How these sauna health benefits boost your emotional wellness

Emotional wellness affects you daily, and not only your mental and social health but can impact your physical health too. If you do not take care of your emotional wellness, then functioning day-to-day can prove exhausting and take a further toll on your health. Suppose you want to boost your emotional wellness, physical and mental health. In that case, a sauna’s an excellent opportunity to do just that.

Sauna has many benefits for both physical and mental wellbeing. In many countries, it is also a place to socialise with your peers. Not only those you know, but strangers too — not wearing any clothing will undoubtedly speed up the process of getting to know others and make new connections!
This sauna health benefit alone is seen as an excellent solution for emotional wellness. It can bring together family and friends — the most influential people in somebody’s lives and discuss concerns and interests together, even business discussions.

Well documented sauna health benefits include its physical attributes, boosting blood circulation, easing joint and muscle pain, clearer skin and detoxification — simultaneously boosting sauna users emotional wellness.

What is emotional wellness?

Emotional wellness is the awareness and understanding of one’s emotions and how their thoughts, feelings and behaviour impact their daily emotional health. When our emotional health takes a nosedive, our reactions to situations can become disproportionate. We carry unhealthy stress that ultimately impacts our psychological ability to cope daily.
This stress builds up and begins to affect our physical wellbeing, being susceptible to illness and avoiding regular physical exercise or meeting others socially.

Ultimately, we begin to avoid life’s challenges and become ostracised from society.

How does sauna impact emotional wellness?

Sauna health benefits help in so many ways to tackle the causes of emotional stress. Saunas relax the body and mind, but they can also boost a user’s self-confidence with their physical and beautifying attributes.
A sauna can be the starting point for stress reduction and the development of mental strength. Using one can provide you with an inner sanctuary where you can meditate, think, relax, focus and ponder what could be stopping you from true emotional wellness.

At the same time, sauna health benefits can aid in physical ailments and beautify the skin, which together contributes to positive emotional wellbeing.

1. Obtaining balance

A sauna can be a great place to refocus and recalibrate your life. By taking time out in a sauna, you can do a lot of thinking about what is bothering you and causing you to be unhappy.
Even if you cannot walk away from a problem situation, a sauna can be your inner retreat to get away from it all and give you the balance needed to return and tackle the challenge thrown at you. Balance and the awareness you need is vital to healthier emotional wellbeing.

2. Creating your boundaries

Boundaries contribute to your mental wellbeing.
A sauna helps you obtain balance; it can make you ponder what sort of boundaries your life needs at this moment. It doesn’t make you wrong if you need to remove yourself from an upsetting situation. A sauna is one way to feel safe and protected. You can be alone or only invite your closest loved ones to be with you, within your own boundaries, provide respite and relief from the outside world.

3. Pain relief

An infrared sauna relaxes, rejuvenates, and alleviates aching pain in joints and muscles. A study found that saunas can decrease muscle soreness and increase recovery from strength-training sessions.
Other studies indicate that infrared light therapy saunas may reduce blood pressure. The parasympathetic system is activated, allowing the body to heal itself and potentially ease any stress on the body and strengthen the brains’ ability to handle stress.

4. Reducing stress

Increased stress and negative emotional wellness run in correlation to each other. When stress is reduced, our emotional wellbeing gets a boost. The heat, the silence, and the solitude within a sauna help relax users. The warm temperatures placed on the body from the sauna causes the body to release endorphins and other ‘feel-good’ chemicals that counteract the harmful hormones caused by stress.

5. Mindfulness

Mindfulness is focusing on what is in the present rather than things you cannot control. Rather than merely doing things as others are doing, mindfulness is making an effort to challenge your inner self to be different and the best version of you. More people combine mediating as part of mindfulness using a sauna as an inner spiritual sanctuary to refocus on what is essential.

6. Sleeping

When you lose sleep, it impacts you mentally and physically because you cannot function properly when tired. When you are well-rested, you can focus better and think more clearly. While it may not always be possible, getting 7–8 hours of sleep per night should be the minimum for everyone to keep their mental health checked.
One sauna health benefit is that it raises your body temperature. Just before you go to bed, your heated body will readjust its core temperature afterwards, making you feel more sleepy. Sauna users notice that they are calmer and thus can sleep soundly throughout the night. Even insomniacs can get some more sleep, which is vital for their emotional health.

7. Fight illnesses

Heat boosts our immune system by increasing blood flow and stimulating the production of white blood cells. These cells fight viral and bacterial pathogens. With a heightened immune system, you can ward off the common cold and flu before it has taken hold of your body. Naturally, everyone is different, but regularly using a sauna can boost the immune system.

8. Socialising

Socialising and making connections with others boost our self-esteem and mental strength. And it does not have to be only romantic relationships too. Friends, family, neighbours and others from our circle all provide some degree of support or entertainment to which we bond. One excellent sauna health benefit is that if you don’t have a strong bond with someone, chatting and discussing in a sauna is a great way to find others who share your passion for using one!

9. Supporting

We all need support from those closest to us. Saunas can be deeply emotional places where friends, family and loved ones come together. During this private sanctuary, it can be ideal for sharing what is harming your emotional wellbeing with others if you find common places daunting to discuss your emotions. You will probably find that those you talk to will share the same concerns. Saunas have been used for meeting, socialising and support for centuries. By only talking about your emotions can already be a great sense of comfort. So give it a go.

10. Cleansing

Taking regular sauna baths and particularly steam ones, can have a transformative effect on the skins’ appearance. The sweat we do during sauna has a cleansing effect on the pores and glands in our skin, flushing out toxins and impurities, resulting in healthier skin that is less prone to acne, blackheads and pimples. Not only does the high heat deeply cleanse your skin, but it also rejuvenates it, making you look and feel better about yourself.

11. Rejuvenating

Collagen gives our tissues and organs strength and elasticity. The heat from saunas stimulates collagen production, thus strengthening and rejuvenating the appearance of the skin. Plus, it removes the dead skin cells and promotes newer and healthier ones. Both the sweat and the high sauna temperature stimulates the sebaceous glands, which keep the skin moisturised. By encouraging sebum production, the sauna helps to keep your skin in great shape and with a fresh and healthy glow!

12. Time for you & self-care

Unbalanced emotional wellbeing can sometimes come from the little things that bother us. It can be from daily routines of looking after children, going to work even though you love your job, or having to ensure the bills are paid on time. All of the above are for the benefit of others — your children, loved ones, family and your employer.

What about yourself?
Taking a little time for yourself is probably the best way to avoid suffering from emotional, mental or physical stress. Focussing only on yourself makes you feel more motivated and ready to do more for others. Self-care is taking a little time of your day to treat yourself and make you feel unique and worthwhile, ready to face your life challenges, no matter how insignificant they may seem.

Find the right sauna health benefit for you

In life, we are given positives and negatives. Our emotional wellness depends on how much we focus on the negatives. Those who experience fewer negative emotions are because they have learned to adapt to focus only on the positives. It is not that they do not have negatives; it is that they have learned ways to minimise their impact. Emotional wellness is treatable in many ways, and one of them is using a sauna. Saunas work exceptionally well at maintaining and fostering good health.
Whether a bit of self-care for yourself and beautifying your appearance, or to relieve aching joints, muscles or fighting infection, boost your mental health with its benefits of socialising, stress relief, mindfulness, and harmony — a sauna can provide all these health benefits for your emotional wellness. Your emotional wellness isn’t going to heal itself. But you can do something to move it in the right direction.

Originally published at https://auroomwellness.com on July 14, 2021.