Sport Psychology Tactics - Why Float REST Tanks Help Athlete Mental Recovery
About the Author
Ben Foodman is a licensed psychotherapist & performance specialist. He owns his private practice located in Charlotte North Carolina where he specializes in working with athletes to help them overcome mental blocks (the yips), PTSD, ADD / ADHD and achieve flow states through the techniques of Brainspotting & Neurofeedback. If you are interested in services, use the link here! Enjoy the article below!
Table Of Contents
Introduction: Why Sport Psychologists Send Athletes To Float Tanks For Mental Performance
Athletes are looking for the new and advanced methods to help advance their psychological performance. Oftentimes they will turn to sport psychologists or mental coaches to help them gain an edge over their competition. These professionals will often use sport psychology methods such as Neurofeedback, Biofeedback, EMDR and/or Brainspotting to help athletes enhance their psychological performance outcomes. But there is a tool that athletes can use outside of consulting with sport psychologists: float tanks.
I have previously talked about how float tanks help athletes enhance their mental performance, but I want to use this issue of the Training Report to take a deeper dive into this tool and how it can be a game changer for elite performers. In part I. I will first review why sport psychologists and mental coaches would refer athletes to float tanks, in part II. I will explore the neuroscience of how float tanks help athletes, and in Part III. I will discuss how athletes can incorporate this into their mental training. Let’s begin by reviewing why athletes should use this tool.
Part I. Why Sport Psychologists & Mental Coaches Refer Athletes To Float Tanks
Most athletes (and non-athlete populations) are seriously unaware about how much work our brain does on an unconscious level trying to assess where we are in our environment. This is because our brains are constantly trying to make sure our boundaries are being maintained. By boundaries, I am referring to where our body ends and where the world begins. In the book The Body Bears the Burden by Robert Scaer, the author explains in beautiful detail how human boundary processing works in the following excerpt: All of our senses-smell, vision, hearing, vestibular input, taste, touch, nociception (sense of pain) and proprioception (sense of joint motion) - contribute to the formation of these boundaries that eventually tell us where we end as a perceptual entity, and where the rest of the world begins. Our unconscious awareness of these boundaries allows us to move about in the world without literally impacting obstacles that are not part of our own self. We receive positive or negative information as a developing infant and child from sensory experiences that contribute to our unconscious perception of our safe boundaries. Painful or unpleasant feedback leads us to avoid moving beyond the boundary created by that experience, where as positive feedback stimulates us to explore the area within that expanded boundary more. So what exactly does this concept of boundaries have to do with athletes and float tanks?
Many sport psychologists who utilize a trauma-informed background will regularly send athletes to float tanks because they have constantly had their boundaries tested through the stressors of sports competition. Let’s take a baseball player as an example. Baseball players are constantly dealing with the stress of a baseball flying at their head over and over throughout a game. It is also very common for baseball players to be hit with a baseball or to see others hit with a baseball. There is also quite a bit of physical contact in baseball (e.g. when a baseball player slides into home plate). Baseball players are also having to put excessive force on their bodies when they are making long throws or at bat trying to hit the ball out of the park. There is also the sociological pressure that baseball players are constantly under. They frequently experience psychological abuse at the hands of their coaches or opposing fans and players. All of these examples are boundary testing experiences. These boundary testing experiences can put the baseball player under so much stress, that their autonomic nervous system can be retrained from a normal healthy baseline, to being in more of a sympathetic nervous system state.
We see the result of boundary testing clearly when we review the book The Body Keeps The Score, by Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk. The author gives us a glimpse into the psychological process that happens during boundary testing: the emotional brain has first dibs on interpreting incoming information. Sensory information about the environment and body state received by the eyes, ears, touch, kinesthetic sense, etc. converges on the thalamus where it is processed and then passed on to the amygdala to interpret its emotional significance. This occurs with lightning speed. If a threat is detected, the amygdala sends messages to the hypothalamus to secrete stress hormones to defend against that threat. The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls this the low road. The second neural pathway, the high road, runs from the thalamus via the hippocampus and anterior cingulate, to the prefrontal cortex, the rational brain, for a conscious and much more refined interpretation. This takes several microseconds longer. If the interpretation of threat by the amygdala is too intense, and/or the filtering system from the higher areas of the brain are too weak, as often happens in PTSD, people lose control over automatic emergency response, like prolonged startle or aggressive outbursts. So the obvious question many people may be asking, is why would float tanks help baseball players (and other athlete populations) improve their autonomic nervous system states and counteract trauma symptoms?
Part II. The Neuroscience Behind Float Tanks & Athlete Mental Performance
When trying to understand how float tanks help athletes improve their mental performance, the first place we have to start is by understanding the significance of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Historically, sport psychologists have for the most part understood the connection between the ANS and athletes. But other human performance professionals have begun to significantly emphasize the importance of including ANS training into their programming. In the book The Book Of Floating, Exploring The Private Sea by Michael Hutchison, the author provides an example of how being in a parasympathetic state can produce a critical brainwave called Theta for performance and recovery: Biofeedback expert Thomas Budzynski, clinical director of the Biofeedback Institute of Denver and professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado Medical Center, is currently doing research involving the measurement by EEG of the brain during hypnosis. He has concluded that float tanks increase the production of theta waves, and believes that this has great potential for opening the mind to learning. ‘We take advantage of the fact that the hypnagogic state, the twilight state, between waking and sleep, has these properties of uncritical acceptance of verbal material, or almost any material it can process. What if you could cause a person to sustain that state, and not fall asleep? I believe flotation tanks are an ideal medium for doing that’. Budzynski’s observation that the tank is ideal for maintaining wakefulness while in theta is supported by almost everyone who has done work in the area of sensory deprivation.
The author continues: When defining Theta, we see that with this brainwave frequency, as calmness and relaxation deepen into drowsiness, the brain shifts to slower, more powerfully rhythmic waves with a frequency of about 4-7 HZ. Everyone generates these theta waves at least twice per day: in those fleeting instants when we drift from conscious drowsiness into sleep, and again when we rise from sleep to consciousness as we awaken. The theta state is accompanied by unexpected, unpredictable, dreamlike but very vivid mental images (known as hypnagogic images). Often these startlingly real images are accompanied by intense memories, particularly childhood memories. Theta offers access to unconscious material, reverie, free association, sudden insight, creative inspiration. When we consider what most athletes need to enhance mental performance, it becomes easier to make the necessary connection between athletes, float tanks, and performance enhancement outcomes. Several important points come to mind when we review this excerpt. First, producing more theta waves can potentially increase the likelihood that athletes enter what is referred to as flow states. Second, it is conceivable that theta states can enhance the learning process which is critical for athletes that are trying to encode both physical training and tactical training into their memory stores. Finally, when we are in sleep states we are also in a recovery state. Most athletes on a regular basis experience high amounts of stress that have a negative impact on the body. Because of this, athletes will need access to tools that can potentially help speed up recovery, and research seems to suggest that float tanks can help with this process. So how can athletes integrate this into their training?
Part III. Athlete Mental Training & Float Tank Therapy
Regardless of the level that athletes compete at, all performers need to be regularly engaged in some form of mental training to enhance their overall mental performance outcomes. Because the very nature of sports is meant to induce stress upon the body and mind, athletes will need to take counter-measures to help reduce the negative outcomes that sports can have on performers. There are varying degrees of research that provide different recommendations for frequency of float-tank use, but from what I have seen if athletes can incorporate 1-2 floats per week on a weekly basis, this can have a significant effect on recovery and performance outcomes. But athletes will need to take other considerations into account if they decide to use the float tanks.
For instance, athletes will be better served using the float tanks after heavy workload training sessions or intense sport performance experiences. It will be important to counteract the negative side effects of these experiences, and if athletes can induce a higher intensity and frequency of parasympathetic nervous system states after these events, they will be able to leverage their body’s self-healing capacity in a more effective way. Athletes can also enhance float tank recovery outcomes by practicing other mental skills such as deep breathing exercises. Because float tanks have become so popular, most athletes will be able to find them nearby. If athletes need an example of a high quality facility for a reference point, check out Still Point Wellness, located in Asheville North Carolina.
Note To Reader:
If you are an athlete reading this segment of the TRAINING REPORT, hopefully this content was helpful! I put the Training Report together because I felt like many of the discussions on issues such as the Yips/mental blocks, strength training & other subject matter on athlete performance concepts were really missing the mark on these ideas (e.g. how trauma is the direct cause of the Yips). If you are interested in learning more, make sure to subscribe below for when I put out new content on issues related to sport psychology & athlete performance! Also, if you are looking to work with a mental performance specialist, you are in the right place! USE THIS LINK to reach out to me to see if my services are the right fit for your goals!
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