What can happen to the mind and body when sauna time is incorporated into a routine? Let’s start with the incredible news first. Sauna bathing may be the ultimate longevity hack. A 2015 study from Finland found that regularly spending time in a sauna may extend life. Sauna bathing also produces many health and wellness benefits that can enhance how a person looks, feels, and performs along the way. Check out the biggest sauna benefits.
Physical Health Benefits
From boosting muscle recovery to simply helping the body’s systems operate more efficiently, time in the sauna often helps people push past physical hurdles. Unlike many common workout plans or recovery approaches, saunas don’t just address one specific issue. Here’s a look at the wide-ranging health benefits of saunas.
Improved circulation
Sauna bathing offers incredible benefits for cardiovascular health. Heat exposure boosts blood flow and cardiovascular performance. Regular sauna bathers enjoy both short-term increases in performance and potential long-term resilience against cardiovascular illness and heart attack. A 2018 study found that sauna bathing is associated with reduced cardiovascular mortality for both men and women. It is also linked with reduced risk for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Muscle recovery
A sauna session is the ultimate way to address sore, aching muscles. For example, a 2022 study found that post-exercise infrared sauna sessions improve recovery of neuromuscular performance and muscle soreness after resistance exercise training. In a 2015 study, researchers looking at a sauna’s impact on exercise-induced muscle damage (EIMD) in the wrists caused by high-intensity exercise found that participants who underwent sauna treatments experienced significantly lower deficits in range of motion. Additionally, sauna bathing makes “getting back out there” easier. As sauna heat opens up blood vessels and relaxes muscles, nutrient-rich oxygen can better travel to tired, sore muscles to speed up recovery efforts ahead of the next workout.
Pain relief
Using a sauna can help relieve pain caused by workouts, injuries, and chronic conditions. The heat soothes tired joints and muscles. By increasing blood flow to feed oxygen to injured tissue, the heat from a sauna helps to relieve inflammation and stiffness. Prolonged use may even help to improve joint mobility.
A sauna’s strong anti-inflammatory properties contribute strongly to pain relief. In a 2018 study looking at sauna bathing’s impact on systemic inflammation, researchers found a link between sauna bathing frequency and decreases in the level of a C-reactive protein, a leading blood marker of systemic inflammation.
Detoxification
It’s not surprising that so many people emerge from the sauna feeling like a “new person.” Sweating in a sauna helps to flush toxins from the body. This may include heavy metals, BPA (bisphenol A) in plastics, and industrial chemicals called PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), commonly found in homes and buildings.
Boosted immune function
Sauna time may be better for the immune system than any vitamin. Regular sauna use may improve the body’s immune response through heat-stress adaptation. This occurs when the body’s heat-shock proteins are activated. During sauna sessions, the body’s elevated temperature helps to enhance the production of white blood cells essential for fighting infections and building immunity against illness.
Mental Health and Wellness
While saunas are often touted as offering transformational benefits for the body, many people haven’t heard of the mood and brain boosts offered by heat exposure. Health and wellness are often looked at through a lens of being as active as possible. However, the passive nature of sauna bathing offers a different take on building up physical and mental health. The meditative nature of taking “time out” for the sauna is just the beginning of the benefits!
Stress reduction
Cortisol is a stress hormone. When we become stuck in a fight-or-flight state in response to chronically stressful situations, cortisol levels stay elevated. That’s worrying considering that high cortisol is linked with weight gain, muscle weakness, osteoporosis, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and many more health issues. Sauna helps regulate cortisol levels in the blood and reduce stress levels.
Better sleep
Sauna bathing’s calming effect is linked with deeper, more restful sleep. A 2019 global sauna survey found that sauna bathers reported improvements in sleep lasting one two to nights following sauna sessions. Overall, sauna users who hopped in five to 15 times per month had comparatively higher mental well-being scores. While sauna bathing’s positive influence on sleep isn’t fully understood yet, it’s believed that heat stress helps to regulate melatonin levels.
Mood enhancement
Cutting-edge research shows that neural changes induced by sauna bathing can profoundly affect brain state. Sauna bathing triggers the release of feel-good chemicals called endorphins that support pain relief and mental well-being. These chemicals create a “runner’s high” after a person runs a marathon or finishes an extreme workout. In addition to boosting mood and brain performance, heat therapy may also be useful for treating depression.
Skin and Beauty Perks
Sauna bathing creates a youthful glow! From cleansing pores to tightening skin, a sauna can be considered a “heated” fountain of youth. Here’s a look at all the ways skin benefits from sauna time.
Cleanses skin
In addition to flushing toxins that affect health and well-being, saunas also flush impurities from pores. Heat exposure from a sauna causes pores to expand. As we sweat in a sauna, caked-in dirt, pus, and other impurities that can clog pores and cause breakouts are gently extracted from the skin.
Improves skin elasticity
Collagen in the body keeps skin looking soft and glowing. Collagen is the building block that gives skin its firmness and structure. Once humans reach age 25, collagen production slows down significantly. For most people, this means lines, wrinkles, and an overall dullness. The truth is that replacing collagen in the skin is difficult. Topical anti-aging creams with collagen simply sit on the surface of the skin without actually doing anything to ramp up collagen production. Meanwhile, heat exposure may trigger the natural production of collagen and elastin in the skin to turn back the clock!
Long-Term Health Support
Sauna bathing offers such a wide range of whole-life, whole-body benefits that it can be hard to pinpoint one reason to begin using a sauna as part of a workout routine. As shared at the beginning of this article, regular sauna usage has been linked with increased longevity. Here’s a closer look at why sauna bathing may stave off various illnesses and extend lifespan.
Supports heart health
One of the most exciting benefits of saunas is the reduced risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). In addition to reducing CVD risk, sauna use can lower risks for other cardiovascular events that include stroke, neurocognitive diseases, and general vascular diseases. A sauna session is believed to produce physiological responses that correspond with responses created by a person participating in moderate or high-intensity physical activity.
May lower blood pressure
High blood pressure dramatically increases risks for heart attack, stroke, kidney disease/failure, heart disease, vision loss, and sexual dysfunction. With repeated use, sauna bathing has been shown to help reduce systolic and diastolic blood pressure over time. Researchers believe this makes it a useful tool for preventing hypertension and other cardiovascular ailments.
Potential longevity benefits
Can a sauna extend a lifespan? Evidence suggests that it’s possible. A 2021 study on
sauna use as a lifestyle practice to extend healthspan which was authored by Rhonda P. Patrick and Teresa L. Johnson, found the following:
- Sauna use mimics many of the physiological and protective responses induced by exercise.
- Repeated sauna can optimize the body’s “good” stress responses via hormesis and heat-shock proteins.
- Sauna use is linked with lower overall morbidity and mortality in a dose-dependent manner.
- Frequent sauna use offers protection against a variety of cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases.
- Sauna use can preserve muscle mass and counter age-related loss of muscle mass (sarcopenia).
While new research on sauna bathing’s benefits for increasing the quality and duration of life is coming out, researchers have looked at the phenomenon for decades. For example, a 2015 study out of the University of Eastern Finland that tracked 2,300 middle-aged men for an average of 20 years divided subjects into three groups based on how frequently they used a sauna each week. This study tells us something important about sauna consistency. During the study, 49% of men who visited a sauna once a week died. By comparison, 38% of those who went three times per week died. Among the final category of participants who visited a sauna four to seven times per week, just 31% died.
Lifestyle and Holistic Wellness
Sauna bathing is about more than extending lifespan or detoxing from the toxins that surround us. It’s also about unplugging. Look at why sauna bathing is essential to navigating modern life.
Promotes mindfulness
A sauna session is one of the few times any of us can fully and truly unplug throughout the day. A session experience is quiet, peaceful, and isolated. It encourages time away from screens and distractions.
Complements wellness routines
Sauna bathing is a fantastic complement to an existing wellness routine or workout plan. For example, many find it pairs wonderfully with yoga and meditation. Even people who do high-intensity workouts or extreme sports benefit from a sauna because it counterbalances to “going hard” and helps to soothe muscles and restore physical resilience. Sauna bathing’s versatility is one of the reasons why it’s used by everyone from the world’s most elite athletes to retirees who don’t want to be forced to slow down.
How Could Sauna Use Change A Health Story?
Sauna use is linked with better mood, better physical recovery, stronger immunity, reduced risks for cardiovascular disease, and increased longevity. There’s no other wellness habit in the same sphere regarding the body-mind benefits of saunas. For many people, a sauna session produces immediate feelings of vitality and brain clarity. They also find that they have a “glow” that was not there before.
The incredible thing about sauna usage is that its benefits only compound over time without needing to adopt any painful, arduous routine. It’s all about sitting back, relaxing, and letting the heat heal your body. Yes, the simple experience of taking a little time out of the day to step into a sauna can make skin look smoother and younger, protect against cardiovascular illnesses, and extend lifespan. The only real risk of a sauna lifestyle is overlooking it because it simply seems like too easy of a fix to provide all these benefits.
