70 Years of Floating
This year marks 70 years since the world's first float tank was invented in 1954. What began as fringe experiments and personal exploration has transformed into a mainstream wellness activity embraced around the globe.
As we reflect on the decades past, we wanted to share how far floating has come as both an industry and as a recognized tool for bolstering wellness and performance. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of history worth delving into (far more than we can cover in this short blog post), but we’ll be covering the high level eras and milestones over 7 decades of float tanks.
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Elevating Your Aspirations with Floatation
We all have goals we want to achieve, whether it’s pushing our physical limits, developing new skills, advancing in our careers, or establishing healthier lifestyle habits. No matter how dedicated you are, the pursuit of these personal and professional objectives can sometimes feel like an uphill climb.
Finding the right support and tools is crucial for turning these aspirations into reality. At our float center, we've observed how floatation therapy not only complements but also enhances these endeavors, offering a unique space for physical rest and mental clarity that's essential for achieving whatever diverse goals you might have set your sights on…
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Buoyant Benefits - Mental and Physical Recovery in Athletics
When we think of sports athletes, we often think of their success in terms of physical ability, performance under pressure, and in-game strategy. However, much of the brilliance and outstanding success we see from top athletes is built on the less flashy foundation of practice, conditioning, diet, and recovery. Based on our article from last month about Dr. Matt Driller’s work around floating and sports, we’d like to look at some other research being done by Dr. Lydia Caldwell out of Ohio State University (now at the University of North Texas).
Float tanks have become increasingly popular in recent years, with professional athletes and weekend warriors using them as a tool for mental and physical recovery. Dr. Caldwell has worked with float tanks for years and presented at the 2017 and 2021 Float conferences. She has worked with special forces military and top-performing athletes to increase their performance and has incorporated float tanks into her research and protocols for both.
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Sensory Deprivation or Sensory Enhancement? A History of Misleading Names
loating, despite its emphasis on stillness, has struggled in the past to settle on a name. For one reason or another, the attempt to aptly name and describe the experience of floating in the warmth of quiet darkness has led to monikers that fall short of reality. Of all the names associated with floating throughout the years, few have had the kind of staying power and winding history as its most misleading: sensory deprivation.
As a term, sensory deprivation was first coined by Canadian researchers in the 1950s. Ostensibly, they were studying phenomenal distortions in people working monotonous jobs, including truck drivers and radar observers. Beneath their sta
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Understanding Float Tanks - Media vs Reality
Float Tanks in the media are most commonly shown as psychedelic-inspired journeys – a sort of modern vision quest in which the character often confronts either internal (or sometimes literal) demons. This leads to a breakthrough that allows the character to grow and progress on their journey.
Although the benefits from floating are deeply profound in many cases, they also tend to emerge more subtly. Float tanks aren’t one-off epiphany machines, and although visuals while floating aren’t uncommon, they’re far from the surreal DMT trips shown in television shows and movies. As a practice, floating has many benefits, including things like reduced stress and anxiety, decreased muscle and joint pain, an improved immune system, heightened creativity, and many other benefits that we’ve written about previously – but these are developed and maintained by floating regularly.
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Breathing Deep: How Floating Impacts our Respiration
James Nestor is an acclaimed author, journalist, and speaker who has brought a fresh perspective to our understanding of breath. He ventured into the sea of human physiology with his book 'Deep'’ and later explored the lost art and science of breathing in his book 'Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.'’
He is also no stranger to the Float Conference stage, having made his third appearance last year in 2022, when he talked about pooling his work on breath with the practice of floating. The Float Conference – an annual gathering of floating enthusiasts, researchers, and floatation tank owners – has been a perfect venue for many of Nestor's unique explorations.
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Breathing Easy - A Look at Floating and Blood Oxygen Levels
mmediately after her first float, Jeanine was already at a new level of relaxation. She says it was an “oh my gosh” moment for her, and recounted how all of her muscles were, “just so relaxed,” even after that single session. Over the following weeks and months, she became aware of another benefit that was even more profound – a rise in her blood oxygen levels, something she had been tracking regularly using an O2 ring.
Normal blood oxygen levels are around 95%, and before finding floating, Jeanine was seeing huge dips in her overnight blood oxygen levels, reaching as low as 77%.
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FLOATNotes: The Gulag Archipelago
5-minute Ideas from Important Books. Exploring sensory deprivation as a point of commonality for the generation of philosophies.
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