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Floatation offers a
relatively stress-free environment in which to escape
temporarily from stressful external stimuli and free your
system from its chronic state of arousal. This makes it a
useful and life enhancing tool. But if that were all it did,
floatation would be essentially a passive tool, and entering
a tank would be little different from sitting quietly in a
dark room. While the absence of stress is desirable in
itself, it doesn't necessarily bring about the presence of
its opposite, relaxation.
Floatation goes far
beyond the passive. Scientists have now proven that floating
activates a physiological response that is parallel to, and
as powerful as, the stressful one of fight or flight. This
response mobilizes the body's resources to bring about an
active, alert, positive, and beneficial state of
relaxation.
The idea of alleviating
psychosomatic disorders by breaking the vicious cycle of
stress and stress-reaction brings us to the floatation tank.
While the stress relief of the tank works on a number of
levels simultaneously, one obvious fact is that entering the
floatation tank removes you from most stressors, both the
primary stressor and secondary environmental stresses. In
the tank there is no noise, no light, no other people,
nothing to do, and nothing that needs to be or can be done.
Like that time after the fight of the near accident, when
you needed someplace just to sit and wind down, the tank is
the perfect recovery-from-stress spot. There, with no
possible threat from the outside world, your body slows
down, the flood of chemicals that has jangled your nerves is
eliminated, and your body chemistry returns to normal. And
just as when, after some stressful moment, your heightened
arousal gives way to a feeling of deep calmness, so in the
tank the deepening relaxation of your body and brain is
perceived as a delicious sensation of peace, well-being,
exhilaration: I have survived and I am alive!
We all know what stress
is. Though we might not be able to explain the physiological
process, we're quite clear about our feelings. We talk about
sweaty palms, chills down the spine, quivering like a leaf,
getting cold feet, being tight-assed, having butterflies in
the stomach, or receiving a shot of adrenaline. Many use
these phrases with the belief that they're just figures of
speech, apt cliches, not realizing that they are describing
with poetic exactness very real physiological processes, all
if which are part of an unconscious, reflective reaction to
stress known as the flight-or-flight response.
© Michael Hutchinson "The
Book Of Floating"
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