I’m going to Camelot Spa at Radisson Blu for a hot stone massage today and this morning I find myself laughing at my own silliness and at how much anxiety spa visits have given me over the years.

Please let me know that I’m not alone in my crazy!

• My first ever spa visit was for a facial, I walk in and the woman who greets me is someone who accused me of flirting with her boyfriend a few years before, I DID NO SUCH THING (not intentionally anyway) she looks at me and channels all her years of training to be super nice and then takes me to the section where my treatment would take place…The therapist comes to me and asks me to undress…Now this is my first spa visit, I’m standing there wondering how much do I undress, what is too much, what is too little, why the hell does one undress for a facial, I WANNA GO HOME to the safety of my face wash. Ended up topless under a fluffy gown wondering if the woman was thinking I was a pervy prude.
• Then there was the time I went to do a video on reflexology for my old job and the reflexologist insisted that I get a quick treatment to fully understand what she does. I remember freaking out because I did not come prepared to have me feet touched. Like did I take off the specks of nail polish that clung on to my toes while the rest disintegrated in the shower, right after I painted it on. Then I remembered I was wearing pumps – pumps can get rather stinky, what if I have stinky feet. I literally excused myself to sniff my feet in the toilet, am I weird, yes, yes I am.
• My first visit to the Radisson Blu spa was for a floatation treatment, it’s this amazing relaxing treatment where you float in this pool of water with nothing but speckles of light and sound. Sounds amazing, right. To normal non over thinking individuals it gives a feeling of floating in outer space, but not when you get it in your mind that you could drown, like there is no one there and you are just in this dark room floating by yourself, what if you get too relaxed and sink to the bottom and DIE and then the front page of the paper reads, woman dies from spa treatment. So I was so tense for the duration of the floating therapy that I couldn’t move my neck for like two days after that. Everyone else who did the treatment LOVED it, meanwhile here I was literally too scared to relax.
• I once went for a massage after eating dairy, this was before I realised that dairy was the cause of my bloating, pain and “cartoon sound effect” grumbly tummy…There I lay on a bed ready for my first full body massage, already kind of freaked out about the fact that my undies don’t match and whether I was supposed to be wearing undies anyway… The therapist comes back in the room, the lights are dimmed and she puts on a CD I assume is some whales accompanied by Mozart or whatever and there it happens, my stomach grumbles so loud I just lay there wondering do I say something, to I act cool, do I run away…I just lay there and hoped she thought it was a whale solo.
• I have such unnecessary anxiety when it comes to things like focusing so hard on not being ticklish that I lay there like I’m auditioning for a corpse on CSI Miami. When I have my nails done I automatically get a itch or my phone rings, I’m THAT girl. I also worry about farting with body treatments – don’t act like you never thought this.
• Today I’m worried about what my back looks like…Why? you ask. Well I did an at home dye job which wasn’t as permanent as I thought, in fact my shower the next day looked like the blood scene from Carrie, so there’s a chance my back might be stained with red blotches so I am probably going to mumble some incoherent apology to the therapist, because I’m THOSE people.

But honestly guys I need this massage, I need to get out of my head for 5 seconds and just lay there and have my muscles not be attacking my body for a bit.

I think we get so caught up in what must be done, in what we have to do that we forget that sometimes we need to do something for ourselves.

We need to put on over-sized dressing gowns and sip on green tea (secretly wishing for a splash of honey) and we just need to own it, DAMN! We work hard for this money, why not spend it on ourselves a little…just a little.