep sleep) suggests that magnesium may be boosted through floating. While it’s next to impossible for researchers to accurately support this due to differences in skin porousness and multiple possible pathways for absorption, it’s still great to know that floating seems to help with conditions often associated with magnesium deficiency.
9. Creativity
Deep relaxation and inducing the theta brainwave state has helped many artists and thinkers in a wide range of fields uncover incredible potential and ideas in their brains. Whether you go into a float with a particular problem you’re trying to tackle or it simply comes to you naturally from the depths of your subconscious, it’s undeniable that the unique environment of the float tank has produced countless fascinating works of art and ingenuity. Float centres in the U.S. have worked with various artists to put together entire music albums and art instalments produced from these artists after coming out of a float. Comedian Joe Rogan has also become a patron saint of floating as he often attributes this deep meditative state to helping him create many of his most popular bits of comedy.
10. Brain Injuries and Concussions
As if floating wasn’t good enough already, many doctors and health care practitioners working with patients dealing with brain injuries or concussions are starting to recognize the healing potential of float therapy. The typical post-concussion protocol involves having the patient spend some time each hour away from the blue light of digital devices and ideally in a quiet and dark area. Taking this a step further, the advantage of nearly-complete sensory deprivation that comes from floating provides an hour or longer free from stimuli, a significant amount of time for the brain to work its magic on healing itself.
This is an important point which has started to get the attention of athletes competing in high-contact sports and we’ve seen customers return to work after a shortened recovery period following traumatic brain injuries with the help of regular floating.
11. Sports Performance
Professional sports teams have started to take note of the potential of floating for more than just the potential to help with concussions. Athletes are highly driven and competitive and often have a hard time turning off their brains to enter a relaxed state. Floating can work wonders to allow athletes to shift into a deep state of relaxation to allow the nervous system to reset and recharge.
The very best athletes in the world also include visualization in their routine as a regular practice to perfect motor patterns for the repetitive movements involved in their sport. It sounds a bit odd at first and like magic to think that seeing yourself in your mind in action can lead to an improvement in the physical world but repeatedly this is the case in research done on a wide range of physical performances. Dry training with U.S. Olympic Swim Coach Bob Bowman’s athletes, including Michael Phelps, entails mentally rehearsing a race while timing it with a stopwatch. These world-class athletes become so myopically focused that they visualize their full race and can stop the clock within tenths of a second of their actual swim time. The sensory reduction of the float tank is the perfect place for athletes to mentally rehearse the practice of their sport to carry over to their performance in-game. Golden State Warrior’s All-Star Steph Curry floats multiple times per month to maintain crisp and perfect shooting.
Just like with any therapeutic modality, many of the great benefits of floating come with time and our customers experience better results over time as compared to just one session. While you’ll love your experience of floating even the first time, know that it gets better with each subsequent visit. A common recommended is that you try floating three times to get used to it and figure out your preferences for having the best experience.
Book Your Float Today
Calyx CBD Summer Sale 2019
Save 15% off all CBD purchases now until July 13.
The full catalog of products and prices are available here: https://www.flowspa.ca/calyx-cbd
Most products are still in stock but as long as you contact us and place an order before July 13 at 11:59 pm we will get the product in stock and you can pick it up or we’ll ship it to you within a few days.
Calyx CBD is an excellent brand, creating top-quality products and all of our customers using the products have seen noticeable pain relief and anxiety reduction from taking the correct dose for their needs.
Do This To Conquer Boredom
It's ok to be bored sometimes.
It's ok to be bored sometimes.
We are driven. Doers.
Every minute planned; every to-do list spewing out to the margins.
And when we have a moment to come up for air, we choose to hold our breath and take another dopamine hit from the social media slot machine. Who’s doing what that’s more exciting than our reality? Who liked our selfie?
At the end of it all we are so run into the dirt that we can no longer choose for ourselves - take our binge watching of The Office, yet again, as case-in-point. The never-ending slump into ‘blah.’ Over time we lose our spark. Our uniqueness is dissolved into the technological soup of humanity and the vicious cycle keeps turning round and round. Our health suffers. Our lives suffers. Our relationships suffer. We suffer.
Every moment of every day we have a choice. Many of those choices may seem to be pre-filled - eight hours here for sleep, another eight for work there, but that still leaves eight hours - not to mention the number of opportunities most of us have at work to make the right choice when on break or switching between tasks.
The choice we have in front of us is that of choosing boredom and then conquering it. We are becoming less human because we give ourselves no chance to just BE anymore.
We come to find our true selves in boredom. We remember. Everyone is so desperate to be someone on social media but we already are somebody in the real world.
People are showing signs of withdrawal symptoms when they are unplugged for too long today. Our smartphones and the apps we use daily have been engineered to be addictive. That constant dopamine drip when unplugged will leave us itching for another hit.
For the sake of your self, your health, and your peace of mind, you must resist regularly.
Conquering boredom is easier said than done. You’ll feel like you’re missing out on something when you look around and see everyone else plugged into a digital landscape and completely unaware of what’s right in front of them. You’ll seem strange, in fact, to choose yourself over your digital avatar.
You’ve been convinced that you’ll miss out on something but you won’t; not really. You’ll actually be receiving so much more in return.
The next time you’re waiting in line at the grocery store or waiting for your friend to arrive for dinner at the restaurant resist the urge to immediately pull out your phone and swipe mindlessly. Because the urge will come immediately - take note of that. And instead take a deep breath - focus intensely on that breath. It feels good to breathe deep. Much better in fact than looking through your Instagram feed like a mindless zombie.
It may feel boring, true, but overtime your overstimulated nervous system will relearn to settle down. It wasn’t very long ago that our world wasn’t like this. Only 15 years ago we didn’t have the same fidgety issues at such an epidemic scale and a generation ago we were content to sit quietly or allow our imagination to wander without intervening.
Think about the simple pleasures a dog gets from sitting and waiting. The depth that comes to the world from the sounds, smells, and sights that are ever-present when we let them just come to us.
So return to your breath or just let your thoughts process for a change. What you call boredom isn’t always as it seems. You’ve just unlearned what to do with your own thoughts as you constantly have the inputs of other consciousnesses bombarding your own.
Overtime it will become easier to embrace the boredom and to allow the stillness to settle in.
And in this stillness, in this silence, you will realize that it’s all ok.
Digital Minimalism - A Podcast Prologue
This week we’ve got a big and important podcast episode for you and I wanted to clear some the thoughts in my head for it prior to the recording because it’s a topic that I’m passionate about and have been studying a lot about in the past few years.
So before I go off rambling on the podcast I wanted to refine my thoughts and target the conversation to be actionable as well as perhaps eye-opening to some of our audience.
The topic is Digital Minimalism.
Who’s In Control?
Several books in the last few years have started to rally towards the need for more control when it comes to all the great and powerful technologies we have in our lives today. At the heart of digital minimalism is the realization that we are becoming slaves to our digital devices in many ways.
This sounds like some sort of sci-fi dystopian scare tactic but it isn’t. Not yet at least.
Technologies do a lot of great things for us but we are evolutionary beings with incredible susceptibility to the shiny object that stimulates the reward centres in our brains the most. This is what technologies like smartphones and social media apps do best, and not by accident. There are many scientists and engineers behind these technologies while their sole job being to make them as addicting as possible. The same people who design slot machines in casinos are working for companies like Facebook or inspiring the work of their software engineers.
Social media sites want you to stay on them longer, because as the whistleblowers and people making cautionary statements about social media say, we the consumer are the commodity being sold to the real customers who are the big companies and ad agencies buying ad space on the likes of social media giants like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Furthermore, these companies are taking ownership of the data of our lives - where we live, where we travel to, what we do every day, and the questions that we are Googling. These data points are refining our digital experience and also being sold for big bucks to the highest bidder wanting our personal data.
It sounds a little scary and it can be if you are an unwitting subject to this reality without making informed decisions and operating with some restraint and forewarning.
Is Social Media Really An Issue, Or Something We Need To Accept?
Many people on the opposite end of the spectrum say that there’s nothing wrong with this and it’s just the way the world works today but that’s not entirely accurate to say. Not only because it’s exploitation on our susceptible biology that we want the easy and immediate rewards in our lives - delayed gratification is a product of our consciousness and insatiable need for growth as human beings and not what we as animals have evolved to want to do. (Have you ever seen a dog pass up a treat in exchange for TWO treats later? NO! And not just because the dog will beg for more treats later).
But this delayed gratification is something that we can and often do as humans to achieve greater meaning. You can have your cake and eat it too but you’ve got to use moderation in the short-term to achieve those bigger goals.
The other reason that the argument that we just have to accept the way the world is today is missing the point is that excessive use of social media, which is ubiquitous, is harmful to our health. Social media has been correlated with an exponential increase in anxiety on college campuses. Social media researchers are showing that the ease of access to social media is making us feel more lonely and socially isolated. When it’s easier to jump on Instagram and double-tap that photo of your friend’s food rather than meeting to go out for dinner together and turn your phones off to have a deep and undistracted conversation or binge-watch Netflix instead of getting together with friends to go hiking when you feel a little “blah” it becomes a real problem for our ability to have those conversations and truly live as a tribe.
It’s true that we’ve far-surpassed our tribal connection which Dunbar’s number considers being 150 people and we may use that in a very empowering way to expand our reach and opportunities in this world but how many of those people would really be there for you if you needed them? That’s one of the issues and the dichotomy between having stable social relationships and those superficial relationships that “Liking” and “Retweeting” online give us.
So what can we do about it?
The Solution For Social Media Addiction
First, recognize.
Recognize that feeling of malaise that you get when you’ve glued yourself to the couch binge-watching Game of Thrones (not to mention the sobbing uncontrollably when another of your favourite characters gets his or her head lopped off).
Recognize that you’ve swiped through all of the latest photos from your friends and all of their Stories are just pictures directing you to check out their feed post on their bio.
Recognize that there’s more to the world than what’s happening on the five-inch piece of glass glowing so bright that it affects your melatonin production and sleep quality.
And once you recognize, take small steps (or big ones) to make a change.
Digital Detox
Digital Detoxes like the one Cal Newport suggests in his book Digital Minimalism are the best way to completely reset and pull the tentacles of addiction out of your skull for good. Small steps are less impactful but you’ll see pretty quickly how out of control of your brain you are when you try to check your social media profiles less than for the over 60 minutes a day we are on Facebook out of the 80 times per day we check our phones on average or reduce frantic email checking to one to two blocks per day.
We all lose our ways over and over again. Recognize that as well. There is no final solution, other than becoming a hermit and moving off the grid and into a cabin in the woods. You will get sucked back into the digital spiral again and again.
But just start again.
Do another Digital Detox, reduce your screen time. Turn your phone off at the dinner table. Check your screen time - all phones do it now - and reduce it by 10 minutes per day for a week. Then push that number a little further. Fill that time with something worthwhile to reduce the temptation.
Whatever strategy you choose to go with, your non-digital brain and body will thank you for it and you’ll be living with more meaning again.
Everything You Need To Know About CBD, Briefly
You’ve certainly heard more buzz around CBD oil as it seems like every industry is capitalizing on this trend and making use or touting the benefits of CBD oil. But what exactly are the benefits of CBD and how does it work?
You’ve certainly heard more buzz around CBD oil as it seems like every industry is capitalizing on this trend and making use or touting the benefits of CBD oil. But what exactly are the benefits of CBD and how does it work?
Let’s break down the science of why CBD oil works to reduce pain in the body while improving mood and symptoms of anxiety.
CBD or cannabidiol is a component of the cannabis plant, you know, marijuana - the stuff that was recently legalized across Canada and no longer carries with it the old “refer madness” perspective. Now, I don’t think everyone is completely over the stigma of cannabis and may have sensitivity or allergies to hemp and while some companies, like Calyx Wellness which we carry at Flow Spa, do a great job creating a very pure and refined CBD oil, we’ll go over some alternatives for anyone looking for natural pain relief without CBD.
How CBD works
CBD is a fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) antagonist. You don’t have to remember this, but it increases anandamide in the body which then activates the CB1 and CB2 receptors throughout the brain and body. Anandamide is a neurotransmitter associated with euphoria - its name comes from the Sanskrit word meaning “joy, bliss, delight.” Sounds pretty good right? It also appears that higher than normal levels of anandamide in the brain and body can lead to reductions in anxiety, lack of fear, and enhancement of the immune system.
The Role of CB1 and CB2 Receptors
The CB1 and CB2 receptors are the main receptors of the endocannabinoid system. Early research into this system was shown to be the target of action for phytocannabinoids like THC and it wasn’t until later that scientists discovered anandamide’s activity on these receptors. CBD has a low affinity for the CB1 and CB2 receptors themselves but works indirectly on those pathways for pain and anxiety modulation through its action as a FAAH antagonist amongst other pharmacological mechanisms.
The CB1 receptor is located in the brain and central nervous system and is primarily associated with euphoria and mood regulation as it is targeted by cannabinoids like CBD, THC, and anandamide.
The CB2 receptor is located throughout the body as part of the pain signal pathway and modulates the inflammatory response in the body.
Because of the mechanisms of action, both CBD and THC can reduce pain and lead to improvements in mood, while CBD does so without the psychoactive effects of THC, meaning you won’t get high from CBD.
This makes CBD a very safe and effective way to improve mood, reduce anxiety, and mitigate pain and inflammation in the body without the harmful side effects that anxiolytics and over-the-counter pain medication has.
Globally, we’ve been seeing an increase in CBD use with both topical application and internal use for a wide range of conditions including:
anxiety including social anxiety and PTSD
depression
pain, including arthritis and fibromyalgia
stress symptoms
dermatological conditions like psoriasis and dermatitis
addiction and neurological conditions
sports performance
The dosage depends on body weight and the severity of the symptoms that you are trying to remedy. Most people will start out with more modest dosages of around 10-20 mg per day and gradually increase daily or every few days until the desired effect is attained.
What if you’re still unsure about CBD?
Plants have evolved incredible defence systems and pharmacological effects and through sheer human curiosity, we continue to find more promising ways to benefit as we experiment and learn about the effects of various plant compounds. Copaiba is an oleoresin coming from the Copaifera genus of South American trees that is concentrated in beta-caryophyllene or BCP. BCP is another compound that has been shown to directly act on the CB2 receptors, thus creating an anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effect throughout the body.
Copaiba essential oil from doTERRA is produced in its native regions of South America and cleanly distilled to pure essential oil making it safe for internal consumption where it can then take effect.
We carry Copaiba from doTERRA at Flow Spa and a few drops under the tongue or in your water each day can help to reduce pain and inflammation in the body. Our customers have told us that taking Copaiba daily has reduced their pain and arthritis symptoms to such an extent that their health care practitioners are impressed with the progress they’ve been making.
Genuine Health Natural Pain Relief
At Flow Spa we also carry the full line of Genuine Health products - a company renowned for their commitment to excellence in quality and research validating the effectiveness of their products. Several of the products from Genuine Health are specifically formulated for safe and effective natural pain relief, both acute pain symptoms and more chronic symptoms. Their fast pain relief+ product is used for acute symptoms of pain and works more effectively than Aspirin at blocking pain within 2 hours.
In addition to this, Genuine Health has a selection of specifically tailored long-term and chronic pain remedies that work for moderate-to-severe joint pain and arthritis in as little as 5 days. The most beneficial aspect of these products though is not just the reduction in pain symptoms but that rather than just blocking pain signals, they actually work on the root cause of the pain by reducing inflammation in the body to promote healing.
How Debbie Relaxed For Two Days Pain-Free After Float Therapy
The first voicemail was a courtesy call from Debbie to thank me, no need to call back. Debbie hadn’t had pain all day and didn’t have to take her usual cornucopia of pills.
The second call we received later from Debbie was even better…
The first voicemail was a courtesy call from Debbie to thank me; no need to call back. Debbie hadn’t had pain all day and didn’t have to take her usual cornucopia of pills.
The second call we received later from Debbie was even better…
The healing potential of the float tank is quite incredible.
It’s hard to say just how and what benefits will come to any individual until they’ve entered through the doors of our float centre and stepped into another world of relaxation.
I’ve previously talked about how floating alleviates my back pain - a byproduct of years of heavy weightlifting - and this is something that has shown to be scientifically validated. There’s documentation consistent with these personal findings.
The oftentimes more amazing results come at the fringe of research where ongoing studies are working through the process of confirming hypotheses. This is where someone comes in not knowing if they will simply get an hour of deep relaxation and peace or if it will go further in alleviating deep-seated pains that have been persistent for years.
It’s been happening just like this so far at Flow Spa. A cosmic roll of the dice. What bonus gift will be dished out to our next customer? Will it be better sleep, a quieting of the mind, or the blessed release from the mortal coil of chronic pain?
It’s been happening more often than not and that’s why I’m convinced it’s only a matter of time before the ongoing research confirms these further benefits.
Everyone gets the relaxation once they get past the learning curve of the first 15 minutes or so. What’s on top of it is the icing on the cake.
From ages 13 to 89 we’ve already facilitated an amazing experience to an incredibly diverse group of customers but some still stand out as having their lives do a complete 180º after visiting us for a float.
Another phone call was received several days later. Debbie was ecstatic. She couldn’t believe that she’d had two full days free from pain. The first time in what felt like an eternity.
Everything becomes better and easier when you’re not constantly in pain.
All the difficult times seem worth it when our customers become our friends and feel such gratitude for what we’ve been able to offer them.
This is why we float.
Book Your Float Today
Spring Cleaning To Declutter Your Mind
Spring cleaning is like this quarter's New Years Resolutions, it’s great that we make a whole big event around it but why did we let it get to this point in the first place?
Whether you embrace the springtime for decluttering your surroundings or you keep it up year-round, we all can benefit from doing some more mindful decluttering not only of our environment but also our mental and emotional framework.
Decluttering may leave you with the feeling of a great sigh of relief - not only because your physical space is in more harmony but also your mental state has been granted a reprieve.
We all know the basic principles of decluttering - gather up the junk you don’t use anymore and donate, sell, or throw it out. Today I want to share with you a few brief techniques that may help in your spring cleaning efforts but I also want to emphasize how your physical reality translates to your emotional state and vice versa and if you’re spring cleaning, you might as well clean up the attic too.
The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up
Marie Kondo has become the patron saint for tidying up and admired by minimalists around the globe because of her book and the inspiration she provides as a professional organizer. It’s become so popular that Netflix has made a series out of it. If you want a fresh take on tidying up that will have you actually enjoying the process, The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up is a short, but complete, reference to how you can declutter your physical space to create joy in your life.
The basic rule of the “KonMari” method is that you organize by category not location and gather every item into one pile before discarding anything. A massive pile of stuff that you barely use will leave quite the impression on you during this process. You are to take each and every single item and ask yourself if it sparks joy. This may seem like a strange practice with inanimate objects but is the core principle of the KonMari method and seems to be the reason this practice works so well to tidy and maintain that tidy sanctuary once you’ve done it.
Sort in this order clothes -> books -> papers -> miscellany -> mementos
Treating your objects with such reverence shouldn’t be hard to do if they are actually that meaningful to you. If you can’t bring yourself to think of the joy you get from a particular item, it’s time to discard it.
Emotional Baggage Impedes Focus
Spring cleaning can be a great time to discard your emotional baggage as well. The physical act of decluttering lends itself well to improving your mood and this is the perfect time to declutter your headspace.
Consider Jim Rohn’s statement that “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
During your spring cleaning efforts, ponder your emotional state and who is contributing positively or negatively to your life.
If you don’t get rid of the wrong friends you will never meet the right friends.
Is it time to fire your friends? Maybe even a family member?
Emotional decluttering is much harder than cleaning up your living space but will lead to greater breakthroughs in your life.
This doesn’t happen overnight, although I suppose it could if you wanted to be really aggressive with your action plan. Don’t just point the finger and throw out blame in this process though.
If you’re going to blame someone for all the bad that has happened in your life, be sure that you are also ready to thank them for everything good that has led you to where you are as well.
You must lead with grace to truly exit a relationship with peace of mind and a clean slate.
A Clean Slate Leads To More Flow
Physical clutter is distracting when you are trying to do deep work but emotional turmoil can be catastrophic. Whatever you do in your life can benefit from being in a flow state. It’s what leads to finding meaning in our lives.
You can’t find flow when in a bad mood.
In this week’s FlowCast, Telsi makes the analogy of your mind is like a river flowing smoothly versus the rapids where all the jagged rocks are.
We all face those rapids but the more that you can smooth out your mental landscape the more productive and creative you will become.
If you want to learn more about strategies you can use to do your spring cleaning more effectively this year, check out this week’s episode of the FlowCast where we dive even deeper into this topic and subscribe on Apple Podcast to get notified when a new episode comes out.
How I Float Now
As a new float centre owner, you should float every single day for a month
This is some of the advice that I received which has been bouncing around in my head all month because, well, I haven’t floated every single day. In fact, far from it. I’ve got customers who have floated more times than me so far.
And I’m ok with it.
Because I didn’t start a float centre just for my own selfish pursuit of floating every day.
I started a business because I wanted to provide something more to myself in terms of growth and to my community in terms of a legitamite benefit to a broad range of people
Do I have time to float every day? I suppose if I wanted to set aside the other important things in my life I could but I don’t think that would bring me much contentment or fulfillment. Maybe I’ll try it later on as an experiment like one of those BuzzFeed articles - “I tried floating every day for a month. You won’t believe what happened…"
And to say I dont have time for it may seem alarming to some - it always tickles that quote in the back of my mind about how if you don’t have 20 minutes to meditate, you need two hours.
But I haven’t given up on my daily meditation practice. It’s actually made a grand resurgence as I study Sam Harris’ Waking Up meditation course which I recently purchased for the benefit of the spa and the customers here.
There’s a big difference between practicing meditation for 10-20 minutes daily and floating for an hour. Not to mention the fact that only one month into a new business I have yet to stay in the float tank for a full hour once.
I’ve made it to 50 minutes so far, which is probably just as good as an hour for most since I already know what to expect when I get in there to float.
My mind doesn’t dissolve very well each time. Perhaps because the minute I step out of the tank it’s back to work.
The four or five times I have floated though have gotten progressively better - other than the one where I listened to a podcast the whole time - I don’t recommend doing that unless your intention really is to use the float tank to download information into your brain. It’s physically relaxing but didn’t come with that great sigh of relief and the post-float glow. It’s probably best saved for another round of experiments or maybe creating a “plugging into the Matrix to download a book into your brain” offer. Any takers? Let me know.
So how do I float now?
As a business owner with an important mission at hand I need to be able to get that valuable recharge time in my week. Meditation is a must on a daily basis - it’s the floor sweeping of your mind - but as many smart business owners will tell you, it’s important to keep your batteries fresh so that you can do the deep work, stay in your flow, and accomplish the big goals that drive your company and your mission forward.
My friend Josh Martin shares his intimate story of what can and will go wrong if you let yourself burnout in his yet-to-be published book “What Is Next.”
So with that in mind, I’m committed to scheduling in my floats and my nature walks when need be. To unplug, reset, and spark creativity.
When it comes to the float tank, I go through the routine that I think most people do. I am not a guru; we are all following the same journey.
The first few minutes are getting situated, letting my heart rate settle down, and my skin temperature equilabrate with the water and the air - returning to the womb if you’re into humouring the Freudian nature of the experience.
It would really be fascinating to see what Freud thinks about floating - I’m imagining a float tank in place of the couch that he’s sitting behind and picking away at your subconscious.
After I’ve reached stasis I deepen my breathing and just try to become aware of the sensations in my body. In typical mindfulness meditation this often equates to the body scan or becoming aware of your surroundings but one of the fascinating things about the float tank is that your surroundings no longer exist in your conscious mind and so you can look inwards to explore deeper things. Whoa, that last sentence sounds like some deep profundity but it doesn’t have to sound so mystical - you’re just relaxing into an experience of nothingness that we rarely ever reach in our day-to-day lives.
Once I’ve let my brain process and settle down I start the final challenge which so far has without fail ended my float exactly when I intend it to - like the satisfying sense of completion that comes with closing the back cover of a really good book.
I count my breaths to ten.
In -one…… Out - one…..
If you’ve ever done this before without getting distracted by other thoughts and losing track you’ll know how challenging it can be.
In…. Two ……. Out…..Two….
I often incorporate this into box breathing to the beat of my heart for a while until I’m ready to let go of the numbers to keep my focus.
The moment I breathe out on ten I feel I’m ready to continue on with my day. And while my body may feel like limp spaghetti for a while after, my brain is firing on all cylinders again and ready to tackle creative masterpieces like this blog post.
Getting The Most Out Of Your Float | 1
At Flow Spa, we choose not to belabour the point of what to expect in the float tank because the experience is unique to each individual. There are far too many factors to take into account to be able to say “this is what you’re going to experience,” especially in the first few sessions as you learn how to relax deeper into the float.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t tips you can use to get the most out of your float and bask in that “post-float glow.”
Far from being comprehensive, today let’s look at some of the tips that you can work on applying when you come in to float to take the experience to the next level.
Remaining Still
I include this as the first tip because I think it can be the more important one for many people looking to elevate their float experience. Part of the benefit of floating is that your body is given a chance to decompress and dissolve in relation to the environment around you. We’ve calibrated the temperature in our float tanks to be perfectly neutral to skin temperature and have made adjustments in the first few weeks to be sure that it is at the perfect comfortable temperature for virtually everyone coming in to float. This means that you’re not supposed to be able to FEEL that you are in water across most of your body or even be able to tell the difference between the air temperature and water temperature. After some thought and experimentation with this, I’ve come to realize that a very important step in nurturing this physical sensation dissolution is to practice remaining perfectly still once you set into your most comfortable position.
Movement means that part of your brain is firing, whether you’re feeling restless or just fidgeting.
The other reason to limit movement is that movement has a convective effect in the water, which will draw heat out of your core quicker and temporarily give you a cooling sensation at your skin as that heat is pulled away from your body. When you remain still everything in the float tank system, including your body, is in a perfect balance. Movement in the water is much like the cooling effect that standing in front of a fan while sweating in the summer heat has. The water draws heat out of the body and cuts through that vapour barrier that our bodies possess.
Slowing Your Breathing
The float tank is conducive to slowing down your breathing already because you are letting everything in your body relax deeply, which frees the diaphragm to take in fuller and deeper breaths and also allows you to hyper-oxygenate because all of your muscles are relaxed and not requiring copious amounts of oxygen for any demanding work.
Many people never take full and deep breaths though so it can be a new and different experience the first few times in the float tank to allow your body and your breath to fully relax and deepen.
I often advise starting with a box breathing style of 4-4-4-4 where you:
-breathe in for a count of four
-hold your breath for a count of four
-breath out for a count of four
-hold the bottom of the breath for a count of four
The Japanese Society for Hypertension has shown that even 1-minute of deep breathing (5-6 breaths depending on the cadence and method you’re using) can significantly reduce blood pressure. Spending an hour like this in the float tank, therefore, has a dramatic impact not just on mental wellbeing but on many physical markers of health as well.
Some people prefer to count their breaths. When doing this style of deep breathing and meditation I like counting up to ten and then starting over. Holding any larger numbers in the mind can take away from the peace of mind you are looking for and if you’re deeply relaxed, even counting to 10 can become a challenge without losing track but whenever that happens you just start over.
Come in with permission to relax
We all lead busy and distracted lives. It’s become a pervasive issue for many people which is why I believe the reset of floating first and foremost teaches all of us the value in practicing mindfulness in whatever way comes naturally to you daily. It’s not realistic for everyone to float more than once a month but trying to go 30-days with only one hour of mental peace of mind is also not a good strategy.
When you do come in to float though you want to pamper yourself with the experience as much as possible.
Turn off your phone or put it in airplane mode so that you can reap the most benefits of not letting your mind instantly get distracted again. Make a day out of it or at least a few hours by hanging out in our lounge before heading back out into the wild or schedule your float for a day where you do have to immediately get busy again after you are done. The more you can float on that cloud for a while afterwards, the more at peace you will be and the more you will realize the value in cherishing the present moment regularly in your life.
World Sleep Day and Recovery
This week’s blog features an audio companion for anyone who prefers to listen - check out this week’s FlowCast here.
Today is world sleep day and with daylight savings time just passed last week, it’s an important time to think about sleep and getting yourself reset this weekend.
Daylight savings time has become a hotly debated issue because it forces us all to accept a lost hour of sleep when we spring forward and for many of us with already full schedules this means we end up losing that hour altogether.
It may not seem like a big deal but from Matthew Walker’s research which is covered in-depth in his masterpiece on sleep science “Why We Sleep” we don’t properly catch up when we’ve accumulated a sleep debt by sleeping more later.
Sleep is an essential part of the circadian rhythm and as such requires diligent daily, not weekly, attention. Something astounding that Walker talks about in his book is that the incidence of heart attacks skyrockets the Monday following the spring forward in DST and plummets when we get an extra hour of sleep when we fall back an hour.
This doesn’t automatically mean that you’re going to have a heart attack because you lost an hour of sleep last weekend but from many people I’ve talked to this week, the change affects us all in subtle ways. The sudden shift in when the sun rises and sets, the sense of feeling the need to catch up all week, it’s kind of a funny feeling.
So what can we do about it?
Matthew Walker might suggest that we can’t make up for a sleep debt but getting an extra hour of sleep or recovery time for World Sleep Day or anytime this weekend can help to get you back on track still in my mind. Take a nap, spend an hour recharging in a float tank, get outside for a quiet walk in nature, turn off all of your devices and go to bed an hour early.
The quick transition of Daylight Saving’s Time is additional stress on all of us. Life is a constant balance of stress and recovery, sympathetic and parasympathetic - yin and yang. Out of respect for World Sleep Day, if you didn’t spend the March Break somewhere relaxing, take an extra hour to do something rejuvenating this weekend and perhaps start to make it a routine - but that’s a whole other topic for another day.