Floating To Sanity

Michael Harding is an ex-soldier who served in Afghanistan and witnessed firsthand the horrors of the war. During one mission, his second-in-command got shot and killed right next to him. He developed severe PTSD — post-traumatic stress disorder — that manifested as tremors so bad in his body that he could hardly drink water. He was discharged from the army and tried everything to cure himself: from psychotherapy to medication to meditation to weed. Nothing worked until he learned about floating.

Justin Feinstein, a scientist who’s determined to find out what happens in our brains when we float, opened his Float Clinic and Research Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He scans patients’ brains before and after the flotation to see what areas in the brain are activated. The “studies show that meditating activates parts of the brain associated with attention and decreases activation in the amygdala, the part of the brain that kicks off the fight-or-flight response to a real or perceived threat”.

The fact of the matter is that flotation can be seen as another form of meditation, and has similar effects, but the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will provide funding for the latter, but not for the former.

Which is a bummer, because Feinstein did some studies where he showed that using flotation as a therapy has the same effects as taking lorazepam, a drug that is “highly effective at reducing anxiety, but it can also be addictive”.

However, it’s difficult to convince the funding authorities and the public that flotation therapy isn’t just bogus. The fact that John C. Lilly, who invented isolation tanks, was “kind of a wackadoodle” and was portrayed in a Hollywood movie as being so didn’t help, of course.

For me, just watching the beautiful cinematography of this article worked as a soother, and it left me with a physical craving for floating. I’m surprised, though, that no one mentioned anything about the flotation-mother’s womb similarity.