Joe Rogan is someone I genuinely admire. If you have not listened to his podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, I recommend scheduling out three hours of your day, popping in some ear buds and going for a leisurely drive on the back roads of your town. I attempt to follow his example in many facets of my own life. Through hours of absorbing his words, I have learned to be a kinder, more sympathetic human, to use the Earth’s resources for introspective learning, to maintain my body and mind, and most importantly appreciate that my thoughts are not independent from the thoughts of the people I surround myself with. Getting an hour to sit down with him and pick his brain would be a dream come true and I envy those who he welcomes into the seat across from him in the studio.

Joe Rogan is one of the driving forces behind the float tank movement. He has spent countless segments of his podcast explaining the benefits of cutting off your sensory inputs and leaving yourself alone in the depths of your mind. Rogan believes in the notion of putting yourself into uncomfortable states for personal growth. He experiments with the godlike powers of psychedelics, smokes marijuana for the paranoia, pushes his body to its physical limits, and performs stand up comedy, which is distressing in itself. When you’re under pressure, you allow yourself the room to explore your reactions to life’s stimuli and correct your thought patterns. He explains, in reference to sensory deprivation tanks,

'I'm not a big fan of running away from reality. I like handling all of the issues that bother me in order to go through life truly happy. There's a lot of people out there with ghosts, a lot of demons haunting their mind. In my opinion, this is your chance to face it head on and try to come up with a better path.' With all this hype promoted by my idol, I figured I had to give the tank a try. Not to mention the company in my town that offers this experience happened to be running a deal for thirty dollars for an hour of submersion. Would I experience all the positive benefits Joe talks so highly of?

So what is a sensory deprivation tank? Basically the idea is to cut off your ability to see, hear, taste, touch, or smell. What are you then left with? The answer is simply your thoughts. Let me explain how it worked for me. I stripped down to my birthday suit: shirt, pants, underwear off, earrings out, bead bracelets removed, and my conveniently placed hair tie slipped off my wrist. I molded two sticky, gummy textured, circle plugs into my ear cavities. Everything went silent. I scrubbed all the oils off my body in a shower located to the left of the tank. Once my body was nude and fresh, I opened the gate to my hour-long journey. I was curious if I would come out with some great revelation, or if I would feel peaceful and happier after the hour, or if it would be similar to a bubble bath that looks more relaxing in Instagram pictures then in actuality.

I closed myself into the six by six-foot box, lied down in the shallow pool of warm water, and due to the high concentration of salt, my body floated right on the surface. I cut off the lights inside the tank as the motion sensor lights in the shower to my left dimmed to pitch black. I could not remember a time where I was in a space so dark I could not determine if my eyes were open or closed. Within moments, I could no longer feel the water, or the air surrounding me for that matter because their temperatures coincided with my internal body temperature.

Immediately, my childhood fears of the demon in the dark space reincarnated. I could not help but fear that someone was going to grab me by the ankle and murder me, possibly my natural reaction to the unknown. After this feeling passed, I thought my daily intrusive thoughts would take hold of my mind and send me spiraling down a wormhole of anxiety, but to my surprise just the opposite happened. For an hour of my life, I felt truly untethered to anything. It was how I imagine astronauts feel when floating through zero gravity space a million miles away from home. Nothing felt heavy. Nothing was important. I felt so far away from anything that had been nagging at me before I entered the tank. It was a true meditation. I could not believe how easy it was for me to disconnect.

I would guess that this is not most people’s experience. In fact, when I stepped back into the lobby of the building the receptionist exclaimed that “sometimes it can be hard to shut your mind off,” but this was not my reaction at all. I exited the capsule in a revitalizing state of calm and as I rinsed the salt off my skin in the second shower, I felt transformed. Everything felt so new and comforting. The water raining down onto my skin felt refreshing and warm; the cool air surrounding me sent chills up my spine; the light being emitted from the ceiling's bulbs tickled my eye sockets; the sound of the water splashing on the stone floor bumped against my ear drums. I never realized how strong my body’s craving for stimuli was. It was an invigorating experience.

On a seemingly unrelated note, my sister is nine months pregnant. She is the first person in my generation of my family to have a child. When I previously overheard other people discussing the topic of creating human beings, it seemed so ordinary. This is what people do; they make more people, no big deal. I now am coming to realize how extraordinary the formation of new life is. For the first time, in the tank, I feel an overwhelming sense of understanding for my soon to be nephew. Not too long ago, he did not even exist. Nobody ever considered the idea of a pint-sized Ethan wandering around. Now he is simply existing inside my big sister in a little pocket of body temperature fluid. He is physically so close to us, yet his consciousness is as if lost in space. He floats in a pitch black pod, unaware of what it means to open and close his eyelids to allow and avoid the influx of light. He is ignorant of the way that the extreme sun rays will crisp his gentle skin.

He has not yet begun to fathom how a cold draft will lift the little hairs on his arms high up toward the sky. He does not know the way he will emerge onto a sophisticated, divine planet, spend years absorbing and interacting with its intricacies, fall in love with other humans, and grow old to be an elderly man, where he will then pass on and decompose back into the planet with all those people he ever loved. The float tank was what I would imagine the life inside a womb would be, given my memories of it have faded in the last twenty years. The distinctions between the two scenarios were that I had no walls to press my feet against, I could not hear constant rhythms of a pounding heart beat, and I knew what the world would look like when I stepped out into the bright light. I felt frightened in the unknown of the tanks total darkness. I cannot imagine how Ethan will feel when he is thrust into the unknown of the light.

Overall, I would consider my first experience of the sensory deprivation tank more powerful than I had anticipated. The sedative benefits were short-lived, however. Within five minutes of leaving the building, a wave of anxiety enveloped my skull. I turned my phone back on and and my heart began to race awaiting calls and texts to roll back in. I concluded my float was a useful tool to help me step back and feel the comparison of the nothingness to the everythingness of life. It gave me a good vantage point to show me how the past few weeks of my existence have created a gloomy energy that I will promptly work to remedy. However, I do not think I spent enough time in the tank to fall into my deepest thoughts. I also believe that I would need to go into the tank routinely to experience its introspective advantages, but unfortunately the monetary cost is too high for a young woman like me.

This is something I would recommend that everyone try at least once, just to see where your subconscious takes you. I hope that my future endeavors will allow me to experience this again. Ultimately, I think the best place for anyone to have this tool is right in their home bathroom, possibly in place of the bathtub. I could imagine myself hopping in the tank for a morning meditation and exiting into the warm shower before beginning the day. I think Joe Rogan has it right by keeping one of these in his office. Let me know what your experience with floating was like, I’m curious.