The Art of Floating : Introduction to Floatation Therapy | Diet and Exercise | Real Life Fitness | PhitZone

It is dark, pitch black if you may, it is silent, the temperature of the liquid is 93.5 degrees the salinity of the water keeps you afloat, you don’t have a clue to where your body starts and where it ends as the buoyancy of the Epsom salt filled capsule keeps you suspended.

At this point your mind stops feeling, hearing, tasting, smelling or seeing and at this point your mind becomes free of external stimuli and starts to let go of its external environment and starts focusing on the state of its internal state of affairs as even gravity is excluded from the equation. Sounds like the twilight zone?

The description given above is the exact experience a floater experiences in a float tank. Most would have heard about sensory deprivation tanks or isolation tanks and although it may sound like a device of mental torture, the opposite is true.  Clinical Studies have shown these floatation tanks have multiple health benefits that range from reduced stress levels, lower levels of the dreaded cortisol, enhanced management of chronic pain, rapid recovery from both injury, and illness and in some instances have even shown positive results with regards to overcoming addiction and depression.

The floatation tank has come a long way since its first clinical trials in the 50s and interest in the device flourished in the 70s and 80s prompting numerous tests that were first focused on mood elevation and improving sports performance and the constant positive results triggered more interest in these tanks which saw the scientific community probing other aspects of the device which eventually led them to the core of the truth.

The truth is that these floatation tanks help floaters to reach a semi state of consciousness which is known as the ‘theta state of mind’, a state of mind when the mind is in a state of deep rest as it rejuvenates and the only other way to achieve this semi state of consciousness is by practising meditation for decades.

The idea of the device is relatively simple according to Ashkahn Jahromi a co-founder of Float On, he says that when external stimuli is removed, the brain is left with an enormous amount of resources that it does not waste and uses these ‘temporarily freed’ resources to focus on resting and internal healing which improves every other aspect of the an individual’s psychological and physical condition.

However, if you are planning to try a float session, the first time you get into a floatation tank could go either way as it is in essence a new experience and very exploratory, hence it can be unnerving to some whilst being exhilarating for others, it all depends on the frame of mind that one is in when he or she gets into the tank for the very first time and based on the fact that almost everyone who tries it for the second time comeback repeatedly attests to the fact that these things really work.