I can’t turn off my stupid brain.
It’s always going. Chasing rabbit trails. Playing out insane scenarios. Thinking about ways that the Rangers can somehow make the playoffs this year. Most of the time it’s banal things, but sometimes, and increasingly as I’ve gotten older, it’s veered apocalyptic in nature. I’ll imagine disastrous scenarios involving myself or my family.
I think that’s called anxiety.
But we’re not here for a psychological diagnosis. We’re here to talk about how I tried to just turn my brain off for at least one hour.
Whenever I try to do mindfulness activities, like meditation, I find that I’ll spend most of the time trying not to think about anything and failing. They say you shouldn’t close your eyes, but instead focus on something in the middle distance. I tried to do 10 minutes of meditation in my office one time. I focused on the middle distance out the window. In the middle distance was an American flag. Five minutes later I was deep in thought about who decides whether flags should fly half-mast. What’s the threshold for it? When did this tradition start? Who was the first person to get a half-mast treatment? Should I get a flagpole? What kind of flag would I put on it?
Essentially what I realized is that any stimulus could throw off my attempt at mindfulness. Anything and everything can send me down a long trail of thought. This isn’t just a problem while I’m trying to meditate or relax. It’s a big issue while I’m trying to work, especially while doing tasks I don’t want to do. I needed to try something new to see if I could truly turn off my brain.
Sensory deprivation is fast becoming a go-to therapy for people like me. If the phrase “sensory deprivation” sounds terrifying, then you’re probably one of the people who could use it. I have long been curious about the idea, but too scared to try it myself.
But Trial & Error is about doing those things that scare me. So I emailed Ray Thoma, owner of Frisco’s The Float Spot, to see if I could come try out his sensory deprivation float pods. He enthusiastically agreed. He was extremely confident that I would love the experience. I wasn’t so sure.
Float therapy was developed in 1954 but has really only found significant popularity in the US recent years. Essentially it’s a tank of water that is pumped so full of epsom salt that your body physically cannot sink in. It’s like a miniature version of the Dead Sea. You get in, close the top, turn the light off, and lay your head back and relax.
Sounds easy right?
If that all seems perfectly normal and reasonable to you then you’d be great at floating. For me, that sounds pretty terrifying. For one, I am claustrophobic. Two, I am scared of the thoughts in my own head, and three, did I mention you do this in the nude?
You know, just three of my biggest fears wrapped up into one experience. Which just means that I had to try it out.
After a three-week delay due to my broken elbow and badly skinned knee (Ray said the epsom salt would “burn like hell” if it got in a cut), I headed over to Frisco to try to sink, I mean float, into oblivion. Though I had my reservations, it was actually a really great time to try it out. If I could truly relax it would help relieve a lot of the stresses that I had going on in my life over the previous few weeks.
Ray included an aqua massage before the float to help me truly get in the state of relaxation. The lady working the counter, Crystal, did an amazing job of explaining everything to me and making me feel comfortable. I was so excited about the aqua massage that I hadn’t even considered that it could cause me some discomfort. That is, until I saw the way the pod actually worked. You lay face down and this big machine closes in around your body and then pummels you with high pressure water.
“So if you don’t like it you can press this yellow button to stop the machine and raise it up,” Crystal told me.
Oh cool, a panic button. Suddenly I realized just how claustrophobic this machine could be. I “bravely” laid down in it, put my face in the horseshoe pillow thing and prepared my mind for the closing down of the machine. Fortunately your arms and head are totally out of the tube. If this wasn’t the case I wouldn’t have gotten in. It briefly reminded me of an MRI tube, which is literally my worst nightmare. Like, something I cannot physically do without a valium.
For the first five minutes every time I would try to relax I’d have to immediately lift my head up and look around the room to remind myself that everything was fine. Eventually I did relax and let the massage work. And it really did feel good. It wasn’t as good as a normal massage, but it was a cool and unique experience and helped my muscles get to a state of relaxation before my float.
Now it was time for the thing I was really worried about. We headed to the float pod room and Crystal explained the whole experience to me. She gave me some amazingly helpful advice. Floating is such an odd experience that your body literally cannot physically adjust to some of it. The big thing Crystal emphasized was relaxing your head. It’s an uncomfortable experience if you can’t get your head to lay back, but often that’s a challenge. So she taught me to put my hands behind my head to aid in laying it back. After those instructions, she left and it was time to get in the pod. There are showers in each room for you to shower off first before slipping into the pod.
She said I was free to lock the door or keep it unlocked. This led to a dilemma. Do I lock it and make myself feel more comfortable being nude in strange room with no senses about me or do I keep it unlocked so that in the incredibly unlikely scenario that something goes wrong they could come in and help? Of course, I am certain in emergency situations they have a way to get in a room if the door is locked. So, I locked it. But I wasn’t sure I made the right decision. Here I was overthinking everything, even in a situation where I’m supposed to be relaxing.
I showered off and slid into the pod. You can keep the top open if you’d like. But I wanted to do this thing right. So I pulled it down. With my ear plugs in and my eyes closed, I tried to lay back and begin my relaxation. Pretty quickly I realized one thing that would become an issue throughout the hour I was in there: I am too tall.
The pod is eight feet long. I am 6’4” and with my toes pointed down and my arms above my head I probably take up about 6’9” of space. That leaves only about seven inches on each side between the wall and my hands and feet. As you float you move a little bit, which meant that more than once as I tried to relax my head gently hit the wall. Once I figured out how to deal with that, mostly keeping my arms above my head to touch the wall first, I started to kind of enjoy the situation.
I didn’t feel any claustrophobia at all. In fact, I started to really enjoy the experience. Though I spent a ton of time trying to find a relaxing way to situate my body, I could understand exactly why people swear by floating as a way to turn off from the stresses of life. Normally I would be checking my phone, mindlessly scrolling Instagram or Twitter, or listening to a podcast or music. I’d do anything to avoid having to sit there with my own thoughts. But here I was forced to do so. Crystal gave me some great advice about how to deal with an overactive mind. Instead of focusing on trying not to think about the random thoughts that popped in my head, just let them go. Follow the rabbit trail as far as it takes me. The effort to stop these annoying thoughts would prevent me from relaxing. Letting them happen would at least eliminate the internal fighting.
So that’s what I did. I thought about so much in that hour. But, I can’t tell you what any of it was. I know that I wasn’t totally relaxed. I know that I didn’t experience the REM-like feeling that many say they get while floating. I felt every single minute of the hour that I was in there. It was still nice to not spend the entire time fighting with my own brain.
And I never got my dang head to relax. I tried everything, but my neck muscles stayed tensed up. At one point I tried to force my head further back than I wanted to go and I got some water in my eye. Water with 1,100 pounds of epsom salt in it is…not great for your eye. I scrambled around for the fresh water bottle they supply in the tank to spay the salt of of my eye. Eventually I found it and got it all cleared. Needless to say, it took a little bit to reset my relaxation afterwards.
Despite all of that, I deeply enjoyed the experience. It was such a unique way to spend an hour. I’ve never tried anything else like it. It has to be the closest thing on earth to the weightlessness of space. I was moving my body in ways that it has never been moved. I was able to completely forget about work and life. I prayed for people and things that I hadn’t found time to pray for in a long time. When it was over I was both ready to get out and ready to try it all again.
Crystal said that most first-timers struggle to relax, but when they come back for a second time they fall right into the state of relaxation they were fighting for last time. She described it as a muscle memory thing. Your body will know what to do the next time. If I go back I will update this to see if that’s true. One thing she, and Ray, guaranteed me was that I would sleep well that night. The epsom salts were absorbed into my body which aids in muscle and mental relaxation. Even if I was unable to truly turn off in the pod, I would more easily turn off that night.
They were right. I slept really well. Most nights I take a while to fall asleep, but that night I went right to bed. Though the whole experience didn’t help me to turn my stupid brain completely off, it should be a path forward for doing so. That hour of relaxation earlier in the day paid dividends later at night. It’s a sign that I should be incorporating more of these kinds of experiences and practices in my day. I don’t have a large pod full of epsom salt in my house (yet), but I can spend the hour before I go to sleep relaxing like this. I should put my phone away, take a long shower or bath, read a book, and stop thinking about things for a while. Maybe one day I will finally defeat my stupid brain.
Thanks for tagging along for another edition of Trial & Error. I am absolutely buzzing about next month’s issue already. I’ll be doing something I’ve always wanted to do. And, of course, I’m also terrified of it.
Please share this post with friends who might be float-curious. And tell me in the comments if you’ve ever tried this. I’d love to hear about other people’s experiences.
Hiking for more than two days does a strange thing to my brain. My thoughts just start floating here, there, not in sudden jerky movements, but floating. I’ll find myself thinking of something that happened in second grade, something I don’t know if I had ever thought of since it happened. Really cool and odd and, I think, good. Not like floating therapy exactly, but maybe along the same lines.
Good article, Scott. Thanks for writing it.