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After a four-day solo darkness retreat helped quiet my anxiety, I began seeking other wellness practices. Here’s what I learned.
There is darkness in me. It burbles up when someone cuts me off on the parkway or my flight is delayed and the connection is tight. Sometimes it is so consuming I feel like a balloon inflated by something old and elemental. It is wonderful. The dark makes me calm.
I should explain. After the pandemic, I began to struggle with a waning sense of purpose. I exercised and meditated and spent more time being in nature, which helped, but those were Bandaids over a stubborn wound. Then one night I stumbled upon a reel about a “darkness retreat” called SkyCave Retreats near my home in Oregon that intrigued me. The idea was simple but terrifying: spend four days alone in utter, uninterrupted blackness in a comfortable but small room underground. No light. No screens. No books. No music. No watch. No noise.
Just me.
Participants said the experience had afforded them healthy, new perspectives and reduced their anxiety.
Long story short, about two years ago, I tried it, and emerged feeling like I’d been mentally spring-cleaned. Over my 82 hours in the cave I wept and hallucinated and slowly entered a prolonged dream-like state where I could physically hold memories and emotions and reorganize them like books on a shelf. Among other takeaways, I found room to feel frustration and despair, while never allowing them to consume the space reserved for happiness, too. Purpose, it turned out, was all around me.
A few months ago, I felt myself returning to a more cluttered mental state. I now had a demanding new job, a teenage daughter about to leave the nest, and a budget that didn’t go as far as before. Maybe instead of another solo darkness retreat, all I needed was a smaller, more concentrated dose of alone time.
You’ve probably heard about float tanks or seen one at a spa. These egg-like pods lay flat and open into a shallow pool of water heated to 95 degrees, about the surface temperature of human skin. The water has more than 1,000 pounds of Epsom salt, creating more buoyancy than the Dead Sea, but without curing your skin to jerky. You climb inside, close the lid, and float in a weightless suspension where sound, light, and touch slip away until you become nothing but a heart beat and breath. You do this for an hour. Some call these pods “sensory deprivation tanks” but that’s not right at all. Sensory awareness is more like it.
Locating a pod wasn’t difficult. Dr. Justin Feinstein, a Hawai’i-based clinical neuropsychologist who studies the benefits of floating on the brain, estimates there are now upwards of 500 floating facilities across the country. My city, Bend, Oregon, population 106,000, is going through something of a wellness boom with guided sound and forest bathing experiences, a psilocybin retreat, three ketamine-assisted therapy practices, and at least five facilities dedicated to contrast therapy that have opened in the past few years, including one, ChillWell, that has two float pods. I booked a 60-minute session for $69.
When it was time to enter the pod, I slipped into the water and waited. The water felt silky and supportive, but the urge to hold my face up strained my neck, so I placed a foam donut-shape pillow under my head for extra float. I could see nothing, which tempered the feelings of claustrophobia that some people experience. Unable to orientate myself, the slightest drift induced vertigo, like when a plane banks with all the cabin windows closed.
Soon my body melted away, leaving only the rush of my breath and the slow metronome of my heart. Just like in the darnkess cave, the snarling machine gun of thoughts—unanswered emails, to-dos, and angst about my 17 year old’s plans to travel the world alone—slowly fell silent. A warm and bottomless, thoughtless peace filled the void.
That’s common, it turns out. “How good it felt to not do anything but be relaxed,” my friend and writer Matthew Wastradowski wrote to me after his own floating experience. “The pains of a recent break-up, unresolved family drama, pressures at work: it all faded and showed me a healthy, workable way forward that I might never have found on my own.”
It’s that level of clarity that compelled Feinstein, who earned his Ph.D at the University of Iowa, to create the Float Research Collective, a nonprofit that seeks to establish floating as an accepted, accessible medical treatment that could be prescribed and covered by insurance. Now living in Maui, Feinstein and his team have engineered the world’s first mobile float facility to offer free float sessions to those traumatized by the island’s 2023 wildfires.
“We have a very small population and essentially no mental health infrastructure for a crisis of this magnitude,” he told me. “People don’t have other ways and natural solutions to overcome the extreme trauma they’ve been through.”
Floating, he believes, can help. Erasing the constant pestering of gravity and reducing touch stimuli to a near uniform thermoneutral state allows your body to relax in a way that no massage or mediation session can accomplish, he says. Remove the noise and glare from the outside world and your body’s “default mode network,” the one that’s constantly processing internal chatter when we aren’t focused on a task, undergoes a remarkable shift. Blood pressure drops. Breathing rates slow. Positive emotions surge, such as intense joy, heightened energy, and a deep appreciation for life. That’s especially true for anxious people whose networks are often “hyperconnected,” Feinstein adds.
He has data to back that up, with 75 percent of his clinically anxious and depressed participants feeling more relaxed after floating than any other therapeutic technique they had ever tried in the past. Happy, healthy people benefit, too. A Swedish psychologist, Anette Kjellgren, at the Human Performance Laboratory at Karlstad University, found that floating can significantly increase feelings of optimism and naturally induce beneficial altered states of consciousness, a phenomenon Feinstein calls “aquahenosis” that can lead to profound moments of clarity. Best of all, Feinstein found the effects can linger for up to 48 hours. Call it a post-float glow.
“We always think people are anxious because it’s all in their head,” Feinstein says. “That’s not true. There are big, basic physiological disruptions that are happening in the body that we interpret as anxiety.” Floating, he says, unplugs that default mode network to offer us a highly rewarding break. “It’s a reset button.”
As for me in the pod, my body and mind as warm and relaxed as sourdough, I drifted into that wonderful altered state that felt like the realest dream ever. I believe in empirical science, but someone or something intangible paid me a visit and guided me to feelings of wonder and awe. Underwater speakers played gentle music, bringing me back and signaling the hour was up. A mistake, surely. It’d felt like ten minutes.
Feinstein had encouraged me to do everything at half pace after the float. “You don’t want to reintroduce the world full-tilt boogie right away,” he’d counseled. I showered and dressed slowly, feeling as calm and relaxed as I’d been in months. Now, a week later, I still feel that glow.
Then, the plumber called to say our broken line would cost thousands of dollars to replace. Vacation plans: vaporized. My reaction?
Meh.
Read the original article on Travel & Leisure
