#100: Float Therapy: Science, Healing & Peak Performance - Justin Feinstein, PhD

33:42So our first set of people that we floated were these people with extremely high anxiety sensitivity. Now here's the paradox. A lot of people refer to float therapy as sensory deprivation. And I think this is a misnomer. It's a horrible description. And the reason is because we discovered that when you're in a float environment, you see a significant enhancement of your internal sensations like the heartbeat and the breath. In fact, when you reduce and remove the outside world, all of a sudden the internal world of the body comes to life. You could feel your heart beating. You could feel your breath with exquisite sensitivity.

34:32You know, I meditated for many years before I floated. And you would go to these retreats where they would have you focus on the breath, right? Just the breath. And all you would do for hours and hours every day is just focus on the sensation of the breath coming in, going out again and again. And when I got into my first float, that came to life. You know, just to give you a concrete example, my first meditation retreat was like three days long. And you're meditating 10, 12 hours a day, easy, sometimes 14 hours. And maybe in that long chunk of time, you get like 30 seconds or a minute of the entire day where your attention is just focused on the sensation of the breath and nothing else.

35:24You're not thinking about the future. You're not thinking about the past. You're just purely immersed in present moment awareness. maybe for 30 to 60 seconds. For me, after a whole day of meditating, you hit that 30 to 60 seconds, you're like, oh my goodness, that's amazing. Well, when I got into a float tank, I didn't have to trot. It was like the spotlight of awareness just focused in right on the breath. And suddenly I wasn't just feeling it right here underneath the nose. It was going into the nose and I could feel the breath going down the esophagus, down the windpipe, into the trachea. That's how exquisite the sensation is when you're floating.

36:10You could track the breath from beginning to end. You could feel the temperature differences as the air comes into the body and then gets slightly warmed up during the exhalation process. You could see that loop from beginning to end, and the breath all of a sudden could be this anchor point and you can't stop thinking about the breath it's just there so anyways this is a part of floating that I think gets missed with all this talk of sensory deprivation it's missing this critical piece which is your internal body what we call interoceptive awareness actually gets enhanced during the flotation experience so now let's go back full circle to these people with high anxiety sensitivity.

37:03And the third mechanism as to why I think floating is having such profound anti-anxiety effects. You have people who have this exquisite fear of their visceral sensations, right? Of their heartbeat and their breath. And now we're going to put them into this environment where literally all they feel is those visceral sensations like the heartbeat and the breath. If you ask my colleagues 10 years ago, before I started this line of research, what would happen in this situation? They may have said, this is a recipe for disaster. They're going to panic. They're going to go crazy. They're going to jump out of the float tank.

37:49Right? No. It turns out there's a great theory that started many decades ago, really one of the founding theories of psychology, behavioral psychology in the sense of cognitive behavioral therapy. This was Joseph Wolpe, who many view as the founder of CBT. He was kind of the earliest version of behavioral therapy. And he had a concept called reciprocal inhibition, which essentially, I won't go into the details, but essentially is about the basic biological fact that the nervous system can't be anxious and relaxed at the same time. there's there's this inhibition if you will that when you're physiologically relaxed it's very difficult to also feel anxious at the same time all right that was my prediction my prediction was that if you put somebody with extreme anxiety sensitivity into a float environment And all of a sudden, those interoceptive sensations of the heartbeat and the breath that are now at the front and center of conscious awareness are paired with a relaxed physiological state where your blood pressure is down 10 to 15 points.

39:23Your muscle tension is completely dissipated away. Your heart rate is in perfect variability. Right? Your brain waves are lowered to an all-time minimal low. Now, all of a sudden, these interoceptive sensations have a brand new association. Instead of being paired with stress and anxiety like they normally are in the real world, now these interoceptive sensations are paired with a state of relaxation. And this, I think, has profound therapeutic benefit. because when they feel these sensations in the real world again, suddenly it has this whole new association where they don't have to run to the emergency room and feel like they're having a panic attack.

40:16In fact, what they could realize is they're in a state of complete flow and relaxation. And this is very powerful for somebody with high anxiety sensitivity. And so, you know, we did our first set of experiments, and it turned out exactly as I predicted. They did not panic. They did not run out of the float pool. In fact, they loved the experience. They didn't want to get out of the float pool. They stayed in there longer than we ever expected. In fact, we just published a study last year where we said, okay, let's take patients with pretty severe anxiety and PTSD and anxiety sensitivity and let them select what is your preferred duration for floating.

40:59You could float for five minutes. You could float for several hours. You get to decide. And when you ask them before the float and you say to somebody with anxiety or PTSD, you're going to go into this room all by yourself and there's going to be nothing but you, your body and your thoughts. How long do you think you would like to stay in there? How long do you think they would say, Josh? I would imagine it wasn't much. On average, about 10 to 15 minutes tops. They said, we're out of there. And for most people with anxiety, they're constantly sort of running away from themselves. They don't like to sit with their own thoughts.

41:43They're constantly trying to distract themselves from their stress and their anxiety. But what was amazing in this study, and this was the first time that the National Institute of Health had actually funded a float study. But one of the basic questions they wanted to know is what is the preferred duration of floating in somebody with anxiety and PTSD? And it turns out it was 75 minutes. It was 25 % longer than our prescribed duration, which was an hour float, okay? They actually wanted to be in there for 75 minutes, which I thought was so incredible to get somebody with severe anxiety and PTSD to be in this environment where they could just focus on themselves and meditate and feel their internal body in this relaxed physiological state.

42:42And they could do it for an entire 75 minutes. And I didn't have to tell them they had to there it was their preferred it was their preferred duration yeah that's huge so anyways this this to me was such a groundbreaking finding to take somebody who normally associates nothing but fear and panic with the experience of their internal body So when they feel their heartbeat, when they feel their breath, right, the first thing they think, the first association that comes to mind is something is wrong. I'm dying. I need to run away. Right. This is the instinctual thought that comes to mind with these interoceptive sensations.

43:33And now they could feel these sensations and have this whole new association. That's incredible to me. And, you know, in fact, you're seeing manifestations of this already happening in the real world in elite performers. You know, one of the best basketball players that have ever walked the earth is Steph Curry. And there's actually a commercial of him floating. And he's been known to float now for quite a few years. And what he talks about isn't floating as just this tool to help with, you know, recovery after an intense workout or gain, right? He says what it helps him with is how to stay calm in the face of the storm.

44:23And by storm, I mean, imagine you're Steph Curry, only one minute left. Everybody in the crowd is looking at you. The pressure is on. Your adrenaline is shooting through the moon. Your heart is beating out of the chest, right? And what happens to most of us, right? In those situations, we go for the shot and we totally screw it up, right? It's like the adrenaline gets the best of us. We can't concentrate. We can't focus. We can't stay calm, right? And now look at Steph Curry. somebody who's done this again and again in these last minute situations and he shoots that shot and you look at his face and he is so cool he is cool as a cucumber and yet he makes it all the time and he talks about floating giving him the ability to do that and it's because of this mechanism of reciprocal inhibition suddenly he feels his heart palpitating and where most of us would go to, oh my God, we're being chased by a saber-toothed tiger, he goes back to the float tank and back to that reduced blood pressure, that reduced muscle tension.

45:35And he could feel his heart beating and he could stay calm in the face of the storm. And you're seeing this in other athletes like Novak Djokovic, who every time he goes to the Australian Open, guess what he's going to at the same time? He's floating every day. I know it because I know all the float centers in australia who who hosts him i saw the upload pictures of him yeah so all of the elite performers are recognizing that this is actually a superhuman strength if that if these visceral associations are what create our experience of stress and anxiety and suddenly you could have this whole new association that's linked to the visceral sensations oh my goodness what a powerful powerful skill that is.

46:21And I think floating really teaches your brain how to learn this skill. It's not something that comes easy. I could tell you that. And even after many years of meditation, I never was able to quite get there the way that float therapy was able to sort of get me there, where suddenly these visceral sensations lose their power over you. and you could redirect them in these entirely novel ways. So I think this is something that is not spoken about nearly enough with flotation therapy. Everyone always talks about sensory deprivation, which, once again, I hate that term, because, in fact, what's happening in the float environment is you're enhancing the most important sensations on Earth, which is the sensations from your inner body.

47:10Yeah, that's so interesting. I have found that as well. And a little bit of what you're talking about. we would call equanimity which i mean there's a scale of equanimity but on it well it's a very desired state at least in in the practice that we partake in and it is quite difficult like you'll go through different stages first and eventually will come to equanimity and then there's varying degrees of this to the point that you feel that almost anything could happen to you and you would be unmoved by it and it's quite a surprising state when it does happen because it's so different to at least my normal state and the tank does seem to accelerate it and the weird and surprising thing is that it doesn't stop when you get out and it also doesn't stop when i wake up the next day it's often like you know it's again it's like oh wow that's that's still there that's still the downregulated nervous system the feeling of resilience the feeling of health and weirdly well-being just seems to spontaneously arise like you're just you're unconditionally happy and then to go back to the sort of prediction error like description it's like the prediction of what you think might happen like the the reality is becoming much closer and we measured this, Josh.

48:36So we actually did a study and published it last year where we tracked how long do the benefits last after a float session is over. And this really was surprising to me as well, because you would think, okay, during the float experience, you're in this very serene, well-calibrated environment, right? Where you're in basically a state of homeostasis. You know, we're talking about equanimity. You know, this is like equanimity for the nervous system, which, you know, really is homeostasis, right? And, you know, to me, this makes sense that during the float, you would feel this relaxed state, okay?

49:16That makes sense. But what you're talking about is different. Now you leave the float environment, you go back into the real world. How quick does your nervous system revert back to its typical prediction areas, right? Its typical moment to moment functioning. But it turns out it doesn't just revert back right away. We actually measured significant anti-anxiety and anti-stress effects that were lasting over two days, 48 hours. In fact, we didn't go out long enough. We should have gone out to 72 hours because we didn't measure long enough. So we don't actually know how long the effects go, but we know at least one to two days post-float, you're still in that sort of float state, which I thought was amazing.

50:01You know, you take somebody with severe anxiety, you give them a benzodiazepine like Xanax, right? They pop the pill, four hours, maybe eight hours later, the anxiety that the pill helped with is percolating back up, right? Four hours or maybe eight hours later, that's how long the anti-anxiety benefits last for a classic benzo like Xanax. The float actually lasted for 48 hours. You know, to me, that difference is enormous, and it didn't require any pharmaceutical. It didn't require a highly addictive drug like Xanax. And the patients I was working with, they had used Xanax. And what they said is they said, listen, they would come out of the float.

50:52They say, listen, whatever you did in there was just as powerful of an anti-anxiety effect as taking a Xanax. But I don't have all these side effects. I don't feel like I'm in this fog or sedated state. You know, a lot of people who take Xanax a lot, they talk about feeling zombified. Right. In fact, what my patient said is for the first time in their life, they came out and they felt clear headed. clear-minded. They could think and see things with new clarity, which is very different than a sedated state like a Xanax or benzo-induced state would create. So, you know, that's very powerful. Not only are we seeing effects that outlast the gold standard benzos, but we're not seeing all of these negative side effects that come with a gold standard benzo.

51:53So, you know, that is very, very powerful. What I'm trying to actually do eventually, we're going to have to fundraise in order to do this, but I would like to do a head-to-head study directly comparing the effects of float therapy to Xanax in people with severe anxiety. And I bet you we're going to win this thing. It's going to cost a lot of money to do a proper randomized controlled trial. But if we could do it in a rigorous way, we could show that we could do this just as good, if not better, than a benzo. Floating is being misperceived by the public. You know, this word sensory deprivation, once again, is causing people not to recognize that, in fact, what floating is, is the perfect backdrop, both from a sensory state and a physiological state, from which to practice meditation.

52:54And it creates this amazing bridge where suddenly, people who normally would struggle to meditate could access these mindful states almost reflexively, spontaneously, without any effort. And that to me is so important. If we could create a bridge to teach the human population how to access these mindful states, that could be the most important bridge we ever create as a society. Yeah, I agree. It does seem that meditation spontaneously arises. Obviously, a big pointer in meditation is that awareness is always underlying whatever is happening and i think in the tank it becomes extremely obvious particularly it feels just very open and spacious particularly as the body can tend to start to dissolve and you know the temperature is nice and it's very comfortable i also i tend to notice in a lot of focus we put in our practices on the tension in the mind we talked about and the body as well but I'll often find there'll be some form of resistance to what is happening in the brain and usually as soon as I get in the tank the first thing I notice is actually I've got a bit of tension it feels like tension in the brain which is kind of weird because I don't think there is a way of sensing necessarily tension in the brain but what I tend to think it is is just a level of resistance to what is happening and that's what I'm perceiving yeah it's extremely interesting that that does just spontaneously arise when you're in the tank.

54:30The other thing that you've just brought up is, I hate to say this, but a fourth mechanism for how floating is actually working. And this involves out-of-body experiences. When you're in a well-calibrated float pool, the temperature of the water is calibrated to your skin temperature. So it's a few degrees cooler than core. It's about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, or I think that would convert to around 35 degrees Celsius. And what you then do is match the temperature of the air and humidity to the same temperature as the water. And then when the lights are off and you can't see your body, And when the temperature is so perfect that there's no difference between air, body and water, suddenly you lose track with where your body begins and where it ends.

55:32It literally immerses with the world around it. And it's a really fascinating feeling. It's unlike anything you could get on Earth. To me, I think the only other place maybe you would get such a sensation is outer space or maybe scuba diving in the deep sea. I don't know. But beyond those two things, I think floating is really out of this world when it comes to out-of-body experiences. And it creates this amazing dissociative state where suddenly the external body is no longer there, has no boundaries, and all that's left is the internal body, the visceral body that we've been talking about, your heartbeat and your breath.

56:19And this simple form of sentience becomes essentially the only existence that matters at that moment of afloat. And so we just published a study last year with my colleague, Mark Whitman, in Germany. He started a laboratory in Freiburg, Germany, a float laboratory. And he's doing some incredible experiments on altered states of consciousness. And one of the biggest things he found that mediates the anxiolytic effect of floating is this dissolution of body boundaries, this out-of-body experience. And I think that's a really powerful piece of the mechanism behind why floating is having an anxiolytic effect.

57:09So, you know, once again, I don't think I could pin it on any one single mechanism, but there are these four fascinating mechanisms that we've discussed today that all have a powerful role to play. that's really interesting that it's correlated with with that effect because obviously in the psychedelic studies they find correlation between like the quote-unquote mystical experience and reduction in addiction and anxiety and and i find just the body disappearing is i mean i'm not sure if the the term is a great one but It feels like a mystical experience. It's an extremely, I mean, it's a big relief for one, but it's also like, wow, consciousness is so interesting.

58:02And, you know, we did this in women with anorexia nervosa. You know, imagine a population where all they could think about is their external body. and their entire life is consumed by trying to get the external body to look a certain way to the point that they are no longer eating. And now suddenly, for the first time in life, this population of women with severe anorexia nervosa no longer feels their body. Guess what happens?

58:43They change behaviorally somehow. Not only does their anxiety go down, right? The nervosa part of anorexia nervosa, we actually see an improvement in their body image. You know, one of the biggest issues with women who have anorexia nervosa is they are objectively skinny. They're malnourished, right? they're underweight. But when you ask them, they actually say, I feel fat. That's how they feel, even though objectively, they are not. They're exactly the opposite. Post-float, they felt more like their true selves. They didn't feel that feeling of being fat anymore. And we showed that those effects actually persevered for six months after floating had come to a stop.

59:49So it shifted their body image. So, you know, think about that. We were talking about earlier, by virtue of removing, dissolving the outer body, right? It just disappears. suddenly afterwards they feel their real body in a truer form and fashion. I think that's very, very profound. And my colleague Saib Kalsa at UCLA was really the linchpin behind these studies with anorexia nervosa. And I think it's going to be a groundbreaking new treatment for this body image disturbance piece. That's incredible. well what what do you what do you make of that because that means that i mean that opens up just so many other like potential avenues to address because it's it's behavioral like what i wonder would it just be body image related effects i don't think so because if the effect is happening in other, like addiction perhaps, or depression or anxiety.

1:01:06Yeah, I wonder, what do you make of that actually? Because a big focus obviously is changing our behaviours and this leads to just many other positive effects. We often can become kinder, more caring, more present with loved ones, which becomes a sort of positive feedback loop. and can make us happier in just so many other ways. That's right. Yeah, I wonder what do you make of the mechanism or effect of that? You know, I think this does harken back to what we were speaking about originally with the prediction errors. Our nervous system is wired for survival. It's always trying to stay a step ahead of nature and all the threats that nature presents to us.

1:01:59And I think what happens post-float is the nervous system becomes a truer reflection of the environment in which it exists. So in other words, it's not being constantly pulled and tugged by the contingencies of the external world, right? All these stressors and threats that we're facing every day, or we think we're facing, but aren't actually in our immediate environment. Maybe it's just a thought that we're having, or maybe it's something on a social media post that we're seeing happening in a far off land, but it's not actually happening in the here and now of our immediate environment. And all of a sudden, post-float, you could start to take in things more.

1:02:49colors become brighter and richer sounds become much more pleasant the taste suddenly becomes palpable and all of those present moment sensations become in in some ways enriched by that float experience and so all of a sudden mindfulness and flow states, and as you were talking about, feelings of positivity and well-being, that comes to surface. I think it actually brings our nervous system into the state that we were always meant to be in. But the world around us has caused so much havoc, right? Constantly causing an earthquake to our nervous system with all the crap happening day in and day out, right?

1:03:43and all of a sudden floating kind of brings us back to baseline back to where we once were and now we could experience that world from those fresh eyes again That's incredible and extremely exciting. I know that you've been using an adapted EEG device and you've been measuring I think there was increase in alpha and theta I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what what those brain waves are like subjectively what would we expect to be like and what's the effect that you've been measuring there so you know originally we thought it was alpha and theta that would have the biggest effect inside of a float environment.

1:04:41And part of the reason for that is when you look at studies on meditation and relaxation, that tends to be the two most prominent brainwaves that you'll see emerge. But in fact, what we found was totally different and once again surprised us. we were seeing delta waves. And I have to credit Joel Froelich and Ricardo Gilda Costa from Neuroverse, which is the system we use. These are really novel, wireless, waterproof EEG systems sit right here on the forehead. And for the first time, we were able to measure signals of the brain in this novel environment. And what we found were an enhancement of delta power.

1:05:32typically the only time you see an enhancement of delta power in the human brain is during a state of deep sleep, deep non-REM sleep, deep restorative sleep when you're totally unconscious. And the amazing part is we were measuring these brainwaves while people were awake and conscious. So it's one of the few times in your conscious life where your nervous system is fluctuating at this extremely low level of one to two cycles a second. It's barely ticking. Your brain is just barely fluttering. It's the lowest state you could go before you're dead. so you know to me this is this is quite amazing you you know you're inducing sort of a deep rest in the brain in a way that normally could only be achieved in a state of deep sleep but you're awake and you're conscious during the flow

1:06:45that's interesting is that and by the way we're still working on publishing these data so these are brand new data. Amazing. First look. Is that a state where you would process memories or

1:07:07is it more like a dream state? I think almost

1:07:17the opposite. When you're in dream state, They call that paradoxical because it's like you're awake. Your brain's fluctuating 15, 20, 25 cycles a second in a state or a waveform they call beta state, the beta waves. But when you're in a deep rest, there may be consolidation of memories happening at some level, but you're not triggering those memories. you're not conscious necessarily of them

1:07:54it's almost like a tabula rasa that's what I would equate it to it's a blank slate your nervous system is just sitting there waiting for something to paint paint the landscape but nothing's coming in and so the landscape is just a blank slate and that's very unusual and what i like to to say to people when i they ask you know what is it like to float i say imagine you have this blank slate of a nervous system before your eyes and you could now paint anything you want you could visualize things athletes oftentimes will say they go into a float environment, they'll visualize. You could fall asleep.

1:08:49I know a lot of people who float and they go into deep sleep. Or you could do things like meditate and focus on your visceral sensations like the breath. And that becomes the center of your awareness on that blank canvas. It's just the in and out of the breath, the in and out of the beat of the heart, the thump-thump, that is what is on the blank slate. So in other words, you could use this for whatever you want. It's your tabula rasa that the float environment has given you as a gift. And now you could paint whatever you would like.

1:09:37Yeah, that's interesting. A lot of the subjective effect I will notice, I'll see myself dipping down to near sleep and then jump back up into that sort of state. A very liminal state, right? It's incredible. So you've also researched the effect on the amygdala activity. Can you talk a little bit about that? what the amygdala is. I think we've covered some of the effects that might have on anxiety, but I'd love to talk a little bit about that. Yeah, so those studies are still ongoing. I don't think we have a good sense yet of how floating is directly impacting the amygdala. To be completely honest.

1:10:31We had some early studies that were showing a dampening of amygdala activation, but we haven't been replicating that in larger data sets necessarily. I think part of the struggle is the technology of fMRI we were learning more recently is quite crude when it comes to individual differences. So being able, for example, to see changes in somebody's brain from pre-float to post-float, right? From time one to time two. It turns out the reliability of that signal is not very good in the amygdala or really almost any brain region. FMRI has, I would say a relatively poor test retest reliability. And we didn't realize this till the past decade where we had these extremely large data sets where you take the same person and you scan them twice on any given day at a given time and say, what happens?

1:11:36And it turns out what happens on time one doesn't have a very strong relationship with what happens in time two. So it becomes harder to use fMRI to discern what's happening in the brain in any intervention, whether it be floating or medications or behavioral therapy or psychotherapy. It doesn't matter because it's not a good tool for looking at individual differences. And this is something, like I said, we've really only learned in the past decade. We were very optimistic that you could use fMRI for these sorts of things 10 years ago. and as more data has come out, I'm quite a bit less optimistic.

1:12:17So it's harder for me to actually say what's happening in the amygdala because of this limitation of the method itself using fMRI to detect changes. One area where we had a little more success is functional connectivity, which is looking at pre - and post-float changes in resting state functional connectivity. It tends to have a more reliable signal. And what we found is floating does tend to reduce the resting state functional connectivity of the default mode network, especially the posterior default mode. and the default mode has been more or less linked with this internal mind chatter right this constant voice in our heads that's always percolating and always thinking right about the past and the future and even when we're not doing anything the default mode network tends to be hyperactive at rest especially in people with anxiety and depression people who are constantly ruminating or struggling with worry, right?

1:13:32It tends to be related to this sort of hyper-connectivity within the default mode. And what we found from pre to post float is this significant reduction in default mode network connectivity, and especially in the posterior hubs, like the posterior cingulate, the parietal lobe, and in the somatosensory cortices as well, the areas that map both our external and internal body. So you're seeing this precipitous reduction in connectivity within these regions. And interestingly, this does overlap with the same reductions in the connectivity you see in psychedelic studies like psilocybin, for example.

1:14:18And so we do think that this may be related to this concept of ego dissolution that is so fundamental. But essentially, it's the loosening of the thought processes, right, to the point where suddenly thoughts themselves evaporate. And what's left is just this very primal, basic version of yourself. What I like to think of as like pure sentience, right? It's just a very basic visceral awareness. And to me, I think that's what these neuroimaging data are telling us is floating is sort of creating a nervous system state where you do see this ego dissolution, this external body dissolution as well.

1:15:11and you just have this very primordial sense of self that is left afterwards that's fascinating that was my next question actually it's interesting that it's happening in the same way because yeah that seems to be at the core of the effects of the psychedelic experience particularly in measurable effects afterwards and also meditation as well so i I did think there would be correlation there. I wonder, you mentioned Richard Davies earlier. He also talks about in the long-term, I said he did on long-term meditators. I think it was like real high level, like 40 ,000 hours I think they had on average.

1:15:59They found that they were measuring gamma asynchrony even when they were resting. How do you, I struggle to consolidate that with some of the other research because obviously gamma is an extremely high frequency brainwave so yeah is there any way you can hypothesize or consolidate that with a lot of the other practices yeah you know Antoine Lutz helped Richie with a lot of those those early studies to to find this gamma effect these are you know very very experienced meditators you know people who were living in caves for years at a time, just meditating in temples and so forth every day. So I think they have a very unique nervous system, almost incomprehensible to even compare them to almost anybody else because the way they interact with the world is just so different.

1:17:02That was something that Richie found. We did not see that in our EEG data. Once again, we saw the opposite. We saw these extremely low frequency states. Does that mean we wouldn't find gamma if, for example, we took long-term meditators and put them into a floating environment? That we don't know. That study has not been done yet. The people we were studying were people with anxiety and PTSD who struggle to get into deep meditative states. and they were the ones entering into these very low frequency states but perhaps if we took experienced meditators and allowed that float environment to give them that tabula rasa maybe we would see a flourishing of high frequency gamma states that'd be interesting yeah even non non-meditators but long-term floaters oh yeah yeah there you go So that would be another interesting group to look at.

1:18:04And, you know, we wanted to do this study for many years and, you know, we still might do it, but we thought it would be so fun to just, you know, take a cohort of these experienced meditators like the Dalai Lama's group that Richie Davidson has been looking at. and just get them to a float center all over the course of a single weekend where you could go to these giant float centers that have anywhere from five to ten float tanks and do a massive study in one weekend where you just get all of them to come and put on these EEG systems and do a marathon testing session. That would be incredible.

1:18:47I hope to keep track of that as we move forward. I remember, I think it was, there's been a couple of instances of that, but I think it was Terence McKenna. He gave, I think, DMT to like a high llama. And then when he took it, he was just completely unsurprised by what happened. And it was just like, as though in one of them, at least, there was no change. It was just the same. Unbelievable. No effect. Unbelievable. Yeah, it's, you know, I think when you could teach your brain not to rely on predictive processing as its core mode of functioning and not to let these erroneous priors get in the way of reality, which is oftentimes what's happening in these horrible mental health conditions like stress, chronic stress, chronic anxiety.

1:19:51chronic depression even all of a sudden the world no matter what it throws at you

1:20:03is going to be okay you can maintain equanimity you can maintain calm in the face of any storm and I think that's what we're learning from these highly experienced meditators that's what we're learning from people who float on a regular basis. This is what we're learning from people who practice things like breath work that help very quickly bring their nervous system into that state of equanimity or homeostasis. So this is, I think, a key skill that we have to learn how to teach society from a very early stage of life. You know, I don't know about you, Josh, but I didn't start getting into some of these practices like floating and meditation and breath work until I was quite old.

1:20:57You know, college was the beginning. And then I think floating not until I was in my postdoc. You know, really, if we want to be doing this correctly at the most efficient time to maximize benefit, you want to be doing this in children and teenagers. that's when the nervous system is developing. And if you could get the nervous system to develop in a salubrious way, suddenly you're going to shift the entire trajectory of that child or that teenager's life. 75 % of mental health conditions start during childhood and adolescence. So if we could teach those basic skills at that critical time window, We could shift people's trajectory away from mental health and towards this state of mindfulness and mental wellness that is so missing from our children and adolescents right now.

1:21:59I got to say, the data is coming out on this young generation, and it is the scariest data I have ever seen as a psychologist. We are seeing rates of mental illness, anxiety, stress, depression, suicidality, body image disturbance, anorexia nervosa, higher than it's ever been. And the females in particular, the adolescent females, are really struggling. I can't emphasize that enough. The warning signs are all there. You could read a great book that just came out last year called The Anxious Generation, talks all about this, but the data is there. And this young generation really needs help. They need help.

1:22:48They are so damn connected to technology that their nervous system no longer knows how to disconnect. And this is where technologies like flotation therapy could become so helpful. And that's something we're actually going to study in Lahaina, in all the teenagers who are struggling right now, not just with the constant connectivity of technology, but with these horrible fires that have completely ruined their lives and livelihoods. gosh yeah that's such a good idea it does i've never heard of a child floating for one but it's i do worry about it often even just driving around the street how little or unusual it is to see a kid playing out these days and the exposure to this level of addictive technology of course that the kid doesn't know not to do it and also the parents are trying to deal with the current stresses of life so it's a very difficult situation to be in but I think it's such a good idea to apply these these technologies to to kids because it really I mean it clearly has long-term changes the effects on the default mode network and also you have a reference of how to regulate back into that state so that would be really profound i think that's an amazing idea have you have you noticed any is there measurable effects in the vagus nerve have you noticed anything yeah anything there as we start to wrap up yeah i think the you know the main things we're seeing in terms of the you know potentially vagal engagement is the high frequency heart rate variability shift that we're seeing from pre-float to during the float.

1:24:44And, you know, a lot of the other indicators of parasympathetic tone, like the reduced blood pressure, the reduced muscle tension, the lowered brain waves. So I do think there's going to be at some level vagal involvement. I I think a lot of it is going to come down to the fact that, you know, floating quite reflexively is shutting off all of your sympathetic arousal and shifting the balance of your nervous system into a parasympathetic state. And the vagal nerve obviously plays a big role in this. and you know what i think people don't recognize enough is the vagus nerve is remarkably attuned to respiration and we're lowering respiration when you're floating like we discussed earlier just naturally and when you do it sort of explicitly when you have that goal i'm going to regulate my breath, it turns out you're in such a low metabolic state that you could reduce your breathing rate to a minimal level.

1:25:56I remember once saying, all right, I'm going to only breathe one breath a minute. And I went in to a float environment and I could do that for 30 minutes. I took 30 breaths in 30 minutes. and if you try to do that go ahead try i i dare anybody try to do that in outside of a float environment and you're going to be struggling immensely even after a couple minutes you're going to need more than just a breath but in a float environment you're in the lowest metabolic state that your nervous system may have ever been in and so it turns out that you can modulate respiration in amazing ways when you're floating.

1:26:45That's amazing. I'll have to try that. But I don't, I mean, I spend a lot of time free diving. So I do a lot of apnea and breath holds, but a 30 second out breath or in breath is, that's incredible. Well done. What was that like subjectively? You must have been extremely calm. You are. I think, you know, one breath is quite slow that was hard so i definitely was pushing my limits but very easily three four five breaths a minute very easy and like you said very calm amazing thank you so much i think you're doing incredible work and yeah it's been amazing to to speak to you if if somebody wants to support the amazing work you're doing in Maui or to keep track of what you're doing in future, your future work, where's best to find you, where's best to support you?

1:27:43So I think, you know, the main website for the Maui Calm project is going to be mauicom.org. Our nonprofit also has a website that has a repository of all the peer-reviewed research that we discussed today. And you could find that at clinicalfloat.org. And, you know, I'm not a big social media person, but ever since I moved to Maui, I decided to get on LinkedIn. So you could find me on LinkedIn if you'd like to hear updates about what's happening, some of the research studies that we're going to be conducting, including the Maui Calm Project. And even some of my other work, you were just talking about apnea, but my other line of research is breathwork and carbon dioxide modulation.

1:28:33So I'll have to come back on at a future time to tell you about some of that. But there's also a whole nother line of interesting research that revolves around being able to teach your nervous system how to cope with carbon dioxide. It's not something that's often discussed, but it turns out it's an extremely powerful tool for modulating, once again, your anxiety levels. So this is work that I also focus on and tend to talk about on LinkedIn when it comes up. So yeah, I'd love for people to check it out. We're going to be opening up this summer in Lahaina proper at the brand new Westside YMCA Resource Center.

1:29:20It's a really beautiful, amazing hub that's being built in Lahaina just to help all the fire survivors in Lahaina. And it's going to be a beautiful place of healing. And it's all going to be provided to the community completely free of charge. So I'm so excited to study this and see what happens at scale when you let an entire population in need use this service. I'm extremely excited to track that. And yeah, I really think you're doing incredible work. So please keep it up. It's been a real pleasure to chat to you, Justin. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you, Josh, for everything you're doing to give a voice to this whole underground world of really novel strategies and tools to keep people's nervous system on the cutting edge.

1:30:11And I think that's really what we're trying to do is push the evolution of our species in a much better direction than the trials and tribulations of what's happening right now are pushing. I really do think we're at a crossroads moment for our species right now, actually, this generation. And we have to make a choice which way we're going to go. and I'm quite worried that we're perilously heading towards extinction. But we have this opportunity. We have this opportunity to shift and evolve in a very different way. And these things that we've talked about today and a lot of the other things you're discussing on this podcast have the chance to advance our species in a much better direction than the one where we're currently headed.

1:31:08So thank you for giving a voice to all of this. You're most welcome. And we'd absolutely love to have you back and talk about the carbon dioxide modulation and more of your work in future. That would be amazing. Awesome. Well, so good to be here, Josh. Wishing you the best of luck in everything you do. Thank you so much for listening to the episode. If you enjoyed it, please, if you could give us a like, a subscribe, and hit the notification bell, that would really help us out. or just share this episode with a friend, share the course with a friend. Anything would go such a long way. Thank you so much and I hope to see you soon.