Floatation Therapy is a luxurious way to soothe and heal the body from the constant stress of life’s daily pressure where you can leave the noise and confusion behind and perhaps, for the first time in your life, experience total relaxation and deep healing in a private, peaceful space.
A therapeutic session in a floatation tank typically lasts for an hour. For the first ten minutes, your body will adjust to the RelaxoPod environment. The next forty minutes will keep you from beta or alpha brain waves to theta state, which typically occurs briefly before sleep and again at waking. In a floatation tank, the theta state can last indefinitely without the subject losing consciousness.
If you suffer from insomnia or other sleep issues, it can bring many detrimental effects into your life. Getting quality sleep on a regular basis helps to ensure that your brain functions at its best, allowing you to make better decisions, resolve problems, remain more emotionally stable, improve focus, and more. It also puts you at a lower risk of developing infections and certain illness too, like hypertension, stroke and heart disease. Floatation therapy can help. Research has found that floating just two hours a week for two weeks may bring improvement in insomnia symptoms. It restores and refreshes the senses, leaving one rested, relaxed and able to forget about those worries and finally enjoy a good night’s sleep. Even if you don’t generally experience sleep problems, after a session you’re likely to find that you sleep much deeper and feel much more rejuvenated and restored the next day.
Floating therapy is said to be an antidote to stress, thanks to it providing a deep sense of relaxation and inner peace. Many users even say that colours seem more vibrant, and you might suddenly notice more about your surroundings, kind of like someone who just got their first pair of corrective glasses after having hazy vision. While these types of benefits can be difficult to prove, research is beginning to show how it works, revealing that it can be an effective, non-invasive way to treat pain and illnesses that are related to stress. In fact, a Swedish study published in the Journal of Complimentary & Behavioral Medicine in 2014, suggested that it may work by reducing the body’s stress response, which induces deep relaxation.
Even if you don’t suffer from a condition like fibromyalgia, you’re likely to experience pain relief. In fact, you’re like to find that it relieves pain you didn’t even realize you had. Many people suffer from tension and stiffness in places like the lower back and shoulders, but by the end of even just one session, it becomes practically non-existent. Both patient testimonials and multiple studies have suggested that float therapy might serve as a natural pain killer as the primary way it helps relieve pain is by evoking the relaxation response, which is known to improve recovery and ease tense muscles.
In fact, research that examined the effects of placebo treatments as compared to floatation therapy showed that the floating sessions relieved muscular pain related to stress in patients suffering from burnout depression. Patients that underwent therapy for six to 12 weeks, had less pain, as well as reduced blood pressure levels, more energy, less anxiety and lower stress levels.
When was the last time you took a real break from all of those screens that you stare at every day, from your smartphone to your laptop and television? We all need a break from those screens now and again as our world is more wired than ever. Our minds are constantly on the go, and without a break, it can often lead to lower productivity and even burnout in the long run, in addition to negatively affecting emotional and physical health. The brain needs time to rest and recover – not just while you’re sleeping. All of that multitasking can actually cause the brain to overheat, similar to what happens with a car engine. Floatation therapy provides that all-important break, allowing you to slip deeper and deeper into relaxation, forgetting about those worries and even becoming totally unaware of the passage of time, like a mental detox. This is a huge benefit for most people, but especially Type As, those that feel obligated to constantly respond to every email and text, or risk feeling “frantic, frazzled, frenzied.’ Taking time to de-stress through floatation therapy means everything gets improved: your enjoyment of life, your physical and mental health, and your longevity.
