Floatation Therapy In The News
Check out our gallery of news stories to learn more about this incredible therapy.
Reboot Float Spa, San Franciso, CA
Why Superstars Like Steph Curry Are Using This Strange Therapy to Stay Focused
The Golden State Warriors' Steph Curry has been dubbed one of the NBA's best all-time shooters, setting records and winning back-to-back MVP titles. The kid who was rejected from numerous top-tier collegiate basketball programs is now a man destined for the Hall of Fame. - By Anne Gherini, Head of Marketing, Node, May 25, 2017
Floating Lotus, NYC
8 Things to Know About Tom Brady's Favorite Self-Care Ritual: Floatation Therapy
As Tom Brady prepares to face the Atlanta Falcons in the Super Bowl, one part of his self-care routine may include floating in total darkness and silence in his own private floatation device.Brady supposedly keeps one in his Boston home. -Bea McMonagle, Forbes.com, January 30, 2017
A floating pod at Pause Float Studio in Los Angeles. Photo: Frank Rocco
Meditation Retreats? Please. Now It's All About Floating in the Dark
Why not just take a long bath? That was my biggest question as I readied to go "floating," the latest wellness fad.
A flotation tank is a human-sized bathtub with a retractable lid that's filled with 160 gallons of body-temperature water and salted with 1,000 pounds of magnesium sulfate. The mineral, studies show, helps detoxify the body, reduce inflammation, and ease sore muscles. It is also said to trigger the release of endorphins. - Rina Raphael, Fast Company, November 4, 2016
Study Demonstrates What Flotation Therapy Can Do for Depression, Stress, Anxiety & More
A study published in the journal BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine explores sensory deprivation in a flotation tank as a form of preventative healthcare. Its results showed substantial reductions in levels of stress, anxiety, depression, and pain, and along with improved sleep quality and overall mood, proving that flotation therapy is an excellent way to prevent and treat many emotional and physical ailments. Alanna Ketler, Collective Evolution, October, 25, 2016
Gaining Happiness By Loosing Yourself
A dissolution of body boundaries during meditation leads to greater happiness, says a new study. The results provide evidence that techniques that foster the loss of sense of body boundary can help in the treatment of mood disorders - Marc Whittmann, Psychology Today, October 9, 2016
(ANYA SEMENOFF/THE DENVER POST VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Should you Try Floatation Therapy?
If Mitch Jordan's new BMW had suffered a hit-and-run accident eight months ago, the venture capitalist owner near Pasadena, California, would have fumed. "I would have felt such resentment and anger toward whoever this person was," imagines Jordan, 48, whose last name has been changed to protect his privacy. - Anna Medaris Miller, US News and World Report, August 11, 2016
Kari Mozena
I went to a "float therapy" studio — and now I'm hooked
I cannot stop smiling, and it’s becoming a problem. My jaws actually ache. An unshakable happiness has clung to me for the last four days, ever since my first float at the brand new Pause Float Studio in Mar Vista. After floating weightless in a skin temperature (gross way to say 93.5 degrees) Epsom salt bath in a large pod (imagine a larger version of that egg Lady Gaga arrived to the 2011 Grammys)—I can’t lose this grin no matter what I do. - Kari Mozena, Los Angeles Magazine, July 24, 2016
Floating Lotus, NYC
These Olympians Swear Sensory Deprivation Helps Them Achieve Their Goals
Sensory deprivation. Flotation therapy. Whatever you want to call it, it's in—and not just among New Age healers and hip celebrities. Olympians are increasingly getting their float on in preparation for the Rio Games.
Flotation therapy, in a nutshell, is a treatment that strips away your brain's sensory input—from light, sound, even touch—for a full hour at a time (sometimes more), in order to increase relaxation, improve muscle recovery, ease aches and pains, and help athletes of any level get their heads in the game. - Aleisha Fetters, Fitness Magazine, July 29, 2016
Floating the New Frontier in Physical and Emotional Health
More than 30 years after the movie "Altered States" introduced Americans to the concept of sensory reduction, hundreds of "float centers" have begun opening up across the country. But while William Hurt's character slipped into an isolation tank to facilitate scientifically farfetched shape-shifting, real people are now flocking to float centers for pragmatic reasons: to enhance their physical and emotional health. - From Military.com, June 20, 2016
Image from Deanne Fitzmaurice ESPN.com
Stephen Curry on copying the Warriors' way: 'You won't have the personnel'
Warriors point guard Steph Curry and his wife, Ayesha, glide into the lobby of Reboot Float Spa in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Eve and quickly make themselves at home. Curry's teammate, forward Harrison Barnes is tied up at a Boys & Girls Club event and running late for his regularly scheduled appointment but the Currys aren't bothered by the delay. They gregariously chat up the spa's staff while charging their phones. - By Sam Alipour, From ESPN.com, December 8, 2015
Lift/Next Level Floats, Brooklyn, NY
What It's Really Like to Float in a Sensory-Deprivation Tank
When my acupuncturist, Justine Wenger (you might remember her from my account of what it's like to get facial acupuncture), first told me about Lift/Next Level Floats, a spa in Brooklyn where you float in dark, gravity-free water tanks filled with 1,000 pounds of Epsom salt, I was...feeling a lot of feelings. But she said floating would help treat my lower back pain—it decompresses and realigns the spine and helps relax back muscles. So I figured, why not? At $99 for a one-hour treatment, it seemed worth a shot. - By Caroline Solomon, Glamour Magazine, October 21, 2015
Photo: © Carsten Höller / Courtesy the artist / Attilio Maranzano
Getting Tanked: One Writer’s 60 Minutes in Sensory Deprivation
It hadn’t really occurred to me to be afraid of floating in a pitch-dark, top-sealed tank until a braver and better-adjusted friend said that she’d always felt a secret hankering to try it but was scared. “Scared of what?” I asked, although by then my mind was running to extremes: the heavy air, the terror of enclosure, the risk of falling asleep and inhaling water. - Nathan Heller, Vogue Magazine, August 13, 2015
Superior Pod
Sleeping Around: How to Sleep in a Sensory Deprivation Tank
In 1953, neuroscientist John Lilly constructed the first sensory deprivation tank. This vessel was devised as a way to study the brain’s response to limited sensory input. The tank immersed the user into a totally dark and silent environment in which sound and vision as well as other sensory inputs were virtually eliminated. The theory at the time was if all sensory inputs were cut off to the brain, the brain would reflexively go to sleep. Lilly, a self-described “psychonaut”, used the tank to study these and other kinds of theories. - Dr. Christopher Winter, May 23, 2015
Can Floating in a Tank of Water Help Your Mind and Body?
The Claim: The practice of regularly floating in a special tank full of warm water and Epsom salts can profoundly relax a person and lead to a variety of mind and body benefits, according to centers that charge for sessions in the tanks.
The Verdict: Regularly floating in such tanks has been shown in research studies to reduce stress and anxiety, ease back and fibromyalgia pain and improve sleep. But the studies are mostly small, and larger, rigorously designed trials are needed, scientists say. - The Wall Street Journal, Laura Johannes, May 22, 2015
Anicca Float Club, 2015
Hope Floats: The Strange New Science of Floating
They started late one night, the tremors that shook Michael Harding’s whole body when he lay down to sleep. “A bit weird,” thought Harding, then a 23-year-old Australian soldier stationed in Afghanistan. Just days before, he’d been in an hours-long siege in which his second-in-command was shot and killed.
Harding soon started shaking so much that he had to ask a friend to light his cigarettes. He couldn’t drink water from a bottle without pouring it down his shirt, and in the mess hall, his twitches got so spastic that he’d sometimes flip his tray. - Time Magazine, July 15, 2015, Story by MANDY OAKLANDER
Cinematography by MICHAEL POTTER , Video by DIANE TSAI
Experience direction by BRONSON STAMP
Thinkstock/istockphoto
The Zen of Floating
HOW DID I end up naked in a stranger's apartment — floating in a saltwater tub, surrounded by darkness and silence — realizing that for the first time in my life I had achieved total mindfulness?
Let's begin our story in 1961, when Peter Suedfeld was a first-year psychology graduate student at Princeton. Another scholar in the department was running a "sensory deprivation" study that offered $20 to volunteer subjects. Suedfeld wanted the cash, so he agreed to be shut inside a pitch-black, soundproofed room for 24 hours, with only a bit of sustenance and a toilet to keep him company. - Seth Stevenson, Theweek.com, June 2, 2013, ©2013 by Slate
JM3/Flickr
Time Out: The Rise of Sensory Deprivation Tanks
It's an environment entirely stripped of stimuli. Even gravity feels nonexistent, inside a tank filled with nearly a foot of water and just about 800 pounds of Epsom salt. Like the Dead Sea. You climb inside and lie floating in the darkness. - Kyle Dowling, The Atlantic, October 12, 2012