“I try all these life hacks, like cold showers and vitamins and grounding, and I suppose they work, like, I’m happier, but I don’t really drop breadcrumbs.”
What is a hack you’ve yet to try but interests you?
“Sensory-deprivation pods.”
Floating your consciousness away, as it were. Interesting.
I began floating in sensory-deprivation pods a year ago at a local outfit named, fittingly enough, Float. It reminded me of a deep meditation, and I was unsure what lasting effect it might have. Then my wife walked out of her hourlong float and could not contain her glee.
She glowed. She was unable to stop smiling for fully a quarter hour after she finished. We acquired memberships.
I’ve now floated a dozen or so hours, and the sensation remains unique. Weightless in an epsom-salt concentrate whose water is kept at body temperature, without sound or light (and definitely not wanting to taste!), you lose any sense of having a body.
What’s more curious, even, is what your consciousness does.
After 20 minutes, I can no longer tell whether my eyes are open or closed. After 30 minutes, I can no longer distinguish between thoughts and dreams.
There are no rules, of course, and many of us, I suspect more of us than we admit, fall asleep during some part of our hourlong floats. Often the soft music that marks your hour’s end gently wakes you to a thought like: Was I already awake?
While it’s possible ingenious types work through unified field theories in their organically altered states, I find the best thing I can do is relax fully as I might, while floating.