How Saunas Can Help Save Your Body, Mind, and Spirit

Sauna is one of the world’s many hot bathing traditions. It originated in Finland but has close relatives in the Russian banya, the Turkish hammam, and the sweat lodge traditions of Native American tribes. 

This kind of cultural ubiquity usually points to some veritable, time-tested benefits, and indeed, modern research has been confirming what many of the world’s peoples already knew for thousands of years: saunas can strengthen the body, calm the mind, and bolster the spirit.

Saunas Are De-Stressing & Meditative

Getting your sweat on in a sauna may not literally release toxins from the body, but it sure feels like it does. While mercury doesn’t drip out of your pores, your metaphorical stress does. It just feels dang cleansing.

Saunas offer a unique, almost paradoxical, sense of rejuvenation. They’re not relaxing in the traditional sense; in fact, the intense heat acts as a stressor on your body, and can get kind of uncomfortable. Yet it’s a discomfort that feels strangely pleasurable; the physical stress somehow alleviates your mental stress.

That’s partly because it releases a bunch of feel-good endorphins in your brain.

Sitting in a sauna also facilitates introspection and a sense of calming reset, especially if you’re by yourself. While you could bring your phone into the sauna, the heat isn’t good for it, making sauna sessions a great way to regularly disconnect from the anxiety-inducing distractions of your life. 

As you first start to warm up, your mind will wander, and it’s a great time to chew on ideas you’ve been mulling over. As your body starts really heating up, you start to lose the ability to do much real thinking. You get into a kind of meditative state, though it’s one you reach without effort; your mind involuntarily starts to go blank. By the end, you feel wrung out, but blissed out. 

Saunas May Boost Cardiovascular Health

Sitting in a sauna not only gives you the kind of “runner’s high” you get from moderate exercise, studies show it also provides you with similar benefits to your cardiovascular health — improved blood pressure and cholesterol counts, along with a reduction in your chances of heart disease.

Heat raises your heart rate. In moderate temperature sauna sessions, your heart rate can rise to 100 beats per minute; in hotter sessions, it can hit 150 beats per minute — as high as when you’re running. Along with that higher heart rate comes an increase in calorie burn.

It’s often been thought that blood pressure drops in a sauna because the heat dilates your blood vessels, but in fact, your blood pressure will climb while sitting in the sauna and then drop below baseline levels once you finish your session. Over time, sauna-ing has a healthy effect on your BP; one study found that men who hit the sauna 4-7 times a week were half as likely to have high blood pressure, and that was compared to those who already did one sauna session a week.

Saunas May Reduce Chronic Inflammation

When our bodies become injured or sick, inflammation occurs to help with the healing process. But too much inflammation for too long isn’t healthy. Chronic inflammation makes you feel crappy and can contribute to conditions like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity, and (as we’ll see below) depression.

One way doctors detect chronic inflammation is by looking at your levels of c-reactive protein (CRP) in your blood. Elevated levels of CRP mean elevated levels of inflammation. 

One study of Finnish men found an association between increased sauna use and decreased CRP levels. What’s more, studies suggest that sauna use may increase levels of an anti-inflammatory protein called IL-10 as well.

Saunas May Help Alleviate Depression

In my podcast interview with psychiatrist Charles Raison, he laid out a theory that chronic inflammation in the body may be one (of the many) causes of depression. Besides damaging tissues, chronic inflammation makes us feel sad and down. Studies have shown that many people with severe depression also have high levels of chronic inflammation. It isn’t clear if the inflammation caused their depression, or if their depression caused the inflammation, but if you reduce the inflammation in these individuals, oftentimes their depression starts to alleviate, too. 

That may be why several studies have shown that regular sauna sessions, which, as we just discussed, reduce inflammation, also help boost mood.

In my interview with Raison, he was quick to note that saunas are not a panacea for curing depression. Many people with depression don’t have chronic inflammation, so working on the latter won’t address the former.

But even if sauna-ing doesn’t work on depression via the inflammation pathway, it may still enhance mood via the aforementioned release of endorphins, or simply by giving you a half hour of silence and solitude; many people with depression simply need more time-outs from the stress that besieges minds that are overly reactive to negativity. If you regularly battle the black dog, consider adding sauna sessions to your multifaceted approach to leashing it.