Does floating impact the Parasympathetic Nervous System? – DSP 243

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.

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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

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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.

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