Floating: An altered state of consciousness

Ritesh Bawri

28 Feb 2026 — 2 min read

You step into a dark, silent tank. The water is exactly your skin temperature. You float without effort.

And within minutes, something strange happens. You stop knowing where your body ends and the water begins.

This is not relaxation. This is an altered state of consciousness.

An altered state of consciousness, or ASC, is any condition where your brain's normal waking patterns shift significantly.

Sleep is an ASC. So is deep meditation. So are certain psychedelic experiences. What makes floating remarkable is that it delivers this state without pharmacology, without years of practice, without anything except silence and salt.

Here is what your brain is actually doing inside that tank.

Your nervous system spends every waking second processing an enormous flood of information. Gravity pulling on your joints. Light hitting your retinas.

Sound vibrating your eardrums. Proprioceptive signals from every muscle reporting your body's position in space.

This constant stream is the scaffolding your brain uses to build the experience of "you."

Remove it all, and the scaffolding disappears.

A 2024 study published in Scientific Reports, by Hruby, Schmidt, Feinstein, and Wittmann, found that 60 minutes of Floatation-REST induced significantly more pronounced ASC than bed rest.

Specifically, participants reported dissolution of body boundaries and distortion of subjective time. Their sense of where the body ended and where the world began became genuinely unclear.

What was happening neurologically?

The brain's Default Mode Network, the system responsible for mental chatter, self-referential thinking, and rumination, showed significantly reduced connectivity after floating.

The same pattern seen in deep meditation.

The same pattern seen with psilocybin. This matters because an overactive Default Mode Network is tightly linked to anxiety, depression, and chronic stress.

Floating quiets it. Not by forcing the mind to be still, but by removing the sensory raw material the brain needs to stay in its habitual loop.

Neuroscientist Dr. Justin Feinstein described it as the only experience comparable to removing gravity from the brain's equation entirely.

You cannot simulate this outside of outer space.

Your body knows how to rest. It just rarely gets permission.

Reach out to me on twitter @rbawri Instagram @riteshbawriofficial and YouTube at www.youtube.com/breatheagain

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