Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
The Parasympathetic Nervous System is the part of your body that gets really excited when the rest of your body is winding down. Taking care of the digestive and rest systems are an important part of human health and physiology. How do float tanks affect this system?
Many of the studies on floating have demonstrated an impact on the parasympathetic nervous system. Graham and Ashkahn talk about the information that’s been studied so far.
Show Resources
Buy your tickets for the 2018 Float Conference!
Book hotel rooms for the Float Conference
Check out our Free Scientific Research List for up to date information on all float related research
The Float Clinic at the Laureate Institute of Brain Research (Justin Feinstein’s research)
Annette Kjellgren’s Research page at Karlstad University
Justin Feinstein’s Talk at last year’s Float Conference
Tom Fine’s Talk from the 2014 Float Conference
The Float Research Panel from the 2015 Float Conference
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: All right.
Ashkahn: Welcome.
Graham: Hello everybody.
Ashkahn: Yeah. This is Ashkahn.
Graham: I am Graham.
Ashkahn: We’re gonna answer a question today.
Graham: Which is, “have there been any studies that show floating engages the parasympathetic nervous system?” The old PNS.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Graham: Thank you for the question. Good luck finding them.
No, let’s start with what the parasympathetic nervous system is.
Ashkahn: Yeah. It’s not the sympathetic nervous system.
Graham: Bingo. Therein lies the entire story.
The sympathetic nervous system is generally much more active. It’s when your adrenal system activates. The parasympathetic nervous system is your rest and digest system, sometimes called.
Ashkahn: Yeah. The little phrases are fight or flight, versus rest and digest.
Graham: Yep. Parasympathetic is much more associated with things like digestion, as you can imagine, with your heart rate slowing, breathing slowing.
Ashkahn: Resting.
Graham: All these things, if you’re familiar with floating, which hopefully you are since you’re listening to us ramble on about it day after day.
Ashkahn: If not, welcome. It’s about to be really exciting to you.
Graham: Right, those are the activities we associate with floating. When you’re in the tank, your heart rate slows, your breathing slows, you calm down.
Ashkahn: People say they come out feeling very hungry sometimes.
Graham: It’s because you’re activating your parasympathetic nervous system. That’s what we’re talking about here.
Ashkahn: This is most likely a very simplified view of the entire thing, but I always think about it as our bodies react to the external environment. When there’s stuff you have to do or there’s an animal trying to eat you, or all the stuff that generally comes with staying alive, your body has to prioritize resources.
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: If a bear is chasing you, your body is like, “You know what we should be doing right now is digesting food.” It allocates the resources it needs to deal with the much more important stuff that’s happening, and then when you don’t have things like that going on, your body shifts into another mode. It’s like, “Great, now we have time to do maintenance stuff. Let’s repair things, let’s rest, let’s grow.” Part of human growth can be part of the rest and digest system.
I think there’s very acute cases of children, of huge amounts of stress in their childhood actually being stunted in terms of their growth. All this stuff is our body switching the fire hose of resources around.
Graham: Yeah. As far as studies showing that that’s the system that’s being activated, for any study that actually looks at humanmetrics and is measuring heart rate, is measuring our brain wave levels even, or what’s going on to us physically in the tank, you’d be hard pressed to find any of those studies that don’t point to the parasympathetic nervous system being activated.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Like most of the stuff you hear about in terms of research, of cortisol levels, and heart rate, and blood pressure, and-
Graham: Breathing.
Ashkahn: Breathing. All these sorts of things are those kinds of effect, the effects of your body switching gears like that.
Graham: I’ll turn the question around to you listener and say, “Do you know of any studies that don’t show the parasympathetic nervous system being activated, that are focusing on humanmetrics.” ‘Cause I would say, “I can’t think of any.”
Ashkahn: Yeah. It seems like it’s just a big broad category of things that our body does, and almost everything is showing, I think that’s probably one of the symptoms of an overabundance of stress in our society, is that our bodies don’t have as much time to be in the parasympathetic nervous system mode as we used to. We used to have longer periods of activating that, and that just gets a little bit harder in modern society with cars, and blinking lights, and sound effects, and all that sort of stuff that our bodies interpret sometimes as things they need to respond to, and things they need to respond to with more of our active survival instincts.
Graham: Yeah. I remember having a discussion with Glenn Perry at some point, one of the founders of our industry, and owners of some Samadhi Tank Company. He was saying, it wasn’t that long ago where we’d finish up a day of work, and then maybe we’d sit on our porch and watch the sunset, and think about things that we done during the day. Maybe we’d reflect and say, “Oh, you know, I was a little too mean in that scenario.” Or, “Oh, my calf hurts. Maybe I should take it a little easy there.” It’s true, we’re a society of chronic stress these days. We don’t have that down time. To me, the fact that the float tanks do activate the parasympathetic nervous system, they, as Glen Perry was saying, recreate this end of the day relaxation contemplation that we used to get very naturally, is a lot of their benefit. It’s certainly at least for me, one of the big things that I take away from floating, is forcing that rest and digest system back into my busy life.
Of those, I guess just to name some, I would say the early ones like John Turner, Tom Fine, they took some really detailed metrics the best that they could do for the time when they were running research back in the ’80s, up through the ’90s. They’re some of the people whose early findings are showing this parasympathetic nervous system activating. More recently, Justin Feinstein has just been collecting a bunch of data on biological metrics and marking. Just to kick you off, those are two big ones. But I think Anette Kjellgren over in Sweden, and the Swedish researchers have also shown the same results. Again, any study that you’re looking into where it’s focusing on this biological aspect of floating, you’re probably find that same parasympathetic nervous system activation.
Question answered, I guess?
Ashkahn: Yeah. Yeah, I guess we did it. We only know so much about the technicalities of all this stuff. The same with that we’re not lawyers, or doctors, or economists. We’re also not researchers. I feel pretty good about the broad strokes of how all this stuff works, but I’m pretty sure there’s plenty of nuance too, to the human body.
Graham: I’ve never found that to be true, but if you disagree, go over to FloatTankSolutions.com/podcast and shoot in your own questions so we can embarrass ourselves with that analogy.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Please.
Graham: It’s what we live for.
Ashkahn: All right. Bye everybody.
Graham: Thanks.
Recent Podcast Episodes
How to Build your Mailing List – DSP 325
Graham and Ashkahn consistently emphasize the importance of mailing lists, but today they dive in deep to talk about how to build a mailing list, giving their best tips and tricks to collecting emails and how to make sure you’re getting the right people signed up.
How to Deal with Employee Conflict – DSP 324
Graham and Ashkahn address the unenviable task of dealing with disagreements between staff members as a small business. This is an area that Float On has needed a lot of help with in the past. The best practices of Human Resources aren’t very intuitive in interpersonal relationships, so hiring a professional is almost always a good idea.
Float Tanks in the Military – DSP 323
The military is famously tight lipped about the research it does in general. No less so than when researching seemingly benign practices like float tanks.
Graham and Ashkahn give their scoop on what they know about the military’s use of float tanks in their research and training programs.
Best Cleaning Practices without Burning Out Employees – DSP 322
Every float center has to compromise somewhere on how much cleaning to do between transitions. Where do you draw the line and how do you make sure that you’re keeping your employees happy without sacrificing sanitation?
Graham and Ashkahn remind everyone that “perfect” sanitation doesn’t exist and that making solutions collaborative in a work environment can do wonders for morale and problem solving in situations like this one.
Good Website Copy for Float Centers – DSP 321
Most websites you visit are filled with words. And that may seem simple, but if you build a website, you’re going to have to be the one to come up with those words. How do you decide what to put up there and how much is too much? What should you focus on?
Graham and Ashkahn tackle the elusive web copy problem for float centers and provide some helpful tips for anyone who’s feeling a little overwhelmed at the concept.
Latest Blog Posts
Timeline for Opening Up a Float Center
Opening up a float center is a lot like climbing a mountain. Even if you can see the peak, it’s a lot further away than you think, and when you finally get there, the journey and the destination usually end up being different than previously assumed.
In this post we’ll lay out a general process and timeline of what you may encounter on your path, from initial idea to actually operating a center.
Can you have volunteers at your center?
So you’re thinking about using volunteers in your float center?
Before we clarify what a “volunteer” actually means, we’ll first explore why a float center might be considering them in the first place. While it can be a way to provide floats to people who are otherwise unable to pay, the impulse to bring in volunteers can also stem from a desire to get some sort of free labor (later in this post we’ll dive into why you can’t actually do this, but it’s important to recognize that the instinct is understandable, especially when you have someone lined up and willing to work for free).
In addition to a desired boost in overall productivity, it’s also a way to invite more people into your center to experience what you do. Some customers actually want to help out and see what happens behind the scenes at a center.
Floating and Athletics, a Strong Relationship
One of the beautiful things about the float tank is that it serves to rejuvenate the whole person. — the body, mind, heart.
Broadly speaking, it’s a tool for homeostasis, an ideal environment that supports balance, health, and growth. This piece will look specifically at floating and athletics. For anyone who defines themselves as an athlete, or as a general pursuant of athletic endeavors, the float tank can be a powerful asset.
In this post, I’ll discuss individual athletes who float and how to look at this from a marketing perspective. I’ll also discuss past and present research, and share some thoughts on how the relationship between the athletic and floating communities might continue to unfold.
A Skeptic’s Guide to Floating
I think it’s time we addressed the giant metaphorical elephant in the salty metaphorical room — there are lots of exaggerated and untrue claims about the benefits of floating being spread around the industry.
Some are anecdotal, some are only half true, and some are just patently false. Floating has historically had a strong oral tradition tied to it — the practice has survived through word-of-mouth, one passionate floater teaching another everything they know. The unfortunate thing about this is that the information disseminated can’t be reliably tested or shared with others on a broader scale. You can’t use “my buddy Chris” as a source for a health benefit of float tanks in a newspaper article, much less for a research paper.
Now that we’re becoming a bit more mainstream, we thought it would be nice to add some clarity to what we should and shouldn’t be telling people about these difficult-to-understand, saliferous containers.
