LIBR

The Laureate Institute for Brain Research (LIBR) is home to the world’s first research lab dedicated to studying floatation therapy’s effects on mental health. Founded in 2014, the Float Clinic and Research Center (FCRC) recently celebrated its 10th anniversary and is now in its 9th year of operations. In July 2024, Dr. Emily Choquette became the center’s third director, aiming to honor the legacy of her predecessors while expanding float research initiatives in the coming years.

Over the past decade, groundbreaking work has explored floatation therapy as a treatment for psychiatric disorders, including anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. Early research led by Dr. Justin Feinstein, the FCRC’s founding director, established that floatation-REST acutely reduces stress, muscle tension, and blood pressure (Feinstein et al., 2018). Building on this, studies led by Dr. Sahib Khalsa demonstrated the feasibility of floatation therapy in individuals with high anxiety and depression, with anxiolytic and antidepressant effects lasting up to two days in some participants (Garland et al., 2023, 2024).

In the realm of eating disorders, two previous studies established the safety of floatation therapy in patients with anorexia nervosa (Khalsa et al., 2020) and found reductions in anxiety, stress, and blood pressure, along with improvements in body image (Choquette et al., 2023). Dr. Choquette received a mentored career development (K23) award from the National Institute of Mental Health at the end of 2023 to study the integration of floatation therapy with evidence-based psychotherapy for women with anorexia nervosa. This new approach, called float-assisted psychotherapy, seeks to effects seen with each individual float session and could lead to a novel mind-body treatment for eating disorders.

This study began recruiting participants in 2024 and will continue through 2028.