Flow state and the float tank

For thousands of years, people have wondered at the complexity and beauty of the human experience. Theologians and philosophers have strived to explain it for centuries, to contextualise it. Now, thanks to a recent surge in neuroscience studies and technology, we're gaining a deeper and deeper understanding of our own minds.

The experience I'm most interested in is something called flow state — and specifically how it relates to our experiences in the tank. I started learning about this not from some dry scientific urge for knowledge, but because of the possibilities of flow altering my mind and my life.

Altered states

You may or may not have heard of flow states or theta brainwaves. I hadn't really heard of flow, but I was familiar with the timeless, spaceless quality of a good float — which indicates a theta brain state.

So, what is flow?

Flow was described to me as a state of mind in which you perform and feel your best — characterised by increased awareness, peak performance, lateral thinking and a distortion of time.

What's amazing is that it's available to us all. Not only that, it's likely been felt by us all at some point — whether "in the zone" during sport or "in the pocket" playing music. Learning this, I instantly thought of the best moments I had playing hockey in high school: those periods where I was fully in the moment, the gameplay flowing seamlessly and automatically from my body, as if I were just the observer.

Pioneer flow researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi characterised flow by the loss of self-consciousness, a distorted sense of time's passage, and the merging of action and awareness. He also argued that flow is one of the mechanisms that made the evolution of humankind possible — because in flow you're opened up to massive leaps in performance and ability. It's believed this is due to the changes your neurochemistry undergoes in flow, and it remains the object of continued research.

This made total sense to me, recalling the times I'd effortlessly pull something off on the field that I'd struggled to attempt on a good training day. As it turns out, flow is not limited to the sports field or the arts, but is accessible to anyone in the presence of certain triggers. In fact, the highest concentration of flow states is found in high-growth, high-movement professional environments — such as start-ups.

Flow-ting

The most exciting discovery for me as a regular floater was learning that in flow we actually enter a theta brain state. For those not in the know, this is a state in which your brain emits theta waves — as compared to beta waves in times of activity or stress, alpha in concentration, and delta in sleep or rest.

The flow theta state, coincidentally, is identical to the one you enter in a deep float session. If you've heard of or experienced this blissful, timeless state, you'll know theta increases creativity and rests the brain. What was news to me is that we now know why.

It's due to a process called transient hypofrontality, where the prefrontal areas of the brain — responsible for orienting you in space, for "I"-centred or egoic thought, and for awareness of time, among others — quieten down, allowing energy to be redirected to other parts of the brain. This stimulates imagery and the ability to connect distant, unrelated ideas and fields of thought, otherwise known as creativity.

Of course, there are many things you can do to try to enter flow; there's a variety of triggers you can arrange to induce it, and meditation is one of them. But the most consistent way to experience a theta brain state is the floatation tank. It does so by igniting the parasympathetic nervous system — the "rest and digest" response, the body's counter to fight-or-flight. It calms the body down from a state of tension, regulating breathing, heart rate, blood pressure and hormone flow as the body settles into homeostasis. As part of this process, your brain activity calms and you begin to emit theta brainwaves, entering a restful flow state.

— By Camilo