In The Tank, On the Clock

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It is dark and I am floating on my back in a pool of salty water. My ears are submerged an inch beneath the surface, and all sound is muffled, save for the distant, piping notes of what I fear might be Kenny G. saxophone music. The water is heated perfectly to the temperature of my skin and the Epsom salt solution in it makes it five times more buoyant than seawater. As I bob around I realize I’ve been deprived of nearly every normal sensory cue that might tell my brain what my body is doing. This must be what it’s like in the womb.

Some people go to the mountains to relax, others to the beach. I went to H&H Flotation Spa. Perched above a Thai restaurant on a busy street in the Tenleytown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the spa’s warren of down-at-the-heels “water therapy” treatment rooms is a far cry from a luxury spa. But it has a float isolation tank — an insulated, lightproof water tank that looks like an oversized plastic coffin — and I am curious to test the claim that starving one’s senses is the key to suspending one’s stressful feelings about time.

The first floatation tank was developed in 1950 by a neurophysiologist working at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland.  Dr. John C. Lilly, who later became a well-known figure in the Sixties counterculture, called the isolation tank “a hole in the universe,” a place where one could shed the demands of the physical body to explore consciousness. “We notice that after immersion the day apparently is started over,” Lilly wrote. “The subject feels as if he has just arisen from bed afresh, this effect persists, and the subject finds he is out of step with the clock for the rest of that day.” Later research on sensory deprivation, or REST (Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy) revealed that it can significantly reduce stress by encouraging the release of endorphins and can help smokers, drug addicts, and alcoholics tame their addictions. Committed floatation tank users claim they enter a dreamlike state where time stands still and from which they emerge brimming with creative ideas.

Lela, my aging attendant at H&H, was more circumspect about the experience.  “Well, you know, some people find happiness in the tank, but others go to a darker place,” she said matter-of-factly, when I asked her what I could expect. She helped me step into the tank, then told me to lie back and let my body float.  The hatch closed with a resounding thunk.

I went into the isolation tank to see if it was possible to kill time.  Devoid of any stimulation, without the constant bombardment of images, noises, demands and distractions of my daily life, would I still have a sense of time passing? And if I did, would it be like my normal experience of time — harried, stressful, always in scarce supply?

I wasn’t in the tank long before I felt vaguely uneasy, then unnerved. Hectic, rather than sublime, thoughts rocketed through my mind: What is that dripping noise?  Has it been twenty minutes?  Forty?  Why does it feel like it’s getting hotter and hotter in here?  I thought of Hudson Hoagland, a physiologist in the 1930s who conducted bizarre experiments involving heating helmets and sweat rooms to judge if changes in body temperature altered his hapless research subjects’ perceptions of time. My agitation grew and I contemplated throwing open the hatch and streaking out of the room. 

Instead I focused on breathing. I quieted my thoughts. Soon I was startled to hear a tap-tap-tapping followed by Lela opening the hatch.  Her glasses fogged as she peered in and said, “OK.  Hour’s up. How do you like it?” If you had asked me to estimate how much time had elapsed since I first went into the tank, I would have guessed about 25 minutes, not 60. Later, walking back to my car, I was far more aware of what was going on around me than I had been earlier. I also felt a weird sense of calm. I had what Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer calls an “adventure in noticing,” and the experience lasted for the rest of the day.

Thanks to the science of chronobiology, we know a great deal about how time works and about the workings of the human body’s internal clock, which regulates such things as why births and heart attacks are more likely to occur in the morning, and why you metabolize alcohol more quickly in the evening. We also know from anthropology that different cultures have radically different notions of time. When Edward T. Hall worked on the Navajo Indian reservation in the 1930s, he discovered that the Navajo had no concept for the future; they lived in the present, their activities centered around ancient rituals and ceremonies, much to the frustration of the government agents sent by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to teach them long-term livestock and farming practices. The British anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard, who studied the Nuer people of Sudan in the 1940s, judged them “fortunate” since they “have no expression equivalent to time in our language.”

At least since the Industrial Revolution, the promise has been that progress and the many machines that emerged from it would give us more time, not less. One of the problems over which philosophers, sociologists, and science fiction writers have mulled is what to do in the near future when we would all presumably enjoy so much free time. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wondered how future man would “occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely, agreeably, and well.” In 1968, when Mechanix Illustrated looked “40 Years in the Future” to 2008, they envisioned climate-controlled cities encased in domes, rapid computer-controlled transportation — and an average workday of four hours.

Embedded in these fantasies was the assumption that our machines would save us time by doing more for us. Our technologies have fulfilled part of this promise of controlling time:  we choose when and where to make a phone call; we decide when we want to watch a television show; cell phones, email, and text messaging have brought the end of asynchronous communication, with the result that none of us are out of contact for very long. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, characters took a drug called soma to fill the vacant hours of leisure the future supposedly held for ordinary citizens. If Huxley were writing today, he would simply give his characters iPhones. 

And yet, sociologists speak of our culture as one experiencing a “time famine” and “time sickness.” In the last hundred years, despite more than twice as large an increase in human lifespan as occurred in the previous 2,000 years, we experience time as fleeting and stressful. A recent Gallup poll found that 3 out of 4 Americans say they “sometimes” experience stress in their daily lives, and 4 in 10 Americans report experiencing frequent stress in their daily lives. Nearly half report that they generally do not have enough time to do what they need to do. Instead of the vast expanses of leisure time imagined by science fiction writers, we now get one hour less sleep per night than our parents’ generation did.

As recent work in “happiness studies” reveals, an intriguing and persistent paradox has emerged:  Since happiness surveys were first conducted in the mid-1940s, GDP, income and life spans have grown, as has the range of new, powerful, and largely affordable personal technologies. But happiness (or “subjective well-being,” as it is often measured), particularly among people in developed countries such as the U.S. and Japan — the places where these technologies are most readily used — has not increased.  

In fact, one of the peculiar ironies of modern life is that the more successful we are, the more time stress we experience. An extensive survey (PDF) of households in Australia, Germany, the U.S., and Korea by economists Daniel Hamermesh and Jungmin Lee found, “Complaints about insufficient time come disproportionately from higher full-income families.” As well, they noted, “Time stress is a problem analogous to poverty:  Both reflect scarcity of resources, time in the former, goods in the latter.  The only difference is that in a growing economy the goods constraint will relax over time, while the time constraint cannot.” How did we get here?

In Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford argued that the clock, which first came into use in the fourteenth century, eventually became the central machine of the Industrial Age and the revolutionary force of modernity because it ushered in a new way of understanding life: “Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing,” Mumford wrote.  Cultures that measured time organically, by seasonal rhythms and the cycles of birth and death, now moved to the more artificial and standardized dictates of the clock. This allowed greater collective action, efficiency, and order, but it also created challenges as the pace of life quickened and societies adjusted to the abstract and often punishing demands of the clock.

The shift from organic time to clock time was seismic. We are now in the early stages of another seismic shift: from clock time to the hyper-artificial measurement of digital time. Digital time has obliterated the last vestiges of organic time and seriously undermined the tenets of clock time. Digital time and the technologies that support it — such as the Internet, the cell phone and the personal computer — make us available Always, Anytime and Anywhere. Although we still tell time by the clock, we live and think in digital time. And digital time is curiously oriented in the present — even the display of a digital clock does not show us what time has passed or what time lies ahead. It is always simply the time it is: 8:39 p.m., or 6:57 a.m.

But digital time exacts costs because it eradicates the boundaries that used to exist with organic and clock time. Now there is no such thing as work time, leisure time, family time, or spiritual time. The medieval monastic bells that called the faithful to prayer had nothing on our constantly pinging, buzzing, ringing selves. Thanks to our technologies, all time is open, presenting us with a surfeit of choices about how to use it. And as behavioral economists have shown, some choice is good, but too much choice can have a paradoxically negative effect: the more options you have, the more difficult and less satisfying it is to select among them.

To improve our relationship with time we don’t need professional organizers or elaborate filing systems; we don’t even need to float weightless in an isolation tank for hours at a time. We merely need to ask ourselves some seemingly simple questions: How do we really spend our time?  Are these activities the ones we know will make us happy?  How great is the cognitive dissonance between what we claim we want to do with our time (spending time with friends and family, pursuing a hobby) and what we actually do with it on a daily basis (watch a lot of television)?

We might not be able to kill time, but in asking some tough questions of ourselves, we might begin to discover what is and isn’t time well spent.

Christine Rosen is senior editor of the New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society and the author of Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement and My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood.