Float Tanks Gave People With Anxiety and Depression a Boundless Feeling, With No Clear Mood Advantage Over a Recliner

TL;DR: In a small American trial, adults with anxiety and depression either floated in a dark, quiet tank of warm salt water or rested in a reclining chair for 6 sessions.

Floaters were much more likely to say they felt boundless, felt like they had no body and felt their heartbeat and breathing more strongly. Mood and anxiety improved in all groups, with no clear difference detected between floating and the chair.

Source: Neuroscience of Consciousness (2026) | Tobel, Cone, Choquette et al.

Imagine lying in water so salty you float without effort, at skin temperature, in total darkness and silence. Most of what your senses normally report simply drops away.

A 2026 study in Neuroscience of Consciousness, by researchers at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies in Santa Monica, California, asked what that experience feels like for people with anxiety and depression.

They gave the state a name: aquahenosis, or "oneness with water."

Floating vs Resting in a Chair

This was a new look at data from an earlier randomized feasibility trial. Of 75 adults assigned to a group, 57 finished all 6 sessions. Nearly all had major depression, and most also had an anxiety disorder.

Each person was randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups:

• Set float schedule (19 people): six 1-hour floats over 6 weeks in a lightproof, soundproof room, in a shallow pool of Epsom salt water
• Flexible float schedule (21 people): the same pool, but people chose when to float over 12 weeks and could stay up to 2 hours
• Recliner chair (17 people): six weekly 1-hour sessions in a zero-gravity reclining chair in a dim, quieter room, fully clothed

After the last session, everyone rated their experience on a long questionnaire about altered states, the same one often used in psychedelic research. After sessions, they also rated how strongly they had felt their heartbeat and breathing.

What Did Floating Feel Like?

Floaters rated the "boundless" part of the questionnaire much higher than chair users. That part covers feelings of oneness, bliss and the edges of the self dissolving.

• Flexible float vs chair: about 22.5 points higher
• Set float schedule vs chair: about 12.7 points higher

Within that, the biggest gap was in feeling disembodied, with items like "I felt as if I no longer had a body." Floaters also scored higher on feeling united with their surroundings and on spiritual experience.

Body signals stood out too. Both float groups rated how strongly they felt their heartbeat about 29 points higher, and their breathing about 23 points higher, than chair users on a 0-to-100 scale.

Did Floating Help Mood More Than the Chair?

Not clearly. Depression, anxiety and mood ratings improved from start to finish in all 3 groups, including the chair group, and the groups did not clearly differ.

A statistical model did find a pattern. Floating went with feeling more boundless, and people who felt more boundless showed bigger gains in good mood and bigger drops in depression scores. That is a statistical link, not proof that the boundless feeling caused the improvement.

How Close Is This to a Psychedelic Trip?

Tobel and colleagues compared floaters' ratings with published average ratings from healthy volunteers given ketamine or psilocybin, the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms."

Floating looked similar to ketamine and to low doses of psilocybin on the boundless, disembodied and blissful feelings. It did not produce the visual effects, such as patterns and imagery, that mark those drugs.

Limits to Keep in Mind

• Small groups: Only 17 to 21 people per group finished.
• Rated once, at the end: The altered-state questionnaire came after the last session, so it can't show how feelings changed from session to session.
• Different conditions: The chair room was not as dark or quiet, people stayed clothed, and the flexible group floated longer, so several things differed at once.
• Loose drug comparison: Psychedelic ratings came from other studies of healthy volunteers, compared mostly by eye.
• Secondary analysis: These questions were not the trial's main aim.

A Drug-Free Way to Study Altered States

Tobel and colleagues also suggested that floating could be a way to study, or even prepare people for, self-dissolving experiences without drugs. Whether that boundless feeling actually helps anxiety or depression is still unknown, since mood improved about as much with a recliner chair.