nss G-Club Beauty Secret: Floating

This week’s Beauty Secret by nss G-Club it’s about a simple yet little-known way to eliminate anxiety, stress and stimulate creativity, which is winning over managers, athletes and creatives from all over the world.

It is called floating and it is, indeed, a floating experience inside a sensory deprivation tank, which allows you to completely isolate yourself from the stimuli coming from the outside world. Invented by Dr John C. Lilly at the end of the 50s in order to study the human states of consciousness, it was then readapted and began to be a part of alternative health cares, seducing also Hollywood and music stars who installed the tank in their own homes. 

The floating bathtub is egg-shaped and its dimensions (2.70m long x 1.60m wide) have been specially designed so as not to create claustrophobia or suffocation. It is filled with water enriched with magnesium sulphate salt, kept at a constant temperature of 36.5 degrees, i.e. the same as the body temperature. This allows to cancel the stimuli of heat/cold and the tactile sensation, thus laying the foundations for truly total relaxation. Salt, on the other hand, helps to relax all the muscles of the body, at the same time allowing you to float without any effort in the total absence of gravity.

The perception of one's own body boundaries gradually fades away and this allows the floater to free from the awareness of his/her own limits, even mental ones. The state of psycho-physical relaxation that is achieved is similar to a waking sleep but even deeper, able to give us a feeling of peace and estrangement from the world and especially from ourselves.

After the first minutes of setting, in which the relaxing music and soft lights guarantee a gradual entry into the experience, you will then remain completely into the dark and silence for the rest of the treatment. In this way, your sight and hearing will also disappear. As the environment is odourless and you should avoid eating before the session, the other senses also go into a forced ‘standby’. After about half an hour of this controlled fluctuation, you begin to feel that something is changing within your body. In fact, our brain has finally relaxed and stopped monitoring body temperature or our positioning in the space around us (actions that usually occupy till 90% of our resources), taking care instead of releasing the much-coveted endorphins and rebalancing our body and our mind. In fact, our mind is able to achieve greater clarity and introspection, stimulating creativity.

This phase of deep relaxation is called the Theta phase, like the brain waves produced by the brain in this state, and is commonly identified in that state of trance that only monks and people who have practised meditation for many years can access. In short, thanks to floating, there will no longer be any valid excuses to avoid making time for yourself and dedicate to a daily dose of mindfulness. Our brain produces theta waves naturally every night during the REM phase, while we dream, or during hypnosis sessions. Basically, therefore, these waves are already produced all those times when our conscious and our unconscious part are able to communicate.

Floating brings considerable benefits from a physical, psychological and spiritual point of view, not to mention that thanks to the special salt contained in the water, called Epsom Salt, our skin and hair will also benefit considerably (which is not bad at all). Also, a very interesting effect occurs if the experience is carried out during pregnancy: the "mirror effect". The future mother-to-be lives a sensorial experience similar to the one the baby is living inside her belly, favouring an even stronger emotional and physical connection between the two. 

"When I tried floating for the first time, my life has changed," says Giacomo Cella, owner of Cocoon Milano, a floating centre in the heart of the city of Milan.

Thanks to that first experience I understood that serenity and true peace are not conquered outside us, but are inside us, we just need to let them out, and wait for them to gain space. We are always overwhelmed by pressures at work, by tensions in our relationships, by the expectations of others and our own, by too many words of too many people, making a fuss in social networks and in real life. We must learn to carve out moments of emptiness, silence, breathing to leave our organism the time and space necessary to return to its natural condition of serenity. Seeing the tranquility in the rested eyes of those who come out of a floating session is really priceless. That's why I decided to bring floating to Milan, my city.

Halfway between a therapy and a wellness treatment, we are sure that we will hear more and more about this unique experience. Prices range from €80 for a 60-minute session to €200 for a 180-minute session. 

Where you can try it:
Cocoon Milano
Via Edmondo De Amicis 33 A, Milan