Float on: An unlikely addiction to sensory deprivation

ONCE a month, I strip off, shower, insert earplugs, and lower myself into a sleek triangular pod; part spaceship, part oversized clamshell.

- SARA ROBINSON

The lid gently closes above me. The lights fade. And for the next hour, I'm suspended in body-temperature water so saturated with Epsom salts that I float effortlessly on the surface, weightless as an astronaut. There is nothing. No sound. No light. No sense of where my body ends and the water begins.

Somehow it’s become my favourite hour of the entire month.

If you’d told me a year ago that I’d become a regular floater - willingly paying to spend an hour in what looks like a loan from the Dr Who prop department - I'd have been sceptical at best.

Me? The woman who fidgets through meditation apps and checks her phone approximately 847 times a day? I'll be honest: the idea of total sensory deprivation initially sounded less like self-care and more like my personal version of Room 101. An hour alone with nothing but my thoughts? Ych. A. Fi.

With a brain that treats mental to-do lists like Olympic-level training? When there are endless emails to answer, washing to put away, and a planet literally on fire? Nah. The prospect felt too anxiety-inducing to contemplate. Give me a deadline, a crisis, 17 browser tabs open simultaneously - that’s my natural habitat. Not nothingness.

But here's the thing about hitting 40-something: sometimes your nervous system starts waving a white flag you can no longer ignore. A friend who knows me well enough to recognise when I’m vibrating at a frequency only dogs can hear suggested I try floating. I raised an eyebrow. But happy to try most (legal) things once, and more than a little curious, I booked a session.