Think about your typical morning. You arrive at work, boot up your computer, and begin checking the emails that have filled your inbox since the day before. Or, perhaps your morning looks like a flurry of lunch boxes and missing homework as you try to shuffle the kids out the door in a condition that won’t call into question your parenting prowess by the school board.

Consider this. Without realizing it, our morning emails or hectic schedules have immediately shifted our thought processes from conscious to reactive. Reactive thinking includes any thought that is formed through reacting to our circumstances and is usually associated with the immediacy of our emotions. Reactive thinking is compulsive and can kick in whenever we are confronted with a task or challenge. This type of thought pattern pulls us away from everything else in our lives until we find a way to resolve the problem we are reacting to. Put simply, reactive thinking is defensive while conscious thinking is offensive. In order progress and truly optimize ourselves, we need to be offensive. So how do we train ourselves to think consciously?

Last week a frequent Vibetality Floater named Alyx pointed out how floating helped him shift his mind away from reactive thinking. While we'd never heard floating explained in this way, we could have never put it better.

Just think about how many times during our typical day we are stuck just "putting out a fire" at work, at home, with a social contact, so we can get back to “being proactive.” Putting out a fire is a perfect analogy for reactionary thinking. The local fire department cannot put out a fire before it starts. Firefighters get notified of a fire and react accordingly. Firefighting is by its nature reactive, but we don't need or want to live in this reactive state.

Reacting, and reacting fast is necessary if we are firefighters. However most of us aren't trained firefighters, and living in a constantly reactive state can lower our quality of work and our quality of life. When our minds are stuck in a reactive state it is hard to find the root causes of our problems. Reactive thinking is about noticing symptoms and reacting to them. When we have all of our focus on urgently solving a task, we aren't very likely to think, do, or to create much of anything that isn’t related to our task at hand. This is why its so hard during reactive thinking to be creative and open minded.

Unfortunately reactive thinking isn't solely associated with putting out fires either. We are almost constantly taking in information. Having a conversation, watching TV, looking at a bright light, listening to a podcast, or even just reading this article creates reactive thoughts. See what just happened there, we are all thinking it, and that is a reactive thought.

According to Stephen Covey, who wrote The 7 Habitsof Highly Effective People one of the most important characteristics of successful and personally effective people is getting away from being reactive and starting to think proactively. In fact Covey sees proactivity as such an important state, its the foundation of all the other habits.

“If you’re proactive, you don’t have to wait for circumstances or other people to create perspective expanding experiences. You can consciously create your own." ~Stephen Covey

Floating gives our brain a hand up to proactive thinking. All of the lights, sounds, and distractions that are usually constantly with us and creating reactive thoughts, are removed, and we are free to consciously create our own “perspective expanding experiences.” This is why so many people have such profound life changing experiences in the float tank. We are finally free, often for the first time, of the burden of reactionary thinking.

Interested in reading more about floating Check out these great books on floating?