Floatation-REST
The mirror image of interoceptive-exposure. Where exposure provokes an interoceptive sensation to be tolerated, Floatation-REST (Reduced Environmental Stimulation Therapy) subtracts the exteroceptive world — floating supine in skin-temperature water saturated with Epsom salt, in darkness and silence — on the hypothesis that when the outside goes quiet, the inside gets loud. Khalsa et al. (2018) list it among “interoceptive treatments on the horizon.”
The mechanism claim
Attenuating exteroceptive input “appears to noninvasively enhance exposure to interoceptive sensations such as the breath and heartbeat.” So the float tank is an interoceptive-exposure chamber reached by removing distraction rather than by inducing symptoms: with no visual, auditory, thermal, or proprioceptive-gravitational load competing for attention, the breath and the pulse become the salient signals. That makes it, in the wiki’s vocabulary, a way of raising interoceptive attention and contact without a provocation the patient must brace against — which is the feature the roadmap flags as the weakness of ordinary interoceptive exposure (the patient retains control, the perturbation is predictable). The tank removes the exteroceptive scaffolding the patient would otherwise use to avoid the body.
The evidence, and its limits
Preliminary. The roadmap cites a single 1-hour session producing “short-term anxiolytic and antidepressant effect in patients with comorbid anxiety and depression” (Feinstein et al. 2018), and a companion finding that it elicits relaxation and interoceptive awareness specifically in individuals with high anxiety-sensitivity. Both are small, short-term, single-session studies; the roadmap says outright that “further research is needed to evaluate the safety, feasibility, and potential for long-term efficacy in psychiatric populations.” None of the primary work is in raw/, so the wiki holds this at one remove, through the consensus paper’s summary.
Why it is worth a page
Two reasons beyond novelty. First, it is a clean conceptual complement to interoceptive exposure — the same target (tolerated interoceptive contact) reached by the opposite operation (removing exteroception vs. adding interoceptive load), which sharpens what “interoceptive contact” actually requires. Second, the anxiety-sensitivity result is a live case for is-more-interoceptive-awareness-better: the population that most fears bodily sensations (high-AS) is the one the tank reportedly helps, which — if it holds — is a “more contact, better outcome” data point in a debate stocked mostly with the opposite. Held as a promising hypothesis, not an established treatment.