What Is Floating?
Float Therapy goes by a lot of names – you may see it called floatation therapy, Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy (R.E.S.T), or just “floating!” It’s also sometimes called a “sensory deprivation tank” or “sensory deprivation pod.” No matter what you call it, floating is a powerful way to experience deep relaxation for your body and mind and reduce stress, pain, and anxiety.
Our large float rooms have a shallow solution of Epsom salt and warm skin-temperature water that allows you to float effortlessly on the surface with no sensation of touch. It’s as close to completely weightless as you can feel without going to space! The rooms are also insulated from light and sound, so you can choose to shut out all other distractions.
Floating in a float tank is the perfect environment to relax and reflect – the lack of external stimulation is like a complete reboot for your brain!
Floating Benefits
Hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies have consistently demonstrated the benefits of floatation therapy. While floating your body gets a break from processing sensory input, allowing your nervous, skeletal and muscular systems to enter a deeply relaxing state. This reduces blood pressure and cortisol, while increasing dopamine and endorphin levels. Here are just some of the many mental and physical benefits from floating, complete with links to studies if you’re interested in more research.
Mental Benefits
Stress Relief
Restricting sensory input helps suppress your sympathetic nervous system’s “fight or flight” response and lets the parasympathetic nervous system take over with a relaxation response. This lowers blood pressure, cortisol, and adrenaline, while increasing dopamine and endorphin levels. This can help down regulate your adrenal and endocrine systems to a lower “set point” for long-lasting improvements, and can help elevate mood and improve symptoms of depression.
Study: Floating and Stress Relief
Lower Anxiety
The deep relaxation and lack of external stimuli in the float tank can help lower anxiety levels and provide a safe, healing environment to explore your own mind. Without the constant distractions of our overstimulated modern life, floating can allow you to explore past trauma, improving coping mechanisms with post-traumatic stress, and focus on your personal mental health.
Enhanced Creativity
Free from external distraction and in a more relaxed state with heightened levels of endorphins, your mind is better able to focus and reach deep levels of concentration that can stimulate your creativity and supercharge your problem-solving abilities. Floating also makes the practice of visualization and manipulating mental imagery more vivid and intense, and can put you in a state of continuous concentrated flow. From athletes looking to sharpen up before a competition to public speakers or performers preparing for the spotlight, the tank is perfect to help you mentally prepare.
Study: Floating and Problem Solving
Meditative Practice
Anyone who has tried meditation, and even those with a daily meditation practice know that it can be very difficult to concentrate on your own mind when surrounded by distractions. Floating gives you a comfortable, safe, quiet space to turn your focus inwards, and supports you in developing mindfulness, body awareness, and reaching mental and spiritual insight. The relaxation induced by floating also allows your brain to reach “theta state” brainwaves instead of the normal alpha and beta waves, which many people report allow them to reach deeper levels of meditation than with years of practice outside the tank.
Behavioral Therapy
Many people use floating as an aid for other forms of behavioral therapy, especially in conjunction with the advice of a medical professional. Because it encourages introspection and a relaxed, meditative state, floating is the perfect environment to work through issues and help solidify behavior modifications such as smoking cessation, weight loss, or coping with trauma.
Study: Floating and Brain Connectivity
Relationship Building
Our Couples Float option, with two people in the same float room, can be a unique and intimate way to bring you closer to that special someone. Couples that float together report feeling deeper levels of mental and spiritual connection to their partner. It’s a way to remove all distractions and baggage from the external environment, and focus just on each other.
Physical Benefits
Pain Management
The 1200 pounds of Epsom salt in the water make you float effortlessly, counteracting the effect of gravity. This total body support allows your spine to decompress and tension in your muscles, tendons, and joints to melt away. It also raises your endorphine and dopamine levels while improving circulation which can help provide relief for inflammation, arthritis, back pain, neck pain, and many other forms of chronic pain.
Study: Floating and Pain Relief
Accelerated Recovery
Reducing the effect of gravity and relaxing your entire body can improve circulation and decrease muscular tension, which allows your body to more easily flush waste and deliver nutrient rich blood to all your muscles. Epsom salt may also improve your magnesium levels, a vital nutrient for healing and repair.
Athletic Performance
The combination of physical and mental benefits from floating are perfect for people looking to improve their athletic performance. There’s a reason top athletes like Steph Curry and Tom Brady are regular floaters! It can help ease muscular pain and improve circulation, encourage rapid recovery from workouts and also give you an environment to work on visualization techniques and anxiety reduction for top performance.
Study: Floating and Athletic Performance
Study: Floating and Motor Accuracy
Magnesium Absorption
Some research has suggested that very high concentrations of Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate) may be absorbed through the skin, giving you a direct source of an essential mineral. Magnesium deficiency is extremely widespread, especially for people on certain diets like Keto. Maintaining proper magnesium levels is critical for helping the body metabolize carbohydrates, regulating blood pressure, and maintaining healthy levels of cholesterol. It may also have positive effects on mood, anxiety, and reducing “brain fog.”
Improved Sleep
The relaxation and mental clarity from floating can help improve your sleep at night, leading to both deeper and most restful sleep. Even a short floating session can also make you feel like you just got the equivalent of hours of sleep. If you’re sleep deprived, jet lagged, or have your sleep frequently interrupted, floating can help you get back some of the benefits of your missed sleep in a shorter period of time.
Immune Response
Lowering your body’s adrenaline and cortisol production while stimulating blood flow and relaxation can help maintain a healthy immune system. Our bodies and brains aren’t well adapted to the chronic stress of modern life, which can suppress our immune system and lead to systemic inflammation. Regular floating can help reset your body’s internal mechanisms and support whole-body health.
Our Luxury Float Rooms
We have two extra large float rooms. Much more spacious than float pods, our rooms are 6 ft. wide, 8 ft. long, and 7.5 ft. tall. This eliminates concerns about feeling claustrophobic while floating, and allows a fuller range of motion to explore the sensations of floating. Our rooms are filled with 11 inches of water (about 400 gallons) and roughly 1200 pounds of pharmaceutical grade Epsom salts to guarantee an absolutely effortless float!
State of the art filtration
Our Zero Gravity Float Rooms use a state of the art filtration system to maintain an exceptional level of water cleanliness. While the high concentration of Epsom salt makes the water in the tank completely sterile, three more layers of hygiene are added to ensure clean, crystal clear water – UV light purification, food-grade hydrogen peroxide sterilization, and a high capacity cartridge filter. Every ounce of water gets cycled through this system 7 times between floats. No Dangerous Chemicals are used.
Ventilation
Each room has two ports in the ceiling that allow an exchange of fresh air during your float. A HEPA filter is then run in each room in-between each float, and doors are left open between guests for maximum air circulation.
Head and neck support
While most people don’t need them, some people find the use of a special float pillow can ease mild neck discomfort. These 1/2″ thick halos were designed specifically for floating. If you need one, just put your head in the hole, neck on the notch, and float on!
Audio
USB and AUX ports allow you to choose your own audio to fully customize each float session. Don’t want to be left in silence? We can keep the audio tracks playing for you to provide a musical landscape while you float.
Lighting
Each room has a light control button. If the thought of being alone in the dark sounds a little too scary, rest assured that you’ll be able to experience the comfort and relaxation of floating with the lights on.
Couples Float
Our float rooms are large enough to easily accommodate two people floating together. Floating as a couple is the perfect way to connect more deeply with your partner, completely free from outside distractions. It can also be a great way to help someone that feels anxiety about the idea of floating ease into the experience.
Q: We both want to try floating: should we float together or alone?
A: If you want your float experience to focus on exploring your own mind, meditation, or deep introspection, we recommend floating separately. If you want your float to focus on deepening your relationship bonds and connecting through a shared experience, float together. Or, try both!