Stress: it’s something that everyone faces at some point. Finding ways to relax and relieve stress are important for a person’s well-being. One of Midtown’s newest businesses is offering a particularly relaxing way to achieve a state of total relaxation: through float therapy.

Flöt Spa, which opened in November 2013, centers its spa treatment around float therapy. The concept involves lying in a salt-water solution inside a pod designed for sensory deprivation. The salt-water solution is dense enough to leave a person’s body floating in the pod, countering the effects of gravity.

The spa’s central concept was implemented by Flöt Spa owner Ryan Landy, a physical therapist with over 20 years of experience looking for an innovative approach to provide therapy for patients. Landy chose float therapy, in part, because of its way of fighting what he sees as one natural source of physical stress: gravity.

“Unfortunately, we deal with gravity every single minute of the day. We can’t escape it. So our bodies are constantly under pressure,” Landy notes.

While stress relief is one way in which float therapy can help someone, the method can also help people suffering from more serious physical ailments.

“[Floating] offers tremendous benefits across the entire spectrum, from just pure relaxation – it’s extremely relaxing, your body doesn’t have to work, your mind can actually shut off. And from a medical standpoint, especially from a physical therapy standpoint, it offers significant benefits because now your muscles can start to relax. You can get increased blood flow into the muscles, the muscles can get more oxygen and nutrients, and it allows for drainage of a lot of pain and chemicals that accumulate in our muscles from working every single day.”

The location itself is an innovative, state-of-the-art spa. The large immersion tanks are connected to large filtering devices, which cycle the salt-water solution through four times after every treatment to rid the tanks of anything left behind by the body during sessions. Modern technology also darkens the windows to each room with the pressing of a button, allowing for total privacy.

While float therapy is an obvious center to the spa – the naming of the spa conveys as much – Flöt Spa also offers other forms of therapy, including massages, skin care treatments, dry needling and physical therapy.

Flöt Spa is now open at 1045 Piedmont Ave, Suite 202. For more information on the spa, including booking information and specials, call 404-464-8613 or visit flotspa.net.