ENTER THE SAUNA

Journalist Emily O’Kelly shares some uplifting research on the benefits of sweat bathing, a global healing practice not just limited to Northern climes.

- Emily O’Kelly

People feel good after a sauna session and have for centuries. It’s no coincidence that every culture, through every age, has enjoyed its own form of sweat bathing. From the Ottoman hammam and Mayan temazcal to the Japanese mushi-buro and kama-buro, from the banyas of Russia to the saunas of Finland, heat therapy has stood the test of time, waxing and waning in popularity and crossing continents in various iterations. But it wasn’t until advances in modern medicine that we really started to get to the bottom of why exactly sweat bathing makes us feel so good.

In 2019, Finnish cardiologist Jari Laukkanen published the findings of his 26-year study into the sauna-bathing habits of 2,000 middle-aged men in eastern Finland. Those who took regular saunas (four to seven a week) were far healthier than those who didn’t. They were 50 percent less likely to suffer from cardiovascular diseases than the non-bathers, and in regular sauna-goers, incidences of strokes, pneumonia, Alzheimer’s disease, and dementia were halved.