Benefits of Sauna and Cold Plunge

The Basics:

Hot and cold cycling has numerous health benefits which improve our wellbeing and vitality. Some benefits occur immediately while others are more noticeable over time if you maintain a consistent hot/cold cycle practice.

Through cycling between the sauna and cold plunge, your body undergoes numerous physiological changes. Thanks to these (temporarily uncomfortable) changes, you enter into a more relaxed, positive state of mind that can last for hours post-session, while additionally enhancing your sleep quality later that evening.

How Often Should I Hot/Cold Cycle?

This truly depends on what benefits you would like to receive from our facility! If you are coming here to benefit your mental well-being, one session can help improve your mood for two days. On day one, you should feel refreshed, focused, and upbeat for hours after your session. The day after your session you should feel more well-rested than usual, as hot and cold cycling tends to improve the time it takes to fall asleep and increases the amount of deep sleep you have at night.

If you are looking for longevity benefits, you should up the ante to four - six sessions per week. This is the sweet spot for staving off cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia.

For a deeper dive into the science behind heat and cold exposure, see below!

The Science:

  • Mind

    Cold exposure improves mood by increasing dopamine levels by 250% and norepinephrine levels by over 500%. On top of improved mood, cold exposure additionally improves vigilance, focus, and attention. Overall, you can view cold plunging as like drinking a cup of coffee without getting a crash or the jitters!

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    Heat exposure also vastly improves mood. Thanks to the release of endorphins and dynorphin in the brain from heat exposure, using a hot sauna can assist in blunting both anxiety and depression. One additional benefit of heat exposure is that it improves your sleep quality. Given the close connection between sleep quality and mood, incorporating a sauna practice in the evening could play a crucial role in promoting restful sleep, ultimately leading to enhanced mood and performance the next day.

  • Body

    Using the sauna has been shown to improve athletic performance as it greatly increases your heart rate and promotes growth hormone release. Heat exposure could be seen as going to the gym without needing to put in the same perceived effort as working out!

    The benefits of using the sauna don't stop there. When you sweat in the sauna, you sweat out toxins that would remain inside your body otherwise. These toxins include heavy metals such as lead, aluminum, and mercury and also chemicals found in plastics such as phthalates.

    Lastly, heat exposure assists in your sleep quality. It does this by reducing the amount of time it takes to fall asleep, while also increasing the amount of time we are in deep sleep throughout the night.

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    Cold exposure has many positive effects on the body. For one, cold exposure helps reduce inflammation in the body which is beneficial for overall health and wellbeing.

    Studies have indicated that cold exposure increases the body's production of certain immune cells such as our white blood cells. This can help stave off colds and influenza.

    Another benefit of cold exposure is that it increases our metabolism and the amount of "brown fat" in our bodies, which is unlike typical white fat. For optimal health, it is important to keep our white fat reserves low, as its main purpose is excess lipid storage. On the other hand, brown fats main purpose is to keep our bodies warm. Because of this, activating brown fat through cold exposure may have numerous positive health outcomes such as aiding in overall fat loss, and improving our metabolic health. To receive these cold exposure benefits it requires continuous, acute exposure to the cold which helps activate both our metabolism and brown fat reserves through thermogenesis. Thermogenesis is the act of our bodies heating up to avoid hypothermia.

  • Longevity

    Consistent use of the sauna (four times or more per week in a 175 F sauna) has been shown to have incredible longevity benefits. Backing this with numbers, consistent sauna use reduces our risk of cardiovascular death by 50%, and reduces our risk of premature death from all causes (i.e. cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, and cancer) by 40%. Perhaps even more impressively, this consistent use of the sauna has also been shown to stave off dementia and Alzheimer's by over 64%. These numbers are quite mind blowing, especially factoring in that lots of individuals use the sauna purely for its mood enhancing effects which is quite the benefit in and of itself! Putting the physical, cognitive, and longevity benefits together, it is clear that regularly using the sauna four times per week or more is a worthwhile way to improve your quality of life and potentially increase your lifespan.

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    While cold exposure does not have as much scientific data regarding longevity compared to heat exposure, the main interesting tidbit that has yet to be mentioned is that thanks to cold exposures immune system strengthening effects, it may actually ward off certain types of cancer. Additionally, as cold exposure has been shown to improve inflammation and metabolism, two metabolic factors that are linked to longevity, it could be theorized that cold exposure does promote longevity to some degree.