Floating - The Ultimate Wingman for New Year’s Resolutions
As you consider what changes you want to make in your life for the new year, it’s worth also spending some time thinking about how you are going to make sure that you actually follow through with them. There are people who joke that their main New Year’s resolution is to not break their New Year’s resolutions – and there is actually a good amount of wisdom in that quip. Especially for those of us who don’t have the best track record of following through with our well-intentioned goals, it’s important to engage in activities and behaviors that can help us on our journey.
There are many tools and tricks out there to help you keep your New Year’s resolutions, from goal journals, to accountability apps, to prescribed morning routines. These are all designed to help you overcome one of the frustrating realities of being human: we are creatures of habit. For the most part, this is a good thing – we have countless routines that allow us to live our lives and get through our days consistently and safely. There are also, of course, those adopted habits that we’d like to change, or eliminate altogether.
One of the practices that is especially useful in breaking bad habits and fostering new behaviors is floatation therapy…
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Making the Most of the Holidays
It's the holiday season. You've booked your time off from work, planned where you're going (or who's coming to you) and you’re excited to finally reconnect with loved ones after an unusually busy year. Holidays are meant to be a break from the craziness – they give us a chance to enjoy special moments and make memories with the people we love.
Sadly, actually fulfilling that yearning for a few nights where “all is calm and all is bright” can be quite stressful. Misbehaving children, older relatives that need extra care, bickering couples, organizing transport and accommodation, spending time to find the right gifts, catering for dietary requirements – with multiple distractions, time can easily feel like it's running away. This was supposed to be a holiday right?
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Alone But Not Lonely
In many ways, our culture has fostered an unhealthy relationship with time spent alone. Even the words that we use to describe alone time are often steeped in some kind of negative connotation. Solitude. Seclusion. Withdrawal. Loneliness.
Loneliness is especially telling: the etymology of the word is simply in the act of being alone, but the modern meaning and most common definitions refer to it as an unpleasant emotional state in which you desire the company of others, but for one reason or another can’t satisfy that desire. When we’re thinking of things that we want to do next Friday night, being “lonely” rarely finds its way to the top of the list.
Fortunately, our relationship to loneliness is changing, and many of these terms and notions are being gradually replaced (or at least supplemented) with ideas that aren’t as negative: me-time, down-time, self-care, treating yourself, and decompressing. As our technology and culture have pushed us to be constantly connected to other people (along with their opinions and demands), we’ve seen an increase in research and general attention to the benefits that spending time alone can offer us…
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Fight, Flight...or Float?
You’ve probably heard of our fight or flight response – when we’re presented with stressful or threatening situations (like being chased by a hippopotamus), our body’s autonomic nervous system responds by preparing for action. Our heart rate increases, our breathing picks up, and blood flows from our core out to our limbs (along with a lot of other changes, all focused on helping us get ready to defend ourselves or to get out of there as swiftly as possible).
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Promising New Research into Floating for Anorexia Nervosa
From helping with anorexia nervosa, to regulating the immune system, to reducing general and acute anxiety, new findings on floatation continue to flow out from researchers around the world. While much of the science news these days is taken up by stories and discoveries about covid, countless labs around the world carry on with their studies, many of which began years before the pandemic, and the world of floatation is no exception.
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Floating Up from the Depths
There is a growing base of research coming out on the benefits of floating, especially on the increased impact that floating consistently over time can offer us. Many of the early studies on floatation therapy involved just a single float, but increased funding and larger float research labs in recent years have allowed for tracking improvements over much longer periods. This month’s blog shares the personal stories behind the data – learn about how a practice of floating has helped people through issues from physical trauma, to compulsive behavior, to eating disorders in this new post!
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Where Did Float Tanks Come From?
Hopping into a soundproof, light-proof box filled with saltwater may be a popular relaxation therapy today, but those just discovering it are likely asking themselves: “who came up with this strange device, and when were float tanks developed?” In order to answer those questions, we first have to ask “why did they want to make them in the first place?”
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The Possible Secret Behind Sustainable Anxiety Treatment
Generalized Anxiety is a psychological phenomenon that’s essentially written in our genes. From our humble origins, anxiety has served as a protective mechanism that alerted us to potential dangers lurking behind the bush.
Today we often refer to its effects as a vestigial feature, not yet erased by the forward march of evolution. However, anxiety does not affect us all equally. In fact, its occurrence rates can differ greatly by country, region, race, age, and gender. As a result, effective treatment measures can be hard to determine and implement on a wide-scale level.
Anxiety is a feature of the human psyche and not a “bug.” But given prolonged states of anxiety, people can suffer many awful side effects, such as depression and autoimmune malfunction. The modern world subjects us to anxiety at every turn. Think - making rent, getting that promotion, the effects of mistakenly thinking that everyone you know is doing better than you based on constantly watching social media, etc.
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