Do you remember the scene in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” where Jason Segal tries to learn how to surf?
If you haven’t seen the movie, here’s a quick breakdown: Jason Segal’s character Peter Brenner gets dumped by his famous TV-star girlfriend. Then he tries to get over the breakup by going on a solo vacation to one of those over-the-top resorts in Hawaii, only to find that his ex-girlfriend is also staying at the same resort with her new boyfriend, a rockstar played by Russel Brand. It’s one of those unremarkable movies with unforgettable one-liners that you remember forever.
I will never forget the scene where Peter gets a surf lesson from Paul Rudd’s character, whose “mainland name” is Chuck but calls himself by his “Hawaiian name”, Kunu.
Before they paddle out into the water, Kunu tries to teach Peter the basic surfing technique known as “popping up”. So they put the board on the sand and Peter lays down on it.
“Don’t do anything,” Kunu says, “Don’t try to surf… Don’t do anything, don’t do it. The less you do, the more you do.”
Then he tells Peter to “pop up” onto his feet, and Peter jumps up and stands on the board with both feet next to each other. You know, exactly how you should not stand up on a surfboard.
“That’s not it at all,” Kunu says, “Do less. Try less. Do it again.”
Then Peter tries to stand up again, this time a little slower.
“Nope. Too slow. Do less.” Kunu says. “Pop up.”
Now completely confused, Peter tries to stand up again.
“Nope, you’re doing too much, try again,” Kunu says.
Peter tries twice more while Kunu tells him to do better but also do less.
Finally, Kunu says “Remember, don’t do anything. NOTHING! Okay, pop up now!”
Then Peter just lies on the board, doing nothing. And they both give up on the “popping up” portion of the lesson.
I’ve always known that meditation could have a lot of positive benefits for my mental health and mental performance. But in the past, whenever I’ve tried to do it consistently, I’ve felt a lot like Peter in the surfing scene in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”. I’ve been wrestling with my intention to get some sort of result out of meditation–like increased relaxation, improved focus or mental clarity–with the overall process of meditation which involves doing and thinking absolutely nothing. How do you do something that requires doing nothing?
Mindfulness and meditation, or “mindful meditation” are words that get thrown around a lot these days by therapists and wellness types. It can be challenging to pin down one narrow definition of meditation. In fact, the Mirriam-Webster dictionary has multiple. The National Center for Integrative Health, says the term meditation refers to “a variety of practices that focus on mind and body integration and are used to calm the mind and enhance overall well-being”. To me that seems a little superficial. So far, I’m over three weeks into my meditation practice–I know, still a novice… but I’ve already found that meditation can be a deep and mystical journey.
My fascination with meditation started three weeks ago when I was laying in complete darkness, bare naked, and floating in 2000 pounds of salt dissolved into a tank of water.
I first heard about sensory deprivation tanks, or float tanks, in 2017 from an old strength training coach who raved about their physical benefits. After doing a little research, I was captivated by them, not only because they can be great for treating physical soreness but also because some people have reported some pretty intense mental experiences while floating.
If you’re not familiar with float tanks, they’re basically giant pods filled with water and a ton of Epsom salt. When you lay down in the tank, you’re in complete darkness and the saltwater is heated precisely to your body temperature. The water is so dense that you float, and since the water temperature matches your skin and you can’t see anything, you get the sense of being in the womb. You feel absolutely nothing and can almost lose any connection to your physical body, hence the term “sensory deprivation”.
This Christmas, after hearing me talk about how much I wanted to try float tanks, my mom gave me, and my fiancée Noa, a gift card for an hour-long float session at a float spa in Houston. Finally, after five years, I was going to go on a little journey into the abyss.
I was both excited and pretty skeptical but wanted to keep an open mind. I had read a lot of overly-positive reviews about float tanks, even that some people had experienced hallucinations or “opened their third eye” as one woman on Yelp put it. Still, I was almost more interested in the mental experience of floating than the physical.
When Noa and I got to the float spa, we had to watch a short introduction video explaining how floating worked. Each of us would get our own room with our own pod. We could control the lights, keep the pod open or closed, choose to play music or lay in silence, etc. The video then explained a breathing exercise that we could do while in the pod to help our bodies relax. I think the exercise was something like a 5-second inhale, a 5-second breath-hold at the top, and a 7-to-10-second exhale with a 5-second hold at the bottom. I don’t remember the specifics because I sort of equated it to box breathing, which I had used in the past as a tool to cool down after intense workouts. It involves equal inhales, holds, and exhales. So for example, box breathing can be a 4-second inhale, 4-second hold at the top, 4-second exhale, 4-second hold, and repeat.
I’ll admit, I’ve dealt with stress and anxiety for as long as I can remember. My thoughts have a tendency to pick up speed like a runaway truck. Sometimes, I have a hard time finding the brakes. Lately, I’ve done a better job managing my mind on most days and have found habits and routines that help me feel good, sometimes even great. But the day of our float tank appointment was not one of those days.
When I stepped into my tank I was feeling particularly antsy and I was hoping the tank would have an immediate calming effect. I dove in headfirst, metaphorically speaking. While we had the option to leave the lights on and play music. I chose to close the pod, turn off the lights and keep the music off.
“Do nothing,” I thought to myself, picturing Peter and Kunu on the beach.
At first, I was resistant to the breathing exercise. I just wanted to settle in and relax. I wanted to meditate passively, but I quickly found this to be extremely challenging. Just like my failed attempts at meditating in the past, I found that if I was feeling stress or anxiety, then sitting completely still, alone with my thoughts, would turn up the volume on my negative thoughts.
If I’m overwhelmed, then why is doing nothing the solution? That’s how I rationalized it. Anyway, sitting in complete darkness by myself made me fidgety. I tried to stay as still as possible, but the relaxation just wouldn’t come. Physically, the float tank was a truly unique experience. I mean I felt nothing. But, my mind wouldn’t cooperate. My thoughts were still a truck racing downhill.
I had no sense of time but it felt like almost 30 minutes had passed when I started to feel worried that I was going to float for an entire hour and feel no mental improvements. I mean, I wasn’t expecting to go on some hallucinatory life-changing trip, but it would be nice to feel something!
Then I felt an itch on my right eyelid. Without thinking, I reached up to rub it with my salt-soaked right hand. I immediately felt a burning sensation and snapped right back into my body. My eye burned like hell.
Luckily, I wasn’t the first doofus that did this to himself in a float tank. The spa had a spray bottle inside the tank. So I flicked on the light and sprayed myself frantically in the eye with fresh water. After a few minutes, the burning dissipated.
I turned off the light again, put the spray bottle back and laid back down. I pretty much gave up on my goal of feeling relaxed and just decided to float with no expectations.
“Might as well try the breathing exercise,” I thought.
I don’t know why I was so reluctant to do the breathing exercise at first. I guess it was because focusing on something like breathing rhythmically feels like too much work when all I want to do is relax and do nothing. Either way, I’m glad I tried it.
I decided to go with box breathing since I couldn’t remember the breath count of the suggested breathing exercise. So I began counting. Inhale…1…2…3…4. Hold… 1…2…3…4. Exhale… 1…2…3…4 and so on.
After a while, I fell into a rhythm and stopped counting in my head. Then something wonderful happened. Look, I’m not here claiming I had some inexplicable supernatural experience in the float tank, but I did get a hint of what my mind is capable of.
As my breath settled into this ‘box’ cadence, I started to feel the tension in my body dissolve. My back loosened even more. The tension in my chest melted away. Maybe it was just the salt, or maybe it was the breathing, who knows. But after what I would guess was about 15 minutes of box breathing, my mind started wandering.
I didn’t hallucinate. My eyes were closed. But every time I took a breath I would envision a beach, not just a beach, but a beach near my parents’ house in Florida that we would often go to. When I would breathe in slowly, a slow breeze would be blowing the palm trees and I could hear birds and the sound of the ocean lightly lapping the shore. Then, when I would breathe out, the scene would drastically change. It was the same beach, but instead of a light breeze, it was getting obliterated by hurricane-force winds. There were storm clouds and waves crashing against the beach. The palm trees were blown over, nearly tearing out of the ground. The most unsettling part of it all was that I felt like I could actually hear the wind howling. In fact, it sounded like my own exhales were the wind.
It was a wild dichotomy. Four seconds of peace and tranquility. Then four seconds of nothing. Set change. And, four seconds of fury. And repeat.
I remembered listening to a podcast with Stanford neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman where he explains breathing techniques to help reduce stress and anxiety. His rule of thumb is essentially that longer exhales than inhales equals less physiological arousal. In other words, a 4-second inhale with a 7-second exhale would calm you down. Whereas, vice versa, a 7-second inhale with a 4-second exhale might pump you up, or if you're anxious, there’s a chance it will make you more anxious.
So, when I was deep into box breathing and weird visions, I decided to lengthen my exhales even more.
The hurricanes I was imagining with each exhale became even more intense. The vision was so clear. But, I wasn’t afraid or anxious. I was actually deeply relaxed as if I were in some kind of trance, witnessing the scene as if detached from it. It was hypnotic, sublimely peaceful. I wanted more of it, but before I could dive deeper into the vision, music started playing, music that indicated the end of the float session. I stepped out of my float pod, uber-relaxed and unsure if it was safe for me to operate a vehicle when I left.
Over the next few days, I thought about my experience. The complete release and total relaxation that happened in the last thirty minutes of my float were immaculate. But why did it take me so long to get into that state of deep rest?
Coincidentally, the aforementioned Stanford neuroscientist, Dr. Andrew Huberman, recently co-authored a study published in Cell Reports Medicine, which compared deliberate breathwork with more passive ‘mindfulness meditation’. This might help explain why my intentional breathing helped me feel way more relaxed than just sitting there trying to will myself into nothingness.
In the randomized controlled study, 111 participants were given one of four different five-minute exercises to perform every day for one month. The control group–24 participants–performed passive mindfulness meditation with no intentional breathwork for five minutes a day. Another 30 participants practiced five minutes of cyclic sighing, which is a double inhale and a long exhale. In other words, you inhale for one second, pause, and inhale again, then take a long exhale. 24 participants practiced box breathing, the same kind of breathing I was trying in the float tank. Lastly, 33 participants practiced cyclic hyperventilation. This does not sound relaxing… It involves a 2-second inhale and 1-second exhale, thirty times in a row, and then a 15-second breath hold. This breathing practice has been popularized by the Wim Hoff method and has been shown to trigger physiological arousal and even adrenaline. It’s basically the kind of breathing you’d want to do if you were about to swim in the arctic without a shirt.
Anyway, the researchers recorded the participants’ subjective experience like their mood and anxiety levels as well as their physiological responses like respiratory rate, heart rate, and heart rate variability.
So what did they find? Well, in a nutshell, that meditation in any form is pretty good. Ninety percent of the participants said they had a positive experience and most showed improvements in mood. However, the study also showed that “breathwork produces greater improvement in mood and reduction in respiratory rate, while both (breathwork and meditation) result in reduction in negative emotion including state anxiety.”
The study found that people who participated in breathwork for five minutes a day for thirty days showed a significant reduction in respiratory rate, which might not seem like a big deal. But they also found that those who experienced the greatest reduction in respiratory rate also showed the greatest increase in “positive affect” over the course of the study. This basically means that the participants with the lower respiratory rate felt better. The study found that of all the breathwork practices, cyclic sighing was the most effective at improving mood and reducing respiratory rate. Of course, this was a study conducted over a month and my time in the tank was less than an hour. But still, this might be why when I increased the duration of my exhales in the float tank, I started to feel increasingly more relaxed. I wasn’t exactly doing textbook cyclic sighs, but my short inhales, short breath holds, and long exhales were pretty close.
So what am I saying with all this? Basically what I learned in the float tank is that you cannot be like Peter on the surfboard. A lot of people talk about meditation like Kunu talks about surfing. You know, ‘just do nothing’. But from my experience, you cannot surf while doing nothing. Sure, once you’re up on the wave, then you can relax your body and go with the rhythm of the wave. But standing on the wave requires some effort. Likewise, getting the full benefits of meditation requires some deliberate action.
For one, you have to schedule time for meditation. In my experience, having it on my daily schedule makes it easier to actually do it. Second, once actually engaged in meditation, I’ve found that starting with deliberate breathwork makes the meditation generally better.
Since my float tank experience, I’ve been trying to practice meditation three to four times a week. I felt like I had a small taste of a deeply spiritual experience while box breathing in the float tank. Now, I want to explore meditation further and see where it leads.
One night I decided to try a yoga nidra meditation. I’m not super familiar with the traditional aspects of yoga nidra, but I have heard it can help improve sleep. So, I found a guided yoga nidra recording online and threw it on before bed. It was 40 minutes long, but I figured I’d just fall asleep if I got bored. I started by doing deliberate breathwork and paying close attention to my breathing. After about twenty minutes of cyclical breathing, I fell into a trance similar to what I felt while in the float tank. My eyes were closed but it was almost like I could see what I was envisioning in crystal clear resolution. My mind was firing with all sorts of crazy visions but I felt totally relaxed and lost in them. The most striking part was that there was almost no ‘inner voice’. There was no dialogue in my head. In other words, I wasn’t really thinking, at least not in the normal sense.
I am by no means a meditation expert, I’ve only barely touched the tip of the meditation iceberg. But so far, my experience has been a spiritual and mental journey full of small but meaningful discoveries. Not every meditation is good, or necessarily effective, but the more I practice the better I feel in general.
Sometimes, I feel completely overwhelmed by life and tasks that seem to be flying around me like a tornado. Things can get out of control. If I sit down to meditate passively and do nothing, I generally feel like I’m getting swept up into the tornado. Yes, sometimes mindfulness meditation can be very helpful, especially guided ones. But, I’ve found that when I sit down to meditate and control the one thing I will always be able to control, my breath, I feel like I can achieve relaxation more immediately.
Just like surfing, I have to do the breathwork to ride the meditation wave.