Compared to traditional saunas that use either dry hot rocks or steam by adding water to hot rocks, infrared saunas use light waves to heat up the body directly. The result is cathartic sweating and an increased heart rate, with benefits extended as most find infrared saunas a much more comfortable environment than traditional saunas.
The beginning of a new year is often a time for making plans and inspiring change, but 2021 has just started and already it has a lot of expectations being placed upon it. With the pandemic, 2020 felt like a global “timeout” for a lot of people, so we’ve all had to push things off and are banking on this year being an opportunity for new beginnings.
Paul Selig is a psychic medium whose work is channeled as dictation from spiritual guides that speak to him with the goal of teaching and shepherding humankind into an awakening of our divine nature or true self.
Three misconceptions that hold people back from using this effective form of therapy.
“But what if I’m claustrophobic?”
This is probably the most common fear that stops people from starting. To dispute this concern, let’s look at claustrophobia and floatation tanks.
This is the first of a 3-part blog series dedicated to the new floater. In part 2, we’ll cover preparing for your first float, and in part 3 we’ll discuss the learning curve and accumulating benefits of floating.
As our stress levels increase or as we are chronically in a stressful (fight-or-flight) state our mind's ability to be easily triggered and reactive increases. We may say and think things that we normally wouldn't say or think if we were in a calmer state. Actively practicing stress management can allow us to be a "better" version of ourselves when dealing with others.
by Tom Jacobs
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Everybody knows the standard answer. But newly published research suggests that, after you’ve labored all day in the practice room, you might want to spend an hour in a flotation tank.
Oshin Vartanian of the University of Toronto and Peter Suedfeld of the University of British Columbia report floating in an Epsom salt solution one hour per week for four weeks boosted the technical ability of a group of college music students. This suggests such periods of minimal sensory stimulation can improve performers’ perceptual-motor coordination.
Don’t start filling up the bathtub, however: This experiment, described in the journal Music and Medicine, featured a level of sensory deprivation achievable only in a specially designed tank. The device was invented in the 1950s by neuroscientist John Lilly; in the years since, its use has been linked to improved sports performance and heightened levels of creativity.
But would it work for budding be-boppers? To answer that question, the researchers conducted an experiment using 13 students enrolled in an intermediate-level jazz improvisation course at Vancouver Community College.
Eight of the students — six men and two women — engaged in flotation sessions for four consecutive weeks. They spent an hour each week in a fiberglass shell, floating in a solution of Epsom salts and skin-temperature water. They were in the dark, and outside sounds were muffled.
All the participants — including the other five musicians who comprise the comparison group — made two five-minute-long recordings in which they freely improvised. The first took place one week before the flotation sessions began; the second, one week after the sessions concluded. Each session was rated by the instructor (who was unaware which students were undergoing the treatments) on five dimensions: improvisation, creativity, expressiveness, technical ability and overall quality.
The researchers found “a significant difference between the treatment and comparison groups on technical ability, but not on any other dimension,” the researchers write. Thanks to this enhanced skill level, those who had floated “had significantly higher grades in the jazz improvisation class than the comparison group.”
Vartanian and Suedfeld concede this was a small sample. But they note that, based on their initial recordings, the instructor rated the treatment and comparison groups essentially equal on all five dimensions. Since “The two groups can be considered equivalent in terms of motivation and baseline ability,” the difference in their ability was very likely the result of the flotation sessions.
So why didn’t the treatment group’s creativity scores also rise? The researchers suspect this reflects the one-week lag time between the final flotation session and the second recording.
That was purposeful on their part: They wanted to gauge long-lasting rather than immediate effects. (Previous research found increased creativity in university students after floating sessions measured their abilities immediately after they left the tank and dried off.)
Of course, for a musician, technical expertise can inspire increased creativity, as it gives one the confidence to take risks. So perhaps this boost in skill will lead to higher levels of originality in the long run.
In any event, the results suggest this technique holds considerable promise for musicians in general and jazz artists in particular. As Vartanian and Suedfeld note, flotation isolation “has been shown to induce a state of relaxed alertness, concentration and reduced stress.”
Which is exactly where you want to be when the bandleader gives his cue.
I’m Jacqueline and I have four daughters—the oldest one is six, and the youngest is a ten-month-old. Needless to say, I don’t get a lot of time to myself. In addition to being a mother, I’m a writer, but this solitary activity does not get a lot of focus these days. I write while I watch Bubble Guppies and when I should be in bed, and I write when I should be cleaning, or exercising, or pre-cooking meals for the week. It’s one of the toughest things about parenting for me, that everything I want to do for myself takes time away from something more important. I am surrounded by squirming little people all day long.
When the first humans began to explore the dark crevices of the world, they were the first of us to experience a situation where they could deprive their senses from their harsh daily lives and slip into a mystical experience and reflect inward. Deep within those caverns, animal cults and secret societies emerged, as more complex and abstract ideas were experienced through ecstatic visions (Hayden, 2003). However, our ancestors did not then realize that those visions came from deep within themselves and one of the world's most complicated information processing machines, the human nervous system. We now do know these things and because of this we have developed the psychological and cognitive sciences in order to measure and analyze how we interact with the world around, and inside us, as objectively as possible.
Why would anyone want to deprive their senses? Why would anyone not want to feel anything? Well, simply put, just because you are in a sensory deprivation tank does not mean you don’t feel anything. All you are doing is minimizing the amount of EXTERNAL stimuli coming into your nervous system. So what does your nervous system do? It cranks up the volume. It tries to detect any sort of stimuli and yet still minimal is coming… so what happens?
