 Good to be here on this stage. This is my fourth float conference, which I am super thrilled about. And I've got a really, I have a topic that's really close to my heart. I mean, it's all about the immune system, obviously, which is like what I do. But like, this is something that is really important to me. I'm calling it, this is not a very descriptive title, but flotation rest and the immune system a second look. Because we're going to be looking back at the data that I presented in 2018, but that I re-analyzed to look at it in a more rigorous way, to really kind of tease some new findings out. But to get started, I want to take a bit of a different approach than I've taken in the past. What does atherosclerosis, diabetes, and depression have in common? Well, for one, they've all been steadily increasing over the past 50 years. And for another, they're all involved with this regulation of the immune system. Now, to just quickly recap what I talked about in 2018, and don't worry if you haven't seen that talk, I'm going to go deeper into a little later. But just to give you the idea of why mental health like depression might be related with the immune system. In 2018, I talked about how we evolved to have a very specific response to stress. And along with that response to stress came an activation of the immune system. And along with that activation of the immune system came the activation of a series of behaviors that were fine tuned to keep us safe. And those behaviors look really similar to depression and anxiety. Now in modern times, we don't have the same types of threats around us. But when we read the news or see something really stressful, it's kind of affecting us like a life or death situation, as if it were a saber-toothed tiger. And so in modern times, a lot of times, our response to stress is to have mental health challenges. Now, I just want you to hold that in mind as that brief recap. We're going to dive back into this from a deeper perspective a little later on. But I want to talk about why all of this has been increasing. Why are these immune conditions, from autoimmune disorders to allergies, to cardiovascular problems, to mental health challenges? Why are they just skyrocketing in the past 50 years? It doesn't make sense. And then what can floating do to help? Well, in order to answer this question, we're going to have to go, again, back in time. So in 2018, I took you back in time to see my little friend Clara as a cave woman. But we're going to have to go even further than that. We're going to have to go farther back than dinosaur Clara. We're going to have to go all the way back to the onset of life itself with microbe Clara. Now, to get an understanding of all of this, I want to talk about the history of the planet Earth and specifically the history of life on planet Earth. So the Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years. And that's really hard to visualize. So if we think about it in terms of a calendar month with 30 days, every day would be about 150 million years. So the first seven or so days on that calendar were abiotic. There was no life, it was just rocks and liquids and lots of other stuff. But something special happened on that eighth day. And we still don't quite understand it. But it was the onset of simple life or prokaryotic life. Prokaryotic life is life that doesn't have a nucleus, doesn't have any organelles inside of it. It's just very simple and it's very similar to bacteria. In fact, bacteria are a form of prokaryotic life. Though whatever happened on day eight was probably a lot simpler than that. Now for millions of years, we just had these bacteria on the planet. But then on day 13, one of these prokaryotes ate another prokaryote. And instead of digesting it, they started working together. And this was the birth of eukaryotic life or the cells that make up our body. Unicellular organisms that cooperate with other organelles inside of them like mitochondria. And the history of earth and life was dominated for about two weeks with just unicellular eukaryotic and prokaryotic life. It wasn't until the last four days of that month that we had multicellular animal life or metazoic life. On the 27th day, we had the Cambrian explosion, tons of creatures all kind of sprouting out from who knows where. We still don't understand why it happened. And then to put this even more in context, dinosaurs existed straddling the last two days of that month. And then if we want to get even more specific, homo sapiens don't show up until three minutes to midnight on the final day of the month. One of the things that you'll notice about this calendar is that it's filled with microbes. Trillions and quintillions of microbes all around us. In fact, we evolved living in harmony with most of these microbes. They're a part of us. We grew together. You might have heard the term the human microbiome. Our microbiome or the microbiota, which are the individual microbes, is all around us. You've probably heard about it mostly in the context of the gut microbiome, which is super important. But we have a microbiome everywhere else, on our skin, on our lungs, in our armpits. There are microbes all over us. And the thing is that we live in harmony with these microbes. They help us. They are our oldest friends. But sometimes old friends get separated. And this talk is about what happens when we get separated from our old friends and what that means for the immune system. Now humans evolved as hunter-gatherers in savannas and grasslands. We were in constant contact with the soil. And in that soil were soil bacteria, some of our oldest old friends. And these soil bacteria, while not colonizing us like our gut bacteria do, they weren't through us. We were constantly eating them, bringing them into our bodies. They were then leaving our bodies. This is called pseudo-commensal, because they weren't commensal bacteria that didn't live with us, but they were constantly going in and out of us. And so in order for us to have a relationship with these pseudo-commensals, we had to kind of negotiate how to interact with each other. And so on the one hand, these pseudo-commensals, these soil bacteria and other old friend microbes, they had to kind of maintain or regulate our immune system so that they weren't seen as a threat. And over millions and millions of years, we became dependent on them doing so. And so in order for us to be healthy, we need to have these bacteria, these microbes, helping to regulate our immune systems. I want to talk about this a little further, partly because I think the immune system needs a bit of an image shift. Most of the time when we think about the immune system, we think about a warrior. We think that our immune cells are out to fight things or out to destroy things or to make sure we don't get sick. They're here to make sure that we're good and okay and healthy. And that's partly true. But I'd like to introduce a different metaphor. I like to think of the immune system as the bouncer at a club. Hang with me here, hang with me here. So let's go to Club Corpus, and we've got our immune system bouncer. And so this bouncer is here to let the good microbes in, keep the bad microbes out, make sure that we don't get sick off of some of them, but to make sure we still have a steady stream of microbes coming into our body because they're super important for our health. And old friends are kind of like the regulars at the club. They become friends with the bouncer. They help keep the bouncer really calm. They make sure that he's well-regulated. And in addition to that, these old friends can help to let other things into our bodies that aren't microbes that we still kind of need to have coming in and out of our bodies like gluten, pollen, pectander. When we have a regulated immune system that is functioning in the way that we evolved, it helps us to not have allergies, to not develop these sensitivities that have become so rampant in modern life these days. So what happens when we get separated from these old friends? And why did we get separated from these old friends? Well, specifically, we moved into cities. We left the soil. Ever since the advent of agriculture, we started to remove ourselves from the environments that we evolved to live in, which was foraging for food, hands in the dirt, living in harmony with the soil, especially from a very young age. And when this happens, we lose that regulating influence of these old friends. Going back to our club example, without his old friend, the bouncer gets really angry. Suddenly, all of these harmless things from the environment that we didn't have to worry about before all get rejected. And not only that, but the bouncer starts to turn on the people who work at the club, like the gut and the pancreas and the lungs, and maybe even turn on the club owner herself. When we're separated from our old friends, we see increases in allergies, autoimmune conditions, and mental health disorders. Now, you might be thinking, well, I get the allergies and autoimmune disorder condition thing, because that's kind of like the immune system fighting against things that should be inside of you or fighting against what's already inside of you. But like, how does this relate to mental health? And now, I'd like to go back and do a quick recap of what I talked about in 2018, because it's critical to understanding how all of this is interrelated. So in 2018, I introduced Cableman Clara, hunter-gatherer, as we've been talking about, and one day Clara was out foraging for berries when in the distance she saw a saber-toothed tiger. Now Clara got really anxious and scared, and a system in her body went right up. The system is called the sympathetic nervous system, or you might be more familiar with it as the fighter flight system. Now, when the fighter flight system is activated, our body is prepared to deal with immediate stress, and that includes things like elevating heart rate and blood pressure, so that you can get your blood pumping to get oxygen all throughout your body and nutrients, nutrients everywhere it needs to go. Rapid breathing, so that you can bring more oxygen into your lungs, get everything moving, because you might have to flee or fight. Increased sweating to cool down your body if you're going to have to be doing a lot of motions. Altered metabolism and attenuated digestion, that metabolism helps to free up easy energy so that you can access it so you can move really fast, and digestion starts to get shut down because digestion is a really energetic process, and we don't want that going if we need to flee or fight. But most pertinent to this discussion is activation of the immune system. Now, why would this make sense? Why would it make sense for our fighter flight system to start preloading our immune system? Well, let's go back to Clara and see why this could be important. Clara's not looking so good. So, Clara got into a fight with the saber-toothed tiger. She fortunately left with her life, but she has some wounds, and she needs to heal. She probably has some infections. She's got a lot of things that the immune system has evolved to take care of. And so, this in essence, oh, well, this manipulation of our body and our mind by the immune system to help us to behave in ways that help us to heal is in essence what psychoneuroimmunology is, which is the field that I got my PhD in. So this activates a series of behaviors that are critical for being able to cope with an infection or being ill, called sickness behaviors. This includes fatigue. Fatigue allows you to conserve your energy so that you're able to have more energy stores to deal with the highly energetic process of the immune system. It increases pain sensitivity, which allows you to not move things that might be injured. Decreases appetite, which might seem a little counter-intuitive, but again, digestion is highly energetic, and we want all that energy going to our ability for our immune system to take care of things. It also leads to social withdrawal, which can have a couple different meanings on the one hand, it's the idea that if you're infected, removing yourself from your social group might be really adaptive. On the other hand, there's some research that shows that individuals who are dealing with sickness behaviors, they actually get more approach towards their caregivers and more removal from others. And so it's kind of this manipulation of behavior so that you're seeking out people that can help you. And it also increases anxiety. If you're vigilant, you can make sure you don't get injured again, make sure that you have the space to heal. Do these symptoms look familiar to you? It looks like depression. In fact, it doesn't just look like depression, it is depression in some circumstances. For us, as we evolved, being able to have these set of behaviors to help us to heal when we're injured or sick was critical. And in the case of the sympathetic nervous system arc, basically, if Clara had run away and gotten away, this might not have even kicked in. But because Clara ended up getting injured, then there was a reason for these sickness behaviors to emerge. It had an adaptive reason to be here. But in modern day society, when we don't have saber-toothed tigers around, again, we're dealing with the news, we're getting stressed out. And when we get stressed out and it seems like a life or death scenario, we might be activating some of these similar circumstances. However, in most cases, our immune system doesn't go crazy. It doesn't engage. We get really stressed out, we kind of move on. But with the loss of old friends, with the loss of that regulatory component keeping our immune system calm, we're at much higher risk of having an out-of-control, exacerbated inflammatory response to daily stressors that can then precipitate mental health conditions. And something that might have just been an adaptive response suddenly becomes catastrophic. So I wanna pause to summarize what we've been talking about so far. Humans co-evolved with environmental microbes that we refer to as old friends, and they helped to regulate our immune system. Separation from our old friends dysregulates our immune system, resulting in more inflammatory diseases that includes things like autoimmune disorders, but also mental health conditions. And an elevated immune response in response to stress exacerbates a previously adaptive mental health response. Something that at one time would have helped us to get out of danger now without the regulation of old friends suddenly puts us in even more danger. So the big question is what do we do about this? And we're gonna talk about floating, but floating is a small piece of the puzzle. And I don't have time in this talk to go through all of the different ways that we can try to get back in touch with our old friends, try to learn how to regulate the immune system. But the thing is, is that those are the questions that I find so invigorating. What we need is a holistic approach. My dissertation was all about novel mental health therapeutics that looked at things as a whole, and tried to not piece out different aspects of the body or experience, but to really look at the body as a whole unit and identify how we can develop interventions that work with our body, work with our old friends, work with all of these things that we know on a multi-dimensional level. And floating is potentially one of those therapies. So one of the things I didn't talk as much about in 2018 that I wanted to bring back into this talk was to talk about what we already know in floating before the research that I've done about floating in the immune system. There's not much, but I wanted to kind of review it because I think it's important for us to get our head around. And it was important to me when I wrote my dissertation. As probably everyone in this room knows, John Lilly and Peter Seudfeld were two of the developers of the float tank back in the 50s and 60s. They initially thought that floating was going to be incredibly stressful. And most of their work was around trying to design these environments and study how stressed out people became. And of course, none of that worked. And they discovered that floating is in fact incredibly anti-stress. And there's many different ways and studies that have shown that floating can help with stress. Floating improves well-being and improves stress-related symptoms. It improves stress-related pain. It can improve symptoms of burnout. Additionally, on a biological level, reduced stress response and connection with floating can reduce levels of cortisol. And it can also decrease circulating metabolites of sympathetic nervous system hormones like adrenaline and noradrenaline. So coming at this whole picture, we can see that float on the one hand can help us to reduce stress, which is a huge component of this tapestry that we've been discussing, right? Because stress is still the precipitating factor that is getting us to dysregulation. But there are more kind of hands-on approaches that floating can do with respect to the immune system. So for one, floating can help reduce sympathetic nervous system activity, which again goes into kind of reducing stress. For another, it can help enhance the parasympathetic nervous system, or our rest and digest system. And this kind of helps to promote immunoregulation. Additionally, floating has been shown to reduce inflammatory symptoms of specific disorders, including rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia. So there's something going on here. And then finally, there was one published study that claimed that floating altered the immune system for the better. Unfortunately, it's not a very good study. They didn't use standard terms, they also didn't really report what was going on very well. So I kind of just include that as it happened. So let's talk a little bit about the current study. The current study was done at the Laurier Institute for Brain Research at Liber, which is where I do my research here. I recently moved to Tulsa for my clinical internship, which has been really nice to be super close to Liber. That is one of our, that is our open float pool right there. And this was the study that my immune research was based off of. So this is a paper that's available. This has been talked about at the float conference. Justin has spoken about this paper on multiple occasions. This was just showing that floating can elicit relaxation and interreceptive awareness, particularly in anxious individuals. This paper found that floating induced serenity and induced relaxation, it decreased muscle tension and decreased state anxiety. So I took that data set and specifically analyzed the individuals that we had immune data on. This is just a quick table. I hate putting tables up here, but I always think that these are important. It gives you kind of the breakdown of who is in our sample. We had more anxious individuals than we did our healthy reference sample. And then one piece that I think is interesting to hold on to is this anxiety sensitivity index, the ASI-3. Our anxious group was super high on this index, whereas the healthy reference sample was pretty low. That's what you would expect in people who aren't dealing with anxiety. Hold on to that because it's gonna be important when I give one of the results. Just remember that there was a striation of anxiety sensitivity among this population. The study was basically, it was a two-condition study. It was a crossover design, so everyone was their own control. You would start out either with a float session or watching a documentary, BBC Earth in a dim room, and then you would have a one-week washout period and then you would do the other condition. So it was all randomized, and we did blood collection before and after both the float and before and after the film condition. And in that blood, we analyzed 10 different immune markers or cytokines. I don't have time to go into all of them, but I have created a little bit of an animation that shows you that they cover a wide variety of different aspects of the immune system. So what we can see here is that we go from innate to adaptive immunity. We've got pro-inflammatory to anti-inflammatory. Each of these different cytokines kind of plays a different role in the large tapestry that is our immune system functioning. And by looking at their concentrations in blood, we can get kind of a snapshot about what's going on in these individuals on an immune level. So let's take a look at some of the findings. So I wanted to start with this because the main expectation of this study was not actually found. So we thought that floating would change the immune system across the board for everyone. And it didn't. And this is just one of our cytokines, IL-6. It's one of the ones that we had the most hope in. Just to explain this graph, so you understand it, is that on this y-axis here, we have concentration. Along the x-axis, this column is the pre-control, post-control, pre-float, post-float. And we're looking at a box plot here. So the line in the middle is the median. The box covers the interquantile range. I know that doesn't make sense. And then there's whiskers to cover the rest of the range. Anyway, now that that's out of the way. What you can see here is that all four of those boxes look pretty much the same. And when you look at this across all 10 of our cytokines, this is what we found. Basically, floating didn't change the immune system across the board for everyone. And I think that this is something really important to keep in mind because it's informing where we go and it's informing the claims that we can make. However, there was one interesting result that came out once we looked at the moderating effect of anxiety sensitivity. It came up with one pro-inflammatory metric, or pro-inflammatory marker called IO1-alpha, which is a specific pro-inflammatory cytokine. And this is really exciting. It's a preliminary finding. It was kind of secondary to the main analysis of what we were looking at, so it'll inform kind of where we go next. But what we find here, again, here we're looking in the dark blue, you see the film control. In the light blue, you see the flotation rest condition. Along the y-axis is the concentration data. Each of those individual points corresponds to a measurement. And then you have before, after, before, after. And then, if you look at the lines, the line that is darker is the significant one. None of the other lines reach significance. But what you'll notice is that the short dotted line is for the trend for individuals who were one standard deviation below the mean in an anxiety sensitivity. The longer dotted line is for individuals who were at the mean of anxiety sensitivity. And the solid line is individuals that were at one standard deviation above the mean in anxiety sensitivity. Again, lots of words. What does this mean? What we're finding is that the people who decrease in a pro-inflammatory marker are the ones who are most anxious and it's only happening in a flow condition. And this is really interesting because it would suggest that perhaps floating is going to be most effective in terms of the immune system for individuals who are maybe already struggling within inflammatory condition. It might not change things for your average person, but in people that might already have something that's inflammatory, like potentially anxiety sensitivity, it might lead to a decrease in inflammatory markers. We have a lot more work to do. We're still figuring this out, but when I did this reanalysis, I got really excited. So just to recap these findings. In this study, one session of flotation rest did not significantly shift markers of inflammation overall for everybody. One session of flotation rest did decrease circulating concentrations of one pro-inflammatory marker, IL-1-alpha, but only in participants' high in anxiety sensitivity. And we need to do a lot more research. And the exciting thing is that there's a lot more research coming up. So this is part two in my immune trilogy. Hopefully next year I will be coming back to talk about the study that we're going on right now. So instead of looking at baseline immune markers, which to be honest, don't shift for a lot of different interventions. We're taking a look at immunoreactivity, which plays into the idea of old friends, right? If our old friends were here to help us regulate our immune system, what if we could measure changes in immunoreactivity? So the study that I have going on right now that is wrapping up actually, takes a look at individuals who have floated eight times and it looks before and after and it takes a look at how reactive those individuals' blood is to an immune challenge to bacterial cell membrane wall. And we're gonna see if there's shifts in response to floating. So that is coming up. I will hopefully have this analyzed by next summer. I'm looking forward to sharing it with you. That is everything I have for you today. Thank you so much. Stay tuned for more. I am the one plug I wanna make is that I am working on kind of transitioning to starting to make online content. And I'm working on a YouTube channel. I'm working on a TikTok channel, Instagram, that kind of stuff. There's not a lot out there yet, but social media, I'm at Flux and Flux. YouTube channels live life in Flux. There's like one or two videos up there yet. My main first project is going to be about the old friends hypothesis. I wanna make a series of YouTube videos that delve really deep into this and talk about it from a lot of different angles because it's something that's really important to me and something that I think a lot of people need to hear about. But anyway, thank you so much for your time and I look forward to chatting with you after the conference.