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Dr Mehmet Yildiz

Wonders of Dry Sauna

2020-12-19

https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=0nRoBH_0Y3Prksf00Image by Efes Kitap from Pixabay

I am very much into health and fitness for a lifetime. Health, fitness, and wellness are my hobbies. Whenever I come across an interesting idea and compelling anecdotes, I gently and gradually try them. Of course, with caution by learning about the pros and cons! In my circles, we call this approach the sensible biohacking.

By trying a dry sauna for long, I gained many benefits; therefore, it turned to be a passion for me. They are not trivial benefits. They are real life-changing gains.

Let me introduce some important ones. Practising dry sauna helped me reduce my chronic stress, improve the quality of my sleep, accelerate recovery from exercise, increase my energy level, reduce painful inflammation.

Apart from these health benefits, I gained a sense of joyful state.

For a long time, I have a stressful profession and hectic social life, coupled with many family commitments. Excessive stress is inevitable in my complicated lifestyle.

Finding a sauna was a life-changing discovery for me.

Sauna has been a creative tool to support my professional and social challenges, even in the midst of critical situations.

In this personal story, I want to highlight how I used the dry sauna to gain benefits.

The benefits included to reduce stress, improve sleep quality, speed up recovery from exercise, increase energy, reduce inflammation, enhance productivity, improve skin conditions, lighten up my mood, and optimize overall blood markers for better health.

Dry sauna has been one of my best stress management tools. It added extra pleasure and joy to my challenging life. It has been a lifesaver for me when leading critical situations in a large business organization and dealing with people in my social circles.

Stressed inflamed my body for many years.

My cortisol level was over three times the normal when I discovered the sauna. Managing my cortisol level was the first reason I introduced dry sauna to my lifestyle.

Apart from addressing my past inflammation issues, which made me miserable, there were a few other compelling reasons that I practised and enjoyed a dry sauna so much.

It is a known fact that the heat in a dry sauna induces quickly noticeable physiological effects in our bodies. More specifically, the heat can increase skin and core body temperature quickly. This quick increase in body temperature can also increase our heart rate, skin blood flow, hence cause perspiration rapidly. This simple yet powerful physical phenomenon can have tremendous health benefits.

Let me give you an idea of how I use dry sauna based on my learning from the experts in the field. As you may have heard, there is substantial research on the health benefits of a dry sauna in many countries.

The way I enjoy a sauna is taking it in a few small sessions. These sessions are usually between 15 to 20 minutes, depending on the temperature of the sauna. After ten minutes, I can experience a lot of perspiration in many parts of my body. I feel it heaviest on the face. Then, I have a quick break. I go outside of the sauna for five minutes and take fresh and cool air. Then I try another 15-minute session. After that 15 minutes, I have a cold shower for three to five minutes.

Having a cold shower after an intense sauna session feels excellent. You can feel your stress disappear.

After the third and sometimes fourth session, depending on my time, I keep cooling down with constant cold showers. Cold showers are essential to cope with the thermal effect of the sauna.

When I check from my smartwatch, most of the time, my pulse fluctuates up and down frequently. For example, my pulse reaches to 150 beats per minutes when inside the sauna after 15 minutes. And it drops back to around 60 beats per second after having cold showers for five minutes outside the sauna.

You can feel the real difference after around an hour.

For example, an hour after the last sauna session, most of my stress magically disappears. I feel more productive, both physically and mentally. The physical manifestation becomes evident in relaxed muscles, joints, and ligaments.

After a few hours, any exercise-induced pain quickly melts away. Therefore, I always take a dry sauna day after weight training or callisthenics.

More importantly, dry sauna positively affects my mental health. For example, my anxieties and worries go away after a few hours of a dry sauna session.

I came across a growing body of literature, documenting many more benefits of dry saunas. The most compelling benefits were about improving cardiovascular health, removing toxins from our organs, improving the immune system, inducing deep quality sleep, reducing Alzheimer’s risks, and even improving longevity by activating the SIRT2 genes.

All these benefits are substantial and make dry sauna compelling for many of us.

Sleep quality is very important to me. Dry sauna was one of the key contributors to improve the quality of sleep and get more deep sleep as my muscles needed it.

As I consumed more than half of my lifespan, improving longevity and reducing age-induced conditions like Alzheimer's turned to be a great interest in my life.

I haven’t fully proven all these benefits empirically yet and am open-minded about the potential benefits. However, I have certainly enjoyed the stress and pain management aspects of the sauna. Using dry sauna has become a pleasant hobby and a regular transformational tool for my challenging life.

Wish this vital health tool have more visibility and more people get benefits from it.

To this point, I am further stretching it to the fact that maybe large business organizations should add a dry sauna and accompanying cold shower facilities to their offices to empower their employees. This unusual investment in people can provide great positive returns with improved employee health and well-being.

To conclude, the dry sauna can be an excellent addition to our health regime. In my view, many people can benefit from it. Of course, a discussion with qualified health professionals is essential.

I discussed with my family, doctor and specialist. As soon as they gave me their blessing, I tried it. I am glad I did because it was affordable, natural, beneficial, and joyful. What else could we ask for something providing so many benefits to our health?

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