Recent discoveries, especially in neurochemistry, indicate that addiction is not restricted to what are usually thought of as “addictive drugs.” Addiction is simply a compulsion to continue doing some thing—whether taking a particular substance or indulging in certain behavior—combined with the occurrence of stressful withdrawal symptoms if the ingestion of the substance or the behavior pattern is suddenly ended. The addictive qualities of opiates, alcohol, and cigarettes are well known, but we now know it’s just as easy to get hooked on food, work, coffee, gambling, spending, sex, chocolate, other people, religion—just about anything.
Happily, scientists have made great advances lately in identifying the mechanisms of addiction. Biochemists have found, for example, that addiction is a result of changes in the body’s ability to experience pleasure, its “reward system”—changes in the number and activity of the opiate receptors of the nerve cells, and in the levels of the body’s internally produced opiates, the endorphins. It is also now known that the symptoms of withdrawal are associated with sudden oversupplies of the neurochemical norepinephrine in the limbic system, and that drugs that block the action of norepinephrine alleviate the symptoms of withdrawal. Such discoveries give scientists hope that they will soon develop chemical ways of overcoming addiction.
Taking a different angle of approach, behavioral and cognitive therapists and researchers have recently developed highly effective methods of attacking addictive mental processes and behavior, and it now seems clear that all who have a serious commitment to overcoming their addiction can do so, provided they follow some of the techniques for behavioral control.
Generally the worlds of the behavioral/cognitive therapists and the neurochemists are far apart, one group trying to change the imperfect actions and ideas of imperfect people in an imperfect world, the other exploring, mapping, and “correcting” microscopic electrochemical processes in the nervous system. With two completely different world views, these groups rarely agree on much. So it’s significant that both behavioral/cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists now agree that the floatation tank is a powerful tool for overcoming addictions, both by changing addictive behavior and personality characteristics, and by bringing about rapid and striking changes in human biochemistry.
Smoking Cessation. In a series of carefully controlled studies of the effects of Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy (REST) in the cessation of smoking, conducted over many years, Dr. Peter Suedfeld found that the effect of sensory deprivation is powerful and unprecedented. In his first study of smoking and sensory deprivation, Suedfeld claims he had little faith that REST could actually change ingrained behavior. But when he did a three-month follow-up comparing people who had undergone sensory deprivation with those who had received similar anti-smoking treatment but without the isolation chamber: “Lo and behold, we found that those groups in sensory deprivation were smoking almost 40 percent less than the others. This was very encouraging and very surprising.”238
The Maintenance Effect. A further follow-up study two years after the treatment found that those who had undergone the REST were still smoking far less than those who had received the same treatment without it. This led Suedfeld to the realization that sensory deprivation has a unique “maintenance effect.” “The problem,” he told me, “is not to get people to quit smoking, but to get them to stay that way once they’ve done it.” Suedfeld’s studies, and others which have followed, show that while most forms of treatment have fairly similar success rates in the initial days after treatment—when people are still highly motivated most methods quickly lose their effectiveness. But the sensory deprivation treatment maintains its power as the months, and the years, pass. Somehow, sensory deprivation makes a long-lasting change in the mind and behavior of the subject.
In his studies, Suedfeld tried sensory deprivation both by itself and in combination with a “behavioral package,” including counseling and guidance, and found that “the combination [of the behavioral package with the sensory deprivation] is much better than either of the others. In fact, it’s better than the effects of the other two put together! And it’s close to double what you tend to get with the standard kinds of clinical approaches—a wide variety of behavioral, cognitive, group therapy and so forth.”
Suedfeld’s technique includes the playing of taped messages about the dangers of smoking, and about the subject’s ability to quit smoking while the subject is in the isolation chamber or float tank. (Suedfeld has in recent years begun working with tanks.) Interestingly, however, simple sensory deprivation environment, without any messages whatsoever, also is extremely successful in changing unwanted behavior says Suedfeld, “The real problem smokers have is not in changing their attitudes, it’s in unfreezing the belief-attitude-habit structure. And as I say, REST in itself, by itself, without any messages, or anything else, unfreezes that. Then the changing comes from the person’s own desire to quit. Now the messages can help that, make it easier, but it can happen without messages. We have evidence for that.”
Weight Reduction. One of Suedfeld’s associates at the University of British Columbia, psychologist Dr. Rod Borrie, decided to apply Suedfeld’s methods to what he told me was “a problem that was even harder than smoking to solve or to deal with: getting people to lose weight.” Smoking, he pointed out, is a relatively simple “all or nothing” behavior pattern, while overeating is very complex. “So I took the design from some of Peter’s research,” Borrie said, “putting together a bunch of messages, using sensory deprivation and so on, and the results were very good.”
Very good indeed: Borrie’s figures show that those subjects who underwent the sensory deprivation session and received the weight-reduction messages Borrie prepared were able to lose an average of about twelve pounds over the next six months, while those who equally determined to lose weight, but only listened to the messages, or only underwent the sensory deprivation, had lost virtually no weight after six months.
But the most striking aspect of Borrie’s study is that the people who combined the sensory deprivation with messages continued to lose weight steadily, month after month, and were still losing after six months when the study was completed. In fact, in the last four months of the six-month study period, the sensory deprivation group lost about 3.5 pounds while the other groups gained some 2.2 pounds. And amazingly, this continuous and extended weight loss was the result of only one session of REST. Here again is powerful proof of the “maintenance effect.”31
In succeeding clinical studies, Borrie modified the technique by personalizing the taped messages played to the subjects in the REST environment, and found that the results were even more impressive, with some of the subjects losing as much as sixty pounds within two months.
Alcohol Reduction. Similarly successful results have been obtained in using the tank to help heavy drinkers reduce their alcohol intake, or stop drinking altogether.
While much of this work has been done using sensory deprivation chambers, many researchers (including Suedfeld and Borrie) have now begun using the float tank instead, and early results show that the tank is as effective as the chamber. In fact, there are some indications that the tank can be an even better behavior-modification device than the chamber. Certainly it is far more practical (the chamber requires a twenty-four-hour period of isolation, the tank only one hour), more enjoyable, and more easily adaptable to clinical use, private therapy, and personal behavior-modification programs.
For example, St. Elizabeth Hospital in Appleton, Wisconsin, has for several years used a float tank as an integral part of its hospital-based stress management program. In a statistical analysis of eighty-seven outpatients gathered over a one-year period in 1981-1982, the hospital noted that those who used the tank had a 50 percent reduction in cigarette smoking and a 45 percent reduction in alcohol consumption. These statistics are striking, since the program was directed at general stress reduction and not specifically toward modifying a single behavior, such as smoking or drinking.
In 1983, having moved to New York City, Rod Borne began using the float tank to assist his patients in smoking cessation, weight reduction, and a wide range of other problems. Preliminary results show the float technique to be as successful as Borrie had hoped. The tank is more effective than the REST chamber, according to Borne, because people can use the tank as a self-assessment tool to devise their own programs: “The first time in the tank,” he says, “you can even work on coming up with the solutions, what you want to say to yourself in the tank, which is in itself very very therapeutic.” And each session that follows becomes a kind of booster session, adding power to the suggestions you have already incorporated into your life. Also, Borrie points out, for the taped messages and self-suggestions to have the desired effect—the effect that causes them still to have power after six months or even two years—deep relaxation is absolutely essential. But because so few people have ever experienced deep relaxation, or know how to go about relaxing, Borrie found that he had to devote a large part of the time allotted for taped messages during his REST sessions to lengthy suggestions aimed at inducing progressive relaxation. The float tank, on the other hand, allows the subject to go rapidly and easily to a deeply relaxed state, so the behavior modification program can have its greatest effect.
Once again, then, we come to the power of the tank to combine a truly deep level of relaxation with an increase in physical and mental sensitivity and awareness. And what’s intriguing is that the long-lasting stress relief and increased awareness seem often to result in reduction in addictive behavior even in floaters who were unaware of a desire for change, or who had no immediate plans to change.
Spontaneous Change
“I’ve always been overweight,” Alice told me, “and I’ve tried just about everything and have never been able to lose much weight, or if I did lose it I could never keep it off for very long. But since I began floating I have lost a lot of weight, without even trying! I feel great. I had a party last week and everyone was coming up to me and hugging me and saying, ‘Alice, you look great!’ and that just never happened before.” Among similar stories I’ve heard from floaters I’ve interviewed:
A professional photographer had become such a heavy user of cocaine that it was affecting his work. He began floating because it “sounded like fun, a trippy thing to do. I began coming over to float after work. Slowly I realized that I was cutting down on the toot, and it dawned on me that I really didn’t feel like doing it all that much. I was really feeling good. Who needs it? I thought. I mean, this was completely an unexpected side effect.”
An alcoholic musician began floating because he heard it helped you to hear music better. The night after his first float he had a concert and discovered he didn’t need his usual drinks before he went on. His hands didn’t shake (which had been a problem before), he had no stage fright, and friends told him he’d never sounded better. The more he floated the less he drank, and the last time I talked with him he had stopped drinking entirely for four months.
I have heard a number of similar stories. I’ve spoken with operators of commercial tank centers who have witnessed the effects of floating on thousands of people and claim that this is a very common occurrence, so common that they now have almost come to expect it. This seemingly anti-addiction quality of floating reminded me of studies by Harvard researchers Herbert Benson and R.K. Wallace, who measured the effect of meditation on the intake of alcohol, cigarettes, and other drugs among 1,862 regular meditators. They found striking decreases in the use of all drugs—in fact, the meditators had virtually eliminated most drug use, even though this was not a specific goal of their meditation.24
An even more significant study is that of Dr. Mohammad Shafii and associates at the University of Michigan Medical Center. They chose subjects who used drugs but were not meditators, and divided them into two groups, one that learned meditation and one that did not, so that they could find out whether non-meditators also cut down on the use of drugs over a period of time. The study showed dramatic decreases in alcohol, marijuana, and cigarette use among meditators, while the control group showed little or no change.215, 216
Other studies have supported these findings. Scientists cite such effects of meditation as reduction in anxiety, blood pressure, and muscular tension, and changes in brain wave activity, as possible causes of the reduction in these harmful habits. Since we have already seen that the effects of floating on these functions are the same as those of meditation, though more immediate, intense, and much longer-lasting, I think it’s safe to assume that floating also possesses the anti-addiction effect of meditation—possibly to an even greater degree. There is much evidence that this is so. Current information suggests that if you float, and do so with some regularity you will to all probability find yourself cutting down or eliminating your use of cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs, and perhaps losing weight even with no systematic effort to do so on your part.
Once we grant that spontaneous behavior change actually does take place in an impressive number of cases, the question becomes How? A few of the answers can be singled out.
Stimulus Hunger and Hypersuggestibility. The behavior-modification programs used by Suedfeld, Borrie, and others are based partly on the concept of “stimulus hunger.” When subjects in a sensory deprivation state are presented with a taped message of suggestions, they are highly receptive. As Borne explained it to me: “The restricted environmental stimulation creates a need for something to happen, a ‘stimulus hunger.’ Anything that does happen—first of all, it has your complete attention. And it’s valued more positively when you hear it’s the only thing happening, so even if it’s something really boring it becomes interesting. It’s the big event of the day.”
Increased Awareness of Internal States. “Normally,” says Peter Suedfeld, “people pay primary attention to the environment. Both through the course of the evolution of the species and in the life of individuals, you’ve got to put major attention on monitoring external events. If you go through life concentrating on your internal events, a car’s going to run you down very quickly, or a tiger’s going to eat you, or whatever. So, given that attention is a limited resource, and since you can’t pay attention to everything that’s going on around you and inside you, you tend to ignore the latter, because for the most part what goes on inside you is less urgent. And what the tank does is get you out of that, because there are no external problems to solve, no external dangers to attend to. There are also no external positive rewards to strive for….You know, externality isn’t there. So, that information processing system is free to turn inward and start monitoring what’s going on inside. And you become much more sensitive, both to psychological events and to physiological events.” While many people don’t pay much attention to just how smoking really makes them feel, to just how much of an effort it is to carry around twenty-five or fifty extra pounds, in the float tank, says Suedfeld, “you become much more aware of how your body feels, what your internal states are. And you’re much more motivated to do something about it!
Increased Production of Pain-Relieving, Pleasure-Creating Chemicals. Floating apparently increases the amount of endorphins in the body. This is important because there is now evidence that, in the words of Dr. William Regelson of the Medical College of Virginia: “It is very likely … that all activities vital to survival—from sex to physical exercise—are physiologically addictive.” Not just drugs, not just cigarettes or alcohol or other substances ordinarily thought to be addictive, but all basic human drives can be addictive.
Neuroscientist Candace Pert has pointed out:
If you were designing a robot vehicle to walk into the future and survive, as God was when He was designing human beings, you’d wire it up so that behavior that would ensure the survival of that species—like sex or eating—would be naturally reinforcing. Behavior is modifiable, and it is controlled by the anticipation of pain or pleasure, punishment or reward. And the anticipation of pain or pleasure has to be coded in the brain…. Emotions have biochemical correlates…. Larry Stein, at the University of California at Irvine, has suggested that the natural opiates are the brain’s own internal reward system. It seems that when humans engage in various activities, neurojuices associated either with pleasure or with pain are released.102
To make sure we eat, for example, our bodies reward us by releasing pleasure drugs when we eat.
A quicker way to get pleasure is to ingest some substance, such as an external opiate that fits into the opiate receptors, or a substance like alcohol, which works by causing the brain to pour out large quantities of its supply of endorphins, or to engage in some behavior that we know by experience will cause the brain to release endorphins.
All people have certain behavior patterns they know will bring them pleasure—that is, release endorphins—when they are hurt or depressed or in need of a quick fix of pleasure. Many like to go shopping. Go buy a hat. Physical exercise is great—get that runner’s high. Clean the house. Eat chocolate. See a movie. Make love. And so on.
Since we don’t indulge in them all the time, but use them only to release endorphins when we need them, most of these behaviors are fairly harmless. Some of them are even beneficial. However, there’s evidence that if we overindulge in certain pleasurable activities, we can throw our pleasure/reward system out of balance. Opiate drugs do this by so flooding our opiate receptors that they shrink and diminish in number. For example, it’s been discovered that the opiate methadone reduces the body’s supply of endorphins so much that endorphin levels remain depressed for six to twelve months after methadone has been stopped. What this means is that when the external, artificial source of pleasure is removed, our own natural ability to create pleasure has withered away. We have no pleasure and no capacity to experience pleasure, and this is a very great pain that is known as withdrawal.
Habitual overeaters have no real need to eat so much. However, every few hours the pleasure chemicals in their body become depleted and they experience withdrawal symptoms. Every twenty minutes or so smokers reach for their pockets to pull out a cigarette. If they can’t have a smoke they begin to get jittery, agitated, and feel the onset of withdrawal symptoms. This same pleasure-chemical release pattern holds true for all habitual/addictive behaviors, from the need to gamble to an inability to stop working.
One way to end habitual or addictive behavior patterns is to find an alternative way of stimulating pleasure. This is roughly what smokers do who take up chewing gum, or junkies who kick heroin only to turn to wine. The problem is that often the alternative routes to pleasure are almost as harmful as the addictions, not very reliable, and usually not as satisfying.
One answer could be the float tank. By providing a reliable means of activating our pleasure pathways, floating is useful in a number of ways.
Withdrawal. In the period immediately after quitting a habit, the tank alleviates the pains of withdrawal and enables the user to feel some pleasure. Floating also reduces the level of such anxiety-related biochemicals as norepinephrine, which are released in great quantities during withdrawal. David Tenerowicz, who runs tank centers in Princeton, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, is one of a number of commercial float tank operators who have told me that many alcoholics and drug addicts use a float in the tank to relieve the anxiety and tremors of withdrawal. Tod Frueh of Tranquility Tanks in New York says that many who use cocaine have found that a float is a good way to come down from the cocaine high: A session in the tank alleviates some of the depression and anxiety usually associated with “crashing” or cutting off consumption of the drug after a period of use.
Post-Withdrawal. One reason addicts find it so hard to keep from returning to their habit even after they’ve kicked the physiological effects is that in the ensuing weeks they find their lives lacking in pleasure. Much of this, we know now, is due to their diminished ability to secrete endorphins. Nothing is fun, because they have no ability to experience fun. By increasing endorphins, floating enables them to experience pleasure—often for the first time in years. Speaking of his many regulars who are former drug addicts or alcoholics, David Tenerowicz says, “They tell me that floating lets them feel good. It puts pleasure back in their lives, during the days and weeks after they float. In fact, some of them felt so good they wondered at first if they could become addicted to floating.”
Assured Alternate Pleasure. Even long after we have quit an addictive behavior pattern, there are circumstances that will cause us to want to return to the addiction: stress, anxiety, depression, a certain individual, whatever. Usually we can feel the pressure building, which gives us an opportunity to take preventive measures. The float tank provides an ideal escape, a pressure valve. When we know we want to return to our addictive behavior, we can simply take a float, stimulate our pleasure pathways, and avert the return to the habit.
Anxiety Reduction. Anxiety plays an important role in the formation, triggering, or continuation of addictive or habitual behavior. Floating has been found to decrease anxiety sharply, by reducing the level of anxiety-related chemicals in the blood, lessening muscular tension, and increasing feelings of wholeness, confidence, competence, and security. By alleviating anxiety, floating directly reduces the need to resort to the harmful anxiety-reduction behaviors of smoking, drinking, eating, and so on.
Cleansing the Doors of Perception. A vacation from normal consciousness while in the tank enables us to return and find that, behold, everything looks better! Like drugs, and like other meditative/concentrative techniques, floating shuts down our awareness of external stimuli, so that when we experience them again we see them as if we’ve awakened from the deep sleep of ordinary life—we have become “deautomatized.” Since we can do this safely and reliably in the tank, there is little reason to rely on more dangerous and harmful consciousness-altering techniques.
All these factors combine to help bring about spontaneous changes in habitual or addictive behavior. And they can be used by floaters consciously and systematically to change unwanted behavior patterns permanently.